Your presidential campaign does not start well when half the people in your audience turn their chairs around and face away from you when you enter the podium to speak.
That happened to Liz Cheney recently. Well, not exactly. The former Congresswoman from Wyoming is not running for president—at least not yet.
She was giving a commencement speech at Colorado College, her alma mater. But it could just as well have been a speech along the campaign trail: it is one of America’s most official secrets that Cheney wants to run for president next year.
Liz Cheney wrapped up her tenure in Congress by co-chairing the committee that ‘investigated’ the events of January 6th, 2021. During her time on the committee, Cheney did her best to paint the events of that day as an insurrection against the United States government.
It is very serious to be accused of insurrection: the punishment is up to 20 years in prison. If she was right, then obviously everyone who unlawfully entered the Capitol on that day should be duly punished. Cheney has also used the committee report to make the case that Donald Trump mishandled the events of that day to the point where he should never be allowed to become president again.
The only problem is that the January 6th committee did not tell the truth, and certainly not the whole truth, about what happened that day. They withheld 41,000 hours of video footage, which make it clear that no insurrection took place. In other words, Cheney conspired to conceal the truth from the American public.
Cheney may be right about Trump. He may very well be unsuitable to hold the office of president again. However, Cheney’s own participation in lying to the American people about the alleged insurrection should preclude her as well from holding that office. If she can doctor a report of such dignity, with such far-reaching consequences for hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans, then if she becomes president, what other truths could she craft, withhold, or conceal if she sees it as being in her best interest?
The problems for a Cheney campaign do not stop at the January 6th report. She is a heavily one-sided politician whose interests—beyond stopping Trump—are limited to increasing the defense budget, growing Pentagon appropriations, and spending more money on the military. When she recently participated in the Mackinac Policy Conference in Detroit, Cheney started off with a careful argument for higher defense appropriations.
Then she spent almost all her 36 minutes explaining why Donald Trump and his sympathizers should not be elected to anything.
In fairness, she did touch on the recent debt ceiling agreement, where Congress and the president shook hands on a deal to let the government borrow more money. However, her interest in this issue was dutiful in tone and she dedicated her comments to the defense budget.
All in all, she presented herself as a traditional neoconservative, whose presidential ambitions will be heavily supported by the defense industry.
Again, we need to be fair to Cheney. Having sponsors for your presidential campaign is nothing wrong per se. All candidates who are not Trump-level wealthy need to have donors with very deep pockets. A serious contender for the presidency must be ready to raise upward of $1 billion to fund his or her campaign. Cheney is no wealthier than any other millionaire former Congressman, so going into the presidential race, she will naturally make sure that she has plenty of big-buck backers.
The problems for Cheney are of a different nature. First of all, what will the defense industry ask in return for supporting her? Cynics would say that she is going to have to be a wartime president. The reason would be that it is much easier to raise defense appropriations when Americans are fighting and dying in the fields, woods, and cities of some distant country than if the world was at peace.
I am not one of those cynics. The Cheney I know, who represented my former home state of Wyoming in Congress, and whom I have had the privilege of meeting several times, is an intelligent and patriotic politician. She has a spontaneous personality, she is likable and easy to talk to. From a general viewpoint, she is a good presidential candidate. In terms of maintaining the administrative—but not moral—integrity of the presidential office, she definitely has what it takes to hold the highest office in the country.
With that said, I fear that her presidency would be heavily influenced by the neocon ideologues with whom she apparently spends a lot of time. They will convince her to commit to America’s foreign policy as we have known it since World War II: long episodes of Pax Americana and American troops all around the world, interspersed with the occasional Bellum Americanum for the sake of protecting peace and defense appropriations.
This foreign policy was rejected by tens of millions of Republican voters who supported Trump in 2020 and elevated Republicans to a House majority in 2022. Many Americans are tired of paying taxes for, and sending their young men and women into, wars that seem to have no purpose and no end. After the disastrous end to 20 years in Afghanistan, it will be difficult to convince the American public to commit to a similar adventure again.
All is not bad with the neocon idea of Pax Americana. It was helpful when the Soviet Union was around, when it made sense for the leader of the free world to keep the communist aggressors at bay. However, the world has changed, evolved, and changed again in the more than 30 years that have passed since the fall of the Soviet Union. While America still needs a strong military, and I as a patriotic American would be happy if it remained the strongest in the world, it is no longer obvious that military intervention anywhere around the world is our duty—or our unquestionable right.
