Actually - and I say this as someone who has long considered myself an active opponent of people named Cheney - she is on our side. So are the never-Trump conservatives. There are two political parties now - the party that believes in democracy and the party that doesn't. When things are over and we can safely go back to worrying about p…
Actually - and I say this as someone who has long considered myself an active opponent of people named Cheney - she is on our side. So are the never-Trump conservatives. There are two political parties now - the party that believes in democracy and the party that doesn't. When things are over and we can safely go back to worrying about policy differences, rather than the existence of the democratic constitutional republic, we can go back to being political opponents. But right now we are - like it or not - in a coalition like that which won World War II. If Churchill could offer Stalin an alliance without conditions, after spending 20 years trying to overthrow his government, because as he said, "If Hitler were to invade Hell, I should at least have a good word for the Devil," we can do no less. I don't like her and I doubt I ever will, but that is irrelevant. What she is saying now is the truth. It's truth we all agree on.
To all those who can't cotton to Cheney's politics: We are not discussing Cheney's particular politics right now. We are recognizing and agreeing with her overarching belief in our Constitutional democracy. Particular politics comes along later in the equation after our Constitutional Republic survives.
Politically-/Policy-wise I am opposed to Cheney. However, if it came down to a choice between the Trump-McCarthy-McConnell bloc and the Cheney-Kinzinger bloc, I'd choose the latter.
I gather you take her speech straight and consider her a convert to democracy crying out in the Republican wilderness? If so I fervently hope you are right.
"...on the side of the devil now. Whodathunk." That's a good one. I never thought I would ever said anything nice about her. She is playing a long game to save the Republican Party. However, as I said before don't trust her as far as I can throw her.
No, she is not deserving of our trust. What she is doing is both admirable and a bold political play. But her ascendancy would not be good news for the values we hold dear, except for democracy, of course! Which, as TC points out, is pretty much all that matters at this point. We can work out the details later.
Seems I woke up today as an incarnation of Debby Downer, but the actual proverb, which takes my side in this discussion, is “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.”
Me too. So as Liz Cheney has never shown herself an enemy of fascism, I hope there isn't too much working with her. My energy is going in to getting rid of the filibuster, at long, merciful last.
You assert this several times, and I am curious why you are so convinced of this. The proverb 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' is from the Arthashastra, from the 4th century BCE https://www.worldhistory.org/Arthashastra/ although the original text is quite a bit wordier... you can find it here in Book 6: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Arthashastra/Book_VI -- what is the source of your claim that there is an even earlier proverb, stating that the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend?
Hiya Terrible Tallypo, that's fascinating. I'm not an ancient historian (though I love ancient history and literatures!). I do teach medieval and Renaissance literature and am very interested in folk forms like proverbs, tales and jokes. I've only encountered the negative version (with proverbs you can usually find both--there was a medieval distinction between the "bonum" and "malum" significances)--maybe because it's been more popular in my lifetime of increasingly dispiriting politics! My father warned me as a young person always to remember that "the enemy of your enemy is not your friend."
Hi Kim. Yes, of course it counts. That’s why the “Whodathunk” comment. I think all the comparisons to Stalin and Churchill are apropos. Anyone who misses the connection between Felon45 and Adolf Hitler has not been paying attention. The Republicans are at risk of becoming a modern version of the Nazi Party, that’s what this is all about, and no I am not being hyperbolic nor am I exaggerating. The Germans were doing what the racist anti-Semitic sexist wing (the whackos) of the Republican Party is now doing. It’s a crucial moment in American history. This is not an average week for us.
Well, Roland, you got me to give up my determination to just read Heather's letter and then hit the sack. Your last two sentences did it: the hyperbole of "crucial moment" justaposed with the understated "not an average week". Perfect. I go to bed (soon, I hope) with the sense that something went right, at least briefly. Thanks.
The adage that comes to mind for me is "Even a broken clock is right 2 times a day." Cheney is as "broken" as it gets, but on this one issue--"Trumpty Dumpty"--she is spot on. I think it's certain that "Trumpty Dumpty" is headed for a fall.
It's an informal group of LFAA subscribers, oriented toward practical political action, who stay in touch by email. There may be several dozen participants so far. The email is posted here periodically. Admission is by invitation, with decisions made by three moderators who comment regularly on LFAA.
