Last Friday, I landed in beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to speak at a pro-life summit. The summit organizers had kindly dispatched a van to transport a number of us from the airport, and a U.S. congressman who happened to be on the same arriving flight hopped on to hitch a ride. The congressman, a conservative, was actually not in town for the pro-life summit; as I learned when he sat next to me, he was in town to campaign against his House colleague and Jan. 6-obsessed would-be martyr for “democracy,” Rep. Liz Cheney (RINO-WY).
Turns out the campaigning congressman’s efforts were not in vain: On Tuesday evening, Republican primary voters in Wyoming absolutely walloped Cheney and nominated her leading challenger, the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman. In this sparsely populated deep-red state, the Republican primary doubles as the de facto general election. Hageman can thus book her ticket to Washington, come January. The housebroken faux-conservative Cheney, on the other hand, will be looking for a new gig. CNN hostess comes to mind.
Cheney’s shellacking in Tuesday’s Republican congressional primary in the Equality State comes a little less than three months after a similar landslide in the Lone Star State. On May 24, the Republican primary runoff between incumbent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and challenger George P. Bush, the state’s land commissioner, was shockingly one-sided: Paxton routed Bush by a roughly 68%-32% margin. Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and George P. Bush, son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and nephew of former President George W. Bush, thus both lost their Republican primaries this year by nearly 40 points.
Texas and Wyoming Republican voters, by eye-opening margins, have dealt thumping death blows to the Bush and Cheney political dynasties. (Perhaps Cheney is solipsistic enough to mount a 2024 presidential bid, a truly masochistic endeavor in which she would have precisely zero chance of victory.) But the even bigger and more important coup de grace is not that for any specific individual — or, indeed, for any particular family dynasty. Rather, the crucial symbolic death blow is that for the effete, country club Republicanism and swashbuckling neoconservatism represented by the Bush-Cheney era. The tremendous defeats this year of Liz Cheney and George P. Bush, scions of neoconservative family royalty, at the hands of two Trump-backed primary opponents, represent a clarion plea from the Republican rank and file: “We will not go back to the old, pre-Trump era.”
Good.
After President Donald Trump’s narrow defeat in the hotly contested 2020 election, many in the housebroken GOP establishment began quietly pushing the party to reject all the substantive departures from sclerotic orthodoxy that Trump’s presidency entailed, to whitewash his myriad accomplishments from the history books and to revert to the “principled loserdom” status quo ante of John McCain and Mitt Romney. But Trump’s generally sustained success in Republican primary contests this year, outside some blips on the radar, evinces the folly of such Beltway conceit. The demolitions of no less establishment figures than those literally named “Bush” and “Cheney,” especially given the latter’s lofty perch in the petty and vindictive Jan. 6 “select committee” witch hunt, only accentuates the key point: The “New Right,” a sweeping amalgamation of nationalist and conservative-populist sentiment, whose propitious rise has served as a rebuke to the overly “liberal” conservatism of yesteryear, is here to stay.
There will be no going back to the old, feckless, moralistic nation-building crusades of decades past. There will be no going back to the old, neoliberal-inspired free trade absolutism that outsourced entire supply chains to our Chinese geopolitical archfoe, dramatically undercutting America’s industrial resilience. There will be no going back to the old, pro-Fortune 500 immigration agenda of open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens and mass visas for all sorts of foreign nationals. There will be no going back to the old, corporatist economic agenda of prioritizing corporate and capital gains tax cuts while working-class families struggle to raise their kids on a single income. There will be no more focusing on libertarian economics, the donor class’s policy hobbyhorse, to the exclusion of those “nasty,” “icky” cultural issues that animate the GOP’s actual voter base.
Republican presidential primary voters in two years will likely have an opportunity to decide whether the party’s future is best represented by Trump himself, on the one hand, or some variation of conservative-populist “Trumpism without Trump,” on the other hand. But those remain the only two games in town. There will be no going back to the pre-2016 “dead consensus” — except perhaps in the fever dream monologues of Liz Cheney’s impending CNN show.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Good riddance to both !!
Now if we could just do the same to the clintons, pelosis and the rest…
sol·ip·sis·tic
ADJECTIVE
1. very self-centered or selfish:
“their solipsistic belief that only their cares are the ones of any importance” ·
• philosophy
relating to the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.
Remember that word,,,burn it into your brain if tempted to vote Democrat, the party of the secular self-god who seeks to get the most out of what they can while alive, in a life they perceive as a finite, soulless, ending in death life, that requires they take for themselves all that they can from others by any means necessary, with no worries of accountability in the next life they can no longer perceive, having killed conscience, the very vehicle God speaks to them with.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”,,,,,,but always watch out for the thorns.
Looking at the current status of the Bush and Cheney family trees of diminished DNA,, George P. Bush is no WWII Fighter pilot George H.W.,, but Liz is definitely a Service dodging ****.
We the U.S.A. need to rid our government and all forms of authority of the treasonous, unethical, destructive, socialist Democrat Party and their RINOs and their “Woke” insanity. Just look at the damage the Democrat Party, their puppet president and their RINOs have done to our country in just 20 months. And This Biden administration has already imported and is supporting 5 Million Illegal Immigrants. They are allowing the illegal immigrants to use their arrest papers and/or their deportation papers as a valid ID to get on flights to wherever they want to go in the U.S.. ..will this treasonous Democrat Party also allow these illegal immigrants to use their arrest papers and/or their deportation papers as a valid ID to VOTE??
The U.S. only has 1.2 million people in all branches of the U.S. Military. But this Democrat Party has imported and is supporting over 5 Million illegal immigrants with our tax dollars. No wonder why the Democrat party approved of hiring 87,000 more IRS political police agents.
You can bet NOT A ONE OF THOSE AGENTS will be used to go AFTER ALL THE Illegal invaders that are tax cheats.
Good. Works for me.
A door that needed to close.
Neither the Cheney or Bush family is relevant anymore in terms of national politics. But there certainly are some emerging RINOs that are appearing like previously hidden sunken boats in a dried up sea. It seems that the movement of true conservatism is exposing people like John Cornyn, whose recent voting decisions makes it seem they are enjoying the benefits of “The Swamp” more than we knew.