Long story short: when Cheney talks about foreign policy, she sounds as though the Berlin Wall is still up. America needs a less ham-fisted approach to the rest of the world.
Another problem for Cheney is that the only time she pays any attention to the fiscal problems of the federal government, it is to keep an eye on the defense budget. I am not going to delve into the intricacies of macroeconomics and public finance (although I will be happy to do it if anyone has questions), but the very reason why America’s defense appropriations are not higher than they are today, is that Congress and presidents—past and present—have decided that they should spend money on just about everything under the sun.
The favorite reason for Congress to spend money is that they want to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Also known as economic redistribution, this practice accounts for $7 out of every $10 that Congress spends; the defense budget is somewhere in the vicinity of $1.50. Entitlement programs are constructed to grow spending on autopilot, and they will continue to grow spending until structural reforms give them another purpose than economic redistribution.
Cheney has no interest in these issues. This is highly unfortunate, especially since the federal government debt has now become a conduit for foreign adversaries to bring the U.S. economy to its knees. Thereby, they can more or less kill the tax base that is supposed to fund Cheney’s big defense budget.
Since the national debt is going to be a major issue in next year’s presidential election, Cheney is at a disadvantage already from the get-go.
She also has to decide which party she is going to run for, or if she will do it as an independent. As Fox News recently reminded its readers, she has said that if she goes for the ‘big chair’, she won’t do it for the Republican party. This statement gives us a clue as to why she avoids taking sides in the big ideological issues of our time. The idea, of course, is that if you offend nobody, you repel no voters.
I know from first-hand experience that this works in Wyoming, where Cheney started her political career. It does not work on the national stage.
You can’t go through an entire presidential campaign as a non-ideologue. While Cheney keeps quiet, her opponents do not. One of them is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose socially conservative record speaks for itself. No matter how much Cheney wants to stand above transgenderism, the LGBT movement, and the sexualization of school curricula, she is going to have to address them at some point.
When she does, I suspect that her choice will not be related to her solid conservative track record as a Congresswoman. Instead, it will be based on careful focus group studies to find out which voter base is more open to her: those who think it is OK for biological males to use the same bathrooms as females, or those who don’t.
Again, the federal government’s huge debt will be a major issue in next year’s election, but the social value issues will also be important. While families across America start fighting back to protect their daughters from having to change clothes in front of men, more corporate executives approach the ‘transgender’ issue with their feet in their mouths. You would think the Budweiser moment was a learning experience for them, but it was not.
Retail giant Target is the most recent corporation to offend Americans with traditional social values. The corporation decided to market “Pride” clothes and ‘transgender’ attire with a Satanic theme.
Needless to say, this has taken a big toll on their stock. Fox Business reports:
Shares fell another 3.66% Tuesday [May 30th], marking the eighth straight decline and lopping off another $2.4 billion in market cap, as tracked by Dow Jones Market Data Group. Since the backlash, Target’s market value has fallen over $12 billion to $61.77 billion as of Tuesday’s closing price. Mid-month the market value was over $74 billion.
According to Newsweek, the stock value plunge was the result of a consumer boycott. Their customers simply chose to shop somewhere else instead.
This behavior, which is entirely in accordance with such founding principles of civilization as individual and economic freedom, has rubbed some people the wrong way. An economics professor tried to make the case that this kind of boycott is a form of “terrorism.” The esteemed professor, Justin Wolfers, has made one notable scholarly contribution: “Gender and the Dynamics of Economics Seminars.”
Wolfers appears to believe that when consumers choose not to buy products from a certain brand, it is an act of aggression.
I am sure that Professor Wolfers holds himself to a higher analytical standard when he teaches microeconomics at the University of Michigan. Nevertheless, his reckless accusation against people who no longer shop at Target is just another example of how tense the public discourse on social values has become. With conservatives pushing back against men who want to invade their daughters’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams, the post-moral left will most certainly dig in its heels.
Liz Cheney will not be able to navigate an entire presidential campaign without at some point deciding if she wants to protect women or those who think they are women.
She is also going to have to become a public finance literate. It was fine for presidents in the past to hand over such issues to experts at the Department of Treasury and think tanks, but that was back when America’s government debt was manageable. Those days are gone.