There's another good reason not to join. Too many layers of too few people. Despite my occasional frustration with the hyperactivity here, I prefer the unfiltered communication. I'll speak for myself, and enjoy the wide range of expression here.
You know why I didn't, TPJ? I have an aversion to anything that begins with somebody's name. And "Herd"? A group that just moves along in the same direction as everyone else without thinking too much about it? I know that's not what you are doing. But the implications of a name like that leave me feeling a little queasy. Can you guys come up with a name a little more, um, dynamic? Or whatever?
I see your point, but I can't fully accept her ally-ship. During unsettling times, the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend -- not the best of allianced. Churchill and Stalin didn't trust e/o one little bit.
Yes but the British and Americans helped rearm his forces and feed his people as a result supplying all through the dangerous convoys to Murmansk.....risking their own personnel's lives to do it. It helps build a belief at least that they share their principal...if not all....objectives. Anything that can be done to help "ease her task" should be welcomed until such a time as interests diverge once again.
I would agree if I thought her plan was to save democracy. According to Dowd it is not, and never has been. Her piece is informative. I suggested people read it, not that they blame Lynn Cheney for the sins of her father.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have never regarded Maureen Down as an especially perceptive or deep thinker. Got back and read some of the drivel she wrote about the Clintons. Honestly, I don't know why people like her and Ross Douthat still have jobs at the NYT.
I agree. That's why I said it was "surprisingly" good. Not a deep thinker at all. I don't think she wants to be. What she is is someone who has been in DC watching these people for decades. She knows them and knows what they've said and done. That's why I pointed to her easily accessible column. Many pieces on her by deep types amount to the same takehome: leopards don't change their spots. I'm not moved by "fiery or "soaring" rhetoric, at least not normally: I study it professionally!
Oh, good, a link. To my surprise, NYT let me read it without dinking me to subscribe (I'm trying to cut down). Mary Baine Campbell, you are right about Doud's piece. Sad to see folks here doing what they love pointing fingers at others for doing: jumping to conclusions about something before taking the time to read and evaluate it. No, Doud's piece is not deep, nor does it need to be. Sometimes writers get so caught up in being "deep" that they bury the simple point at the core of things. Doud didn't do that. She laid it out plain and square. For crying out loud, folks, read it and let go of your intellectual purity.
Republicans won't listen to anyone on the left, not even Manchin, so even if she is a hypocrite and untrustworthy, she is telling the truth about the election and about Trump. Maybe she is like a sacrifice bunt for the GOP? Perhaps to save them or to advance a new runner---Stefanik?
Those were brave people who manned the Allied supply convoys to Murmansk. German U-boats were kings of the seas through 1942 and sank thousands and thousands of Allied ships. About 15 years ago, I read a 1942 copy of "LIFE Magazine" in which President Roosevelt [in a close paraphrase] said, "The people of the United States will be eternally grateful to the Russian people for the sacrifices they have made." Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and other Allied leaders wanted to send as many supplies as possible to the Soviet Union because the Soviet armies were keeping the German Wehrmacht away from British and American shores.
Your response to my point below seems to have disappeared, so I'll just respond here. Yalta and the supplies were the price that Roosevelte and Churchill paid for the creation of the second front. The Treaty effectively gave Eastern Europe to Stalin to do as he wished. Hence the headlong rush of allied forces to get to Berlin ahead of the Russians...they were late as the latter East German boundary testified. Whether the Western leaders were aware of the fact that Stalin probably killed more people than Hitler at the time is a moot question....but I think that the Ukrainians might have told them. What Stalin did to the Poles he had already done to the Russian people....a real model for Pol Pot.
Given the underlying competing ideologies dictating world dominance ....granted, in different ways....one can hardly be surprised at the poor US-Soviet relations thereafter. Stalin however mostly respected his part of the deal in that he stopped Communists taking over in France for instance after the war as they had been the mainstay of french resistance to the Nazi invaders....after 1942! Similar uncontrolled communist eruptions in Greece and Belgium were left to the tender mercies of Churchill to do the job.
