As regulars here at the shebeen will recall, the management has been vigilant as regards our new Never Trump friends, especially those who were clearly complicit in creating the political culture—and the vast political audience—that made someone like El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago not merely possible, but inevitable. Actually, given the damage for which they are responsible, I think we’ve all been very nice to them. It’s just that we always have to be on guard against any effort to memory-hole how the Republican Party came to be the vehicle for the ruination of the American republic.

But not this guy.

From the Washington Post:

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney says.

No. Just, no. Shut up. Go away. How dare you? You are the poster boy for the Unaccountable Executive and for the Unitary Executive Theory, and you have been since your days working for Gerry Ford. You served that function in Congress when you helped cover up the crimes of the Iran-Contra. And in the nervous days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, you found yourself living in authoritarian Xanadu. You turned this country into a nation that tortured. You lied this country into a disastrous foreign war. “The dark side,” you called it.

I suspect that it’s called something quite different around The Hague.

“He is a coward,” Cheney says in the ad, which was released Thursday. “A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it, he knows it, and deep down I think most Republicans know it.”

Says the guy who shot his friend in the face, and who went for the Scotch before he went for the cops. Says the guy who lied the country into a war. Here he is, lying his ass off to a hopelessly credulous Tim Russert. And somewhere, Valerie Plame must find this all very amusing.

Naturally, the commercial that this old bag of sins cut for his daughter was considered "an event" by our pundit class, especially that element of the pundit class interested in whitewashing everything that Republicans did prior to the 2016 presidential election.

Odds of Liz Cheney’s keeping her seat are pretty damn long, but she seems to have grander plans. Anyone who cares about the future of American democracy should know that keeping the Cheneys away from power is only slightly less important than keeping the Trumps away from power. It’s a choice between the seditious conspiracy of the bear spray and the mob, and the seditious conspiracy of the black site and the waterboard.

The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.