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August 24, 2022

Much has been written about Liz Cheney and her motivations for blowing up her congressional career over a seemingly psychotic obsession with Donald Trump.  But there are aspects to the analyses that are missing the larger point that Cheney was not motivated by high principles and a quest to save our country.  She was motivated by hatred, self-interest, and vengeance.

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In a Wall Street Journal column entitled “I Don’t Donate to Politicians, but I Will to Liz Cheney,” frequent contributor Joseph Epstein displayed his anti-Trump bias through a vapid argument about Cheney’s “principled stance against Trump,” jumping to conclusions based on meaningless anecdotes and unsubstantiated inferences about Cheney’s motivations for her self-interested positions.  Although he never met Cheney, Epstein justified his conclusions on his “pleasant history” with her parents.

Unlike Epstein, I have met Liz Cheney (and her parents) and have a actual basis on which to question her ethics and political motivations.

After I sat next to her at a luncheon about a year into Obama’s first term, she invited me to an intimate and private dinner with two of George W. Bush’s former national security advisers.  The four of us spent several hours discussing Iran, Iraq, al-Qaeda, and Israel, and it was clear that Cheney was preparing to launch her political career, for which she had high aspirations.  She asked me to write a white paper on why Israel is a strategic asset to the United States and offered to pay me $2,000 for my product.  I spent one month thoroughly researching the 6,000-word paper, which was edited by a highly respected former NSA official, foreign policy expert, journalist, and conservative thinker. 

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After receiving the final paper from both of us in separate emails, Cheney never responded.  She went completely MIA.  To this day, I have no idea if she ever used the paper in her campaign or work in Congress.  She never thanked me, never paid me, and never reached out to me again.  I would call that rude, unprofessional, and certainly unethical.  It showed a lack of character and morals, but it also showed hubris — the kind we often see from politicians like Obama and Hillary, who not only believe themselves above the law, but believe they are entitled to their power and the rest of us are here to serve them.

What Epstein and others who blindly believe that Cheney is motivated by upstanding morality and principles are missing is that Trump Derangement Syndrome, from which she clearly suffers, is a psychological illness.  It has led to formerly sane, smart, respectable individuals flying off the handle into irrelevance and disreputability while they pursue destructive and delusional agendas motivated by animus and hate.

Cheney’s former colleague at the Emergency Committee for Israel, Bill Kristol, whom I also had met and spoken with many times prior to his TDS, and the destruction of The Weekly Standard as a direct result, is another example.  When Cheney and Kristol founded ECI in 2010, their message was that the Obama/Biden policies presented an emergency that required immediate attention in order to help Israel survive in the face of a dangerous U.S. administration.  A decade later, these same individuals supported Biden in 2020 despite his record on Israel and obsession with joining a nuclear deal with an Iranian regime that continually threatens Israel’s annihilation.

Did Biden’s danger to Israel simply vanish, or did TDS blind Cheney to the real dangers facing our country and our allies?  For Cheney, the emergency committee on Israel morphed into the emergency committee to destroy Trump, who she now claims presents the greatest danger to our republic.  And we’re supposed to take her seriously.

Never mind the axis of Russia, China, and Iran taking hold across the world (following our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan), threatening our national security.  Who cares about fatwas issued against former Trump officials who are no longer safe without being surrounded by Secret Service.  Biden handing Iran nuclear weapons (and $1 trillion!) in the midst of all of this is no longer a concern for Cheney.  A woke military that can no longer recruit soldiers at required levels, let alone maintain its readiness to fight our enemies as Democrats continue to weaken its strength and resolve, is small potatoes for this congresswoman singularly obsessed with destroying the former president. 

Never mind our open southern border, where drug- and human-traffickers, warlords, terrorists, and millions of illegal aliens are flying across, setting us up for more 9/11s; crime on our streets; fentanyl overdoses; tent cities; and taxes required to pay for all of the free stuff and services provided to noncitizens.  Cheney does not see a threat to our nation from all of this.