To the Editor:
Talk about politics making strange bedfellows! Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s fallout with former President Trump has now caused her to be anointed the latest darling of many self-styled progressives, as shamelessly expressed in a NY Daily News cartoon reprinted in the Sun of 5/7. There, a Wehrmacht-like column of goose-stepping, sieg-heiling Republican zombies chant in unison that the Wyoming representative is “out of step with the party!” The poor dear!
You would never guess that the aggrieved victim of this horrible abuse is in truth a leading exponent of the Permanent Warfare doctrine that has destroyed millions of lives and wasted trillions of dollars, while turning Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and other nations into the wastelands they have become. (Make no mistake: the congresswoman’s crime is not that she happens to be former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, but that her own views dovetail precisely with those of her justly-infamous father on these matters.)
Also curiously missing from this fake picture is the simple fact that President Trump, with all his warts and blemishes, did indeed try to end this madness. Sure, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was an obsessive, China-bashing neocon warrior. Sure, the Trump sanctions led to misery and starvation in Venezuela, Iran, etc. But when he tried to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan, he was violently opposed, first and foremost, by congressional Republicans like—wait for it—Saint Liz Cheney. Is this sterling individual the new standard-bearer for the crusade against all things Trump? Really?
The issue of war is anything but academic today. Even establishment voices like Henry Kissinger and NY Times reporter Peter Beinart are warning that U.S.-NATO deployments in Ukraine and Taiwan, at the doorsteps of Russia and China, respectively, are threatening to unleash conflicts that the West would certainly lose short of an all-out nuclear exchange. Admiral Charles Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, has asserted that official American pronouncements on the probability of nuclear war be changed from “not likely” to “very likely.” A slew of anti-war figures, from Tulsi Gabbard to Tucker Carlson to Helga Zepp- LaRouche, have all recently put out dire warnings of the looming threat.
In this context, why are erstwhile progressives now glorifying a congressperson who never met a war she didn’t love? Is it because they themselves hate Donald Trump more than they love truth—or peace?
Sincerely, Doug Mallouk