Good points. We also need to remember that 80 percent of the deaths in World War II worldwide happened on the Eastern Front. The Soviets lost more men at Stalingrad than we lost in the entire war. At Tehran, Stalin promised to start an offensive within a week of the Allied landing in Normandy, to take pressure off the invasion; the Soviet 1944 offensive began on June 10, four days after D-Day and did remove the pressure. At Yalta, he promised to enter the war with Japan 90 days after the Germans surrendered. On August 9, the Soviets invaded Manchuria. The record of the Japanese Supreme War Council for that day makes no mention of the fact that Nagasaki had been bombed. All eyes were on the Soviets, because they knew they had no defenses in Manchuria or in northern Japan, having sent everything to Kyushu to oppose the coming US invasion. The Soviets planned to invade Hokkaido from Sakhalin at the end of September, a good 5-6 weeks before Operation Coronet, the Kyushu invasion (which would likely have failed in the face of the kamikazes and the Japanese beach defenses - I spoke to a Marine who was part of the Marine leadership of the 6th division, who all visited the beach they would have hit after the surrender in September. They all agreed, after talking to their opposite numbers and looking at the defenses, that they would never have gotten off the beach). Had that invasion happened, the Soviets would have taken Hokkaido and Honshu already.
We believe Japan surrendered because of the A-bombs because that was what they told us. In fact they were happy to surrender to us, rather than to the tender mercies of the Russians, who hadn't forgotten the events of 1905 and whose "mercies" in Germany after the surrender they had knowledge of.
Ah! The wonders of new technology. Always there to make life easier for us all. Previously we would be writing letters and awaiting the response...which wouldn't disappear in a puff of smoke between gmail and substack. In the meantime we managed to get around it!😁
Rowshan, this is one of the mysteries of Substack. For unknown reasons, sometimes it shuffles comments around. I've searched fruitlessly for comments I KNOW I have read, sworn they were lost, only to have them unexpectedly pop up in some peculiar context (sometimes sounding even more appropriate than they did in the original context!). Yours too, will reappear. Often it happens for me when I near the end, and then keeps going- then the missing comment appears, and it is actually somewhere near the beginning. Some weird intellectual cycle and I don't even want to know how or why. Life started out weird and it is determined to stay that way.
Precisely. In this fight we are not choosing friends. We are choosing a side - that of democracy.
I have mixed feelings of course. On the one hand, her opposition to Trump is sudden. During Trump’s Presidency I can’t recall her ever opposing him, at least until the eve of the insurrection. She was a rising force within the Party and I guess it behooved her to be a good soldier through his Presidency. She appears sagacious now, but she was one of the leading voices in support of Trump in the Ukraine impeachment, with numerous media moments. I thought her arguments were typical of the weak tea the GOP was serving up on behalf of Trump.
Nonetheless, she is now at the head of a movement to pull the Republicans back from the cliff they are so rushing so eagerly to. She may succeed in the long run and she may not. But she was unequivocal in her words last night and has at least rocked the lickspittles who currently “lead” the Republicans. One suspects that she has more powerful support behind her than we know.
And finally, who else could we expect to perform this feat. The Republicans have been the very embodiment of mediocrity and mendacity for decades now. Their intellectual poverty came dazzlingly into view with Newt Gingrich in the 90s a man of some intelligence and no wisdom. George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz led a bound to fail bid for a spreading of American hegemony going forward. It’s not hard to recall how they wreaked havoc in pushing forward A Project For a New American Century.
They moved on to be slapped around by the Tea Party movement with luminaries such as Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Grover Norquist swinging for the fences. For a hot minute Bobby Jindal was thought to be the savior of the Party. Then it was Marco Rubio’s turn. Then, in an hour of greatest weakness, they allowed themselves to be seduced by Trump.
Really, it’s beyond astonishing how stony their soil has been. The Republicans have been masters of tactical maneuvers to win elections. Once won, they have not once shown themselves worthy in leadership.
The stakes appear immensely high now. The loyal opposition will do what it will do. We can but watch uneasily as they confront yet another “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” moment.
There is no Joe DiMaggio. Liz Cheney will have to do for the time being.
This is right. This is why I once applauded Mitt Romney, why John McCain will always be a hero to me. Do you remember Corker and Flake? I may not have liked their policies but they didn’t betray the Constitution or bow to the golden calf.