America’s next president is going to have to fight for the nation’s very existence, but it will not be on the battlefield. Only a few will be qualified to lead this fight. Cheney is not one of them.
The America Report: Another Hat in the Ring
Your presidential campaign does not start well when half the people in your audience turn their chairs around and face away from you when you enter the podium to speak.
That happened to Liz Cheney recently. Well, not exactly. The former Congresswoman from Wyoming is not running for president—at least not yet.
She was giving a commencement speech at Colorado College, her alma mater. But it could just as well have been a speech along the campaign trail: it is one of America’s most official secrets that Cheney wants to run for president next year.
Liz Cheney wrapped up her tenure in Congress by co-chairing the committee that ‘investigated’ the events of January 6th, 2021. During her time on the committee, Cheney did her best to paint the events of that day as an insurrection against the United States government.
It is very serious to be accused of insurrection: the punishment is up to 20 years in prison. If she was right, then obviously everyone who unlawfully entered the Capitol on that day should be duly punished. Cheney has also used the committee report to make the case that Donald Trump mishandled the events of that day to the point where he should never be allowed to become president again.
The only problem is that the January 6th committee did not tell the truth, and certainly not the whole truth, about what happened that day. They withheld 41,000 hours of video footage, which make it clear that no insurrection took place. In other words, Cheney conspired to conceal the truth from the American public.
Cheney may be right about Trump. He may very well be unsuitable to hold the office of president again. However, Cheney’s own participation in lying to the American people about the alleged insurrection should preclude her as well from holding that office. If she can doctor a report of such dignity, with such far-reaching consequences for hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans, then if she becomes president, what other truths could she craft, withhold, or conceal if she sees it as being in her best interest?
The problems for a Cheney campaign do not stop at the January 6th report. She is a heavily one-sided politician whose interests—beyond stopping Trump—are limited to increasing the defense budget, growing Pentagon appropriations, and spending more money on the military. When she recently participated in the Mackinac Policy Conference in Detroit, Cheney started off with a careful argument for higher defense appropriations.
Then she spent almost all her 36 minutes explaining why Donald Trump and his sympathizers should not be elected to anything.
In fairness, she did touch on the recent debt ceiling agreement, where Congress and the president shook hands on a deal to let the government borrow more money. However, her interest in this issue was dutiful in tone and she dedicated her comments to the defense budget.
All in all, she presented herself as a traditional neoconservative, whose presidential ambitions will be heavily supported by the defense industry.
Again, we need to be fair to Cheney. Having sponsors for your presidential campaign is nothing wrong per se. All candidates who are not Trump-level wealthy need to have donors with very deep pockets. A serious contender for the presidency must be ready to raise upward of $1 billion to fund his or her campaign. Cheney is no wealthier than any other millionaire former Congressman, so going into the presidential race, she will naturally make sure that she has plenty of big-buck backers.
The problems for Cheney are of a different nature. First of all, what will the defense industry ask in return for supporting her? Cynics would say that she is going to have to be a wartime president. The reason would be that it is much easier to raise defense appropriations when Americans are fighting and dying in the fields, woods, and cities of some distant country than if the world was at peace.
I am not one of those cynics. The Cheney I know, who represented my former home state of Wyoming in Congress, and whom I have had the privilege of meeting several times, is an intelligent and patriotic politician. She has a spontaneous personality, she is likable and easy to talk to. From a general viewpoint, she is a good presidential candidate. In terms of maintaining the administrative—but not moral—integrity of the presidential office, she definitely has what it takes to hold the highest office in the country.
With that said, I fear that her presidency would be heavily influenced by the neocon ideologues with whom she apparently spends a lot of time. They will convince her to commit to America’s foreign policy as we have known it since World War II: long episodes of Pax Americana and American troops all around the world, interspersed with the occasional Bellum Americanum for the sake of protecting peace and defense appropriations.
This foreign policy was rejected by tens of millions of Republican voters who supported Trump in 2020 and elevated Republicans to a House majority in 2022. Many Americans are tired of paying taxes for, and sending their young men and women into, wars that seem to have no purpose and no end. After the disastrous end to 20 years in Afghanistan, it will be difficult to convince the American public to commit to a similar adventure again.