Whereas I agree completely, I was very disappointed that they chose to bow out rather than engage in a very public fight to keep their seats, Flake in particular. We needed that vocal example then, even if they lost big, and they missed that opportunity.
Good question. She hasn't done much that I'm aware of that would engender trust. Words are cheap. And although I'm glad any Republican with in-house bona fides is contradicting the party line, I don't expect much to come of it.
One thing I've learned over my long life is that men do not follow women. They use women and sometimes set them up to test the waters, but the notion of 'follow the money' is sometimes secondary to 'follow the men'....the ones with both money and power having the greatest advantage.
We'll hear nothing about Liz Cheney in a month as the media focuses on the next shiny trinket and people go about the business of recovery, exhausted from the past year, especially, and sick of politics. I don't think most Americans even know what democracy is, let alone worry about its survival.
I could not agree more. Let's encourage the former Republican Party to set up its circular firing squads. The rest of us need to recognize that the line has been drawn between republican democracy and fascist autocracy. All that matters now is which side you're on.
Actually - and I say this as someone who has long considered myself an active opponent of people named Cheney - she is on our side. So are the never-Trump conservatives. There are two political parties now - the party that believes in democracy and the party that doesn't. When things are over and we can safely go back to worrying about policy differences, rather than the existence of the democratic constitutional republic, we can go back to being political opponents. But right now we are - like it or not - in a coalition like that which won World War II. If Churchill could offer Stalin an alliance without conditions, after spending 20 years trying to overthrow his government, because as he said, "If Hitler were to invade Hell, I should at least have a good word for the Devil," we can do no less. I don't like her and I doubt I ever will, but that is irrelevant. What she is saying now is the truth. It's truth we all agree on.
To all those who can't cotton to Cheney's politics: We are not discussing Cheney's particular politics right now. We are recognizing and agreeing with her overarching belief in our Constitutional democracy. Particular politics comes along later in the equation after our Constitutional Republic survives.
Excellent differentiation. Thank you, Claudia.
Politically-/Policy-wise I am opposed to Cheney. However, if it came down to a choice between the Trump-McCarthy-McConnell bloc and the Cheney-Kinzinger bloc, I'd choose the latter.
I gather you take her speech straight and consider her a convert to democracy crying out in the Republican wilderness? If so I fervently hope you are right.
👍👍
My wife just said Liz is Daddy’s little girl. Spawn of war criminal. Yes, we are on the side of the devil now. Whodathunk.
"...on the side of the devil now. Whodathunk." That's a good one. I never thought I would ever said anything nice about her. She is playing a long game to save the Republican Party. However, as I said before don't trust her as far as I can throw her.
No, she is not deserving of our trust. What she is doing is both admirable and a bold political play. But her ascendancy would not be good news for the values we hold dear, except for democracy, of course! Which, as TC points out, is pretty much all that matters at this point. We can work out the details later.
That’s exactly what the founders of Israel thought about the ultra-right. Just saying.
Yes, a deal with the devil is still satanic.
She voted 93% in compliance with DT. She is not our hero or friend in any way, shape or form.
And yet, here we are....
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Seems I woke up today as an incarnation of Debby Downer, but the actual proverb, which takes my side in this discussion, is “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.”
At this point, I will settle for working with enemies of fascism.
Me too. So as Liz Cheney has never shown herself an enemy of fascism, I hope there isn't too much working with her. My energy is going in to getting rid of the filibuster, at long, merciful last.
You assert this several times, and I am curious why you are so convinced of this. The proverb 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' is from the Arthashastra, from the 4th century BCE https://www.worldhistory.org/Arthashastra/ although the original text is quite a bit wordier... you can find it here in Book 6: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Arthashastra/Book_VI -- what is the source of your claim that there is an even earlier proverb, stating that the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend?
Why not two sayings instead of just one? Both have their merits. People who don't like old sayings can always make up their own. I do!
Common sense.
Hiya Terrible Tallypo, that's fascinating. I'm not an ancient historian (though I love ancient history and literatures!). I do teach medieval and Renaissance literature and am very interested in folk forms like proverbs, tales and jokes. I've only encountered the negative version (with proverbs you can usually find both--there was a medieval distinction between the "bonum" and "malum" significances)--maybe because it's been more popular in my lifetime of increasingly dispiriting politics! My father warned me as a young person always to remember that "the enemy of your enemy is not your friend."
Yes!
does it count that it is a devil with a constitution, or a belief in our shared constitution?
(missed your contributions, Roland. Glad to see you back.)
Hi Kim. Yes, of course it counts. That’s why the “Whodathunk” comment. I think all the comparisons to Stalin and Churchill are apropos. Anyone who misses the connection between Felon45 and Adolf Hitler has not been paying attention. The Republicans are at risk of becoming a modern version of the Nazi Party, that’s what this is all about, and no I am not being hyperbolic nor am I exaggerating. The Germans were doing what the racist anti-Semitic sexist wing (the whackos) of the Republican Party is now doing. It’s a crucial moment in American history. This is not an average week for us.
Cheeto is our homegrown Hitler.
And, Stephen Miller is Hitler’s spawn. He has his eyes.
Stephen Miller = “baby Goebbels”-Malcolm Nance
His eyes show no soul, no compassion, no empathy...only icy cold, hard fascist ideology. His eyes show a totally dead individual.
Agreed
Interesting— I never noticed his eyes so much— just what a hater he is.
Miller, Hawley, Goebbels...they all look the same to me.
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-just-think-what-goebbels-could-have-done-with-facebook-1.7308812
Hitler wannabe
Well, Roland, you got me to give up my determination to just read Heather's letter and then hit the sack. Your last two sentences did it: the hyperbole of "crucial moment" justaposed with the understated "not an average week". Perfect. I go to bed (soon, I hope) with the sense that something went right, at least briefly. Thanks.
Same here.
Rather, I think that the devil has come to our side, at least temporarily.
The adage that comes to mind for me is "Even a broken clock is right 2 times a day." Cheney is as "broken" as it gets, but on this one issue--"Trumpty Dumpty"--she is spot on. I think it's certain that "Trumpty Dumpty" is headed for a fall.
Please consider signing on to Heather's Herd, Roland. Your friends want to see and hear you.
Is it possible to share that link? She gave it to me once but I lost it
I too would appreciate the link
Just send my information to join
Ooh la la
And what is Heather's Herd pray tell?
It's an informal group of LFAA subscribers, oriented toward practical political action, who stay in touch by email. There may be several dozen participants so far. The email is posted here periodically. Admission is by invitation, with decisions made by three moderators who comment regularly on LFAA.
There's another good reason not to join. Too many layers of too few people. Despite my occasional frustration with the hyperactivity here, I prefer the unfiltered communication. I'll speak for myself, and enjoy the wide range of expression here.
You know why I didn't, TPJ? I have an aversion to anything that begins with somebody's name. And "Herd"? A group that just moves along in the same direction as everyone else without thinking too much about it? I know that's not what you are doing. But the implications of a name like that leave me feeling a little queasy. Can you guys come up with a name a little more, um, dynamic? Or whatever?
I see your point, but I can't fully accept her ally-ship. During unsettling times, the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend -- not the best of allianced. Churchill and Stalin didn't trust e/o one little bit.
Yes but the British and Americans helped rearm his forces and feed his people as a result supplying all through the dangerous convoys to Murmansk.....risking their own personnel's lives to do it. It helps build a belief at least that they share their principal...if not all....objectives. Anything that can be done to help "ease her task" should be welcomed until such a time as interests diverge once again.
We do share the same objective - the maintenance of democracy, where we scrabble with each other and respect the results.
Right the overarching goal is to save our democracy.
I would agree if I thought her plan was to save democracy. According to Dowd it is not, and never has been. Her piece is informative. I suggested people read it, not that they blame Lynn Cheney for the sins of her father.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have never regarded Maureen Down as an especially perceptive or deep thinker. Got back and read some of the drivel she wrote about the Clintons. Honestly, I don't know why people like her and Ross Douthat still have jobs at the NYT.
I agree. That's why I said it was "surprisingly" good. Not a deep thinker at all. I don't think she wants to be. What she is is someone who has been in DC watching these people for decades. She knows them and knows what they've said and done. That's why I pointed to her easily accessible column. Many pieces on her by deep types amount to the same takehome: leopards don't change their spots. I'm not moved by "fiery or "soaring" rhetoric, at least not normally: I study it professionally!