All is not bad with the neocon idea of Pax Americana. It was helpful when the Soviet Union was around, when it made sense for the leader of the free world to keep the communist aggressors at bay. However, the world has changed, evolved, and changed again in the more than 30 years that have passed since the fall of the Soviet Union. While America still needs a strong military, and I as a patriotic American would be happy if it remained the strongest in the world, it is no longer obvious that military intervention anywhere around the world is our duty—or our unquestionable right.
Long story short: when Cheney talks about foreign policy, she sounds as though the Berlin Wall is still up. America needs a less ham-fisted approach to the rest of the world.
Another problem for Cheney is that the only time she pays any attention to the fiscal problems of the federal government, it is to keep an eye on the defense budget. I am not going to delve into the intricacies of macroeconomics and public finance (although I will be happy to do it if anyone has questions), but the very reason why America’s defense appropriations are not higher than they are today, is that Congress and presidents—past and present—have decided that they should spend money on just about everything under the sun.
The favorite reason for Congress to spend money is that they want to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Also known as economic redistribution, this practice accounts for $7 out of every $10 that Congress spends; the defense budget is somewhere in the vicinity of $1.50. Entitlement programs are constructed to grow spending on autopilot, and they will continue to grow spending until structural reforms give them another purpose than economic redistribution.
Cheney has no interest in these issues. This is highly unfortunate, especially since the federal government debt has now become a conduit for foreign adversaries to bring the U.S. economy to its knees. Thereby, they can more or less kill the tax base that is supposed to fund Cheney’s big defense budget.
Since the national debt is going to be a major issue in next year’s presidential election, Cheney is at a disadvantage already from the get-go.
She also has to decide which party she is going to run for, or if she will do it as an independent. As Fox News recently reminded its readers, she has said that if she goes for the ‘big chair’, she won’t do it for the Republican party. This statement gives us a clue as to why she avoids taking sides in the big ideological issues of our time. The idea, of course, is that if you offend nobody, you repel no voters.
I know from first-hand experience that this works in Wyoming, where Cheney started her political career. It does not work on the national stage.
You can’t go through an entire presidential campaign as a non-ideologue. While Cheney keeps quiet, her opponents do not. One of them is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose socially conservative record speaks for itself. No matter how much Cheney wants to stand above transgenderism, the LGBT movement, and the sexualization of school curricula, she is going to have to address them at some point.
When she does, I suspect that her choice will not be related to her solid conservative track record as a Congresswoman. Instead, it will be based on careful focus group studies to find out which voter base is more open to her: those who think it is OK for biological males to use the same bathrooms as females, or those who don’t.
Again, the federal government’s huge debt will be a major issue in next year’s election, but the social value issues will also be important. While families across America start fighting back to protect their daughters from having to change clothes in front of men, more corporate executives approach the ‘transgender’ issue with their feet in their mouths. You would think the Budweiser moment was a learning experience for them, but it was not.
Retail giant Target is the most recent corporation to offend Americans with traditional social values. The corporation decided to market “Pride” clothes and ‘transgender’ attire with a Satanic theme.
Needless to say, this has taken a big toll on their stock. Fox Business reports:
According to Newsweek, the stock value plunge was the result of a consumer boycott. Their customers simply chose to shop somewhere else instead.
This behavior, which is entirely in accordance with such founding principles of civilization as individual and economic freedom, has rubbed some people the wrong way. An economics professor tried to make the case that this kind of boycott is a form of “terrorism.” The esteemed professor, Justin Wolfers, has made one notable scholarly contribution: “Gender and the Dynamics of Economics Seminars.”
Wolfers appears to believe that when consumers choose not to buy products from a certain brand, it is an act of aggression.
I am sure that Professor Wolfers holds himself to a higher analytical standard when he teaches microeconomics at the University of Michigan. Nevertheless, his reckless accusation against people who no longer shop at Target is just another example of how tense the public discourse on social values has become. With conservatives pushing back against men who want to invade their daughters’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams, the post-moral left will most certainly dig in its heels.
Liz Cheney will not be able to navigate an entire presidential campaign without at some point deciding if she wants to protect women or those who think they are women.
She is also going to have to become a public finance literate. It was fine for presidents in the past to hand over such issues to experts at the Department of Treasury and think tanks, but that was back when America’s government debt was manageable. Those days are gone.
America’s next president is going to have to fight for the nation’s very existence, but it will not be on the battlefield. Only a few will be qualified to lead this fight. Cheney is not one of them.
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