Dowd's column: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/opinion/liz-cheney-donald-trump.html
Oh, good, a link. To my surprise, NYT let me read it without dinking me to subscribe (I'm trying to cut down). Mary Baine Campbell, you are right about Doud's piece. Sad to see folks here doing what they love pointing fingers at others for doing: jumping to conclusions about something before taking the time to read and evaluate it. No, Doud's piece is not deep, nor does it need to be. Sometimes writers get so caught up in being "deep" that they bury the simple point at the core of things. Doud didn't do that. She laid it out plain and square. For crying out loud, folks, read it and let go of your intellectual purity.
Thanks!
This, TPJ. I posted my comment before I saw yours. YES to having a democracy to bicker about.
Republicans won't listen to anyone on the left, not even Manchin, so even if she is a hypocrite and untrustworthy, she is telling the truth about the election and about Trump. Maybe she is like a sacrifice bunt for the GOP? Perhaps to save them or to advance a new runner---Stefanik?
Stuart, exactly!
Those were brave people who manned the Allied supply convoys to Murmansk. German U-boats were kings of the seas through 1942 and sank thousands and thousands of Allied ships. About 15 years ago, I read a 1942 copy of "LIFE Magazine" in which President Roosevelt [in a close paraphrase] said, "The people of the United States will be eternally grateful to the Russian people for the sacrifices they have made." Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and other Allied leaders wanted to send as many supplies as possible to the Soviet Union because the Soviet armies were keeping the German Wehrmacht away from British and American shores.
Your response to my point below seems to have disappeared, so I'll just respond here. Yalta and the supplies were the price that Roosevelte and Churchill paid for the creation of the second front. The Treaty effectively gave Eastern Europe to Stalin to do as he wished. Hence the headlong rush of allied forces to get to Berlin ahead of the Russians...they were late as the latter East German boundary testified. Whether the Western leaders were aware of the fact that Stalin probably killed more people than Hitler at the time is a moot question....but I think that the Ukrainians might have told them. What Stalin did to the Poles he had already done to the Russian people....a real model for Pol Pot.
Given the underlying competing ideologies dictating world dominance ....granted, in different ways....one can hardly be surprised at the poor US-Soviet relations thereafter. Stalin however mostly respected his part of the deal in that he stopped Communists taking over in France for instance after the war as they had been the mainstay of french resistance to the Nazi invaders....after 1942! Similar uncontrolled communist eruptions in Greece and Belgium were left to the tender mercies of Churchill to do the job.
Good points. We also need to remember that 80 percent of the deaths in World War II worldwide happened on the Eastern Front. The Soviets lost more men at Stalingrad than we lost in the entire war. At Tehran, Stalin promised to start an offensive within a week of the Allied landing in Normandy, to take pressure off the invasion; the Soviet 1944 offensive began on June 10, four days after D-Day and did remove the pressure. At Yalta, he promised to enter the war with Japan 90 days after the Germans surrendered. On August 9, the Soviets invaded Manchuria. The record of the Japanese Supreme War Council for that day makes no mention of the fact that Nagasaki had been bombed. All eyes were on the Soviets, because they knew they had no defenses in Manchuria or in northern Japan, having sent everything to Kyushu to oppose the coming US invasion. The Soviets planned to invade Hokkaido from Sakhalin at the end of September, a good 5-6 weeks before Operation Coronet, the Kyushu invasion (which would likely have failed in the face of the kamikazes and the Japanese beach defenses - I spoke to a Marine who was part of the Marine leadership of the 6th division, who all visited the beach they would have hit after the surrender in September. They all agreed, after talking to their opposite numbers and looking at the defenses, that they would never have gotten off the beach). Had that invasion happened, the Soviets would have taken Hokkaido and Honshu already.
We believe Japan surrendered because of the A-bombs because that was what they told us. In fact they were happy to surrender to us, rather than to the tender mercies of the Russians, who hadn't forgotten the events of 1905 and whose "mercies" in Germany after the surrender they had knowledge of.
How did my comment disppear, Stuart? I didn't do it. It shouldn't have been offensive except to a Russian not.
Ah! The wonders of new technology. Always there to make life easier for us all. Previously we would be writing letters and awaiting the response...which wouldn't disappear in a puff of smoke between gmail and substack. In the meantime we managed to get around it!😁
Bot, not "not".
Rowshan, this is one of the mysteries of Substack. For unknown reasons, sometimes it shuffles comments around. I've searched fruitlessly for comments I KNOW I have read, sworn they were lost, only to have them unexpectedly pop up in some peculiar context (sometimes sounding even more appropriate than they did in the original context!). Yours too, will reappear. Often it happens for me when I near the end, and then keeps going- then the missing comment appears, and it is actually somewhere near the beginning. Some weird intellectual cycle and I don't even want to know how or why. Life started out weird and it is determined to stay that way.
If you want to get a bit into the weeds on this, see Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front, by Serhii Plokhii.
Completely right.
Precisely. In this fight we are not choosing friends. We are choosing a side - that of democracy.
I have mixed feelings of course. On the one hand, her opposition to Trump is sudden. During Trump’s Presidency I can’t recall her ever opposing him, at least until the eve of the insurrection. She was a rising force within the Party and I guess it behooved her to be a good soldier through his Presidency. She appears sagacious now, but she was one of the leading voices in support of Trump in the Ukraine impeachment, with numerous media moments. I thought her arguments were typical of the weak tea the GOP was serving up on behalf of Trump.
Nonetheless, she is now at the head of a movement to pull the Republicans back from the cliff they are so rushing so eagerly to. She may succeed in the long run and she may not. But she was unequivocal in her words last night and has at least rocked the lickspittles who currently “lead” the Republicans. One suspects that she has more powerful support behind her than we know.
And finally, who else could we expect to perform this feat. The Republicans have been the very embodiment of mediocrity and mendacity for decades now. Their intellectual poverty came dazzlingly into view with Newt Gingrich in the 90s a man of some intelligence and no wisdom. George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz led a bound to fail bid for a spreading of American hegemony going forward. It’s not hard to recall how they wreaked havoc in pushing forward A Project For a New American Century.
They moved on to be slapped around by the Tea Party movement with luminaries such as Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Grover Norquist swinging for the fences. For a hot minute Bobby Jindal was thought to be the savior of the Party. Then it was Marco Rubio’s turn. Then, in an hour of greatest weakness, they allowed themselves to be seduced by Trump.
Really, it’s beyond astonishing how stony their soil has been. The Republicans have been masters of tactical maneuvers to win elections. Once won, they have not once shown themselves worthy in leadership.
The stakes appear immensely high now. The loyal opposition will do what it will do. We can but watch uneasily as they confront yet another “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” moment.
There is no Joe DiMaggio. Liz Cheney will have to do for the time being.
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you...
This is right. This is why I once applauded Mitt Romney, why John McCain will always be a hero to me. Do you remember Corker and Flake? I may not have liked their policies but they didn’t betray the Constitution or bow to the golden calf.
Whereas I agree completely, I was very disappointed that they chose to bow out rather than engage in a very public fight to keep their seats, Flake in particular. We needed that vocal example then, even if they lost big, and they missed that opportunity.
My heroes as well.
There is an ancient proverb written in Sanskrit in the 4th century BC that expresses the following sentiment: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
I'm sorry but you have that proverb wrong. It's "The enemy of my enemy is not my friend"--and that's the wisdom we need reminding of at such times.
Two proverbs instead of one . . . .
I am curious about why people think she believes in the Constitution. Is it because she said so in this speech?
Good question. She hasn't done much that I'm aware of that would engender trust. Words are cheap. And although I'm glad any Republican with in-house bona fides is contradicting the party line, I don't expect much to come of it.
One thing I've learned over my long life is that men do not follow women. They use women and sometimes set them up to test the waters, but the notion of 'follow the money' is sometimes secondary to 'follow the men'....the ones with both money and power having the greatest advantage.
We'll hear nothing about Liz Cheney in a month as the media focuses on the next shiny trinket and people go about the business of recovery, exhausted from the past year, especially, and sick of politics. I don't think most Americans even know what democracy is, let alone worry about its survival.
I could not agree more. Let's encourage the former Republican Party to set up its circular firing squads. The rest of us need to recognize that the line has been drawn between republican democracy and fascist autocracy. All that matters now is which side you're on.
100%.
Absolutely right TCinLA