It Was Just A Matter Of Time

As much as it has irritated the hell out of me to see Liz Cheney all over my Tee Vee over the past few months spewing invective at President Obama and lying through her teeth to try to keep her dad from going to jail, one of the more amusing side notes has been how many so called "pundits" have rushed to say that she would be some kind of viable political candidate in the future. Nothing about her appearances had suggested that this was the case, in point of fact she has been fact checked so mercilessly as to lead most rational Democrats to HOPE she tries to run for office so she can be publicly humiliated and we can get some measure of retribution for all of the hijinks she is pulling now. But I guess because she is a Republican and she can string a sentence or 50 together without taking a breath this meme persisted and indeed started to gain momentum with the Villagers.

Now for someone like Liz Cheney they are caught in a conundrum. On the one hand she has an almost unquenchable thirst for publicisty now and she wants to be out there as much as they will have her so she can continue her low risk high reward campaign against President Obama. But on the other hand she is also batshit crazy and she as well as her handlers have to know that sooner or later the more she talks the higher the likely hood that some of that crazy is going to slip out. This makes for an interesting balancing act.

Having already noticed this dichotomy it wasn't all that surprising to me last night when reports started trickling out about an appearance that Liz Cheney made on the Larry King Show where she defended the "birthers". Here is how Salon.com's Joan Walsh put it:

After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that's one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a "poor, pathetic" fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because "People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas."

The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney -- which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable.

At the time of that post Walsh did not have a video of the interaction and so I had to rely just on her words. But even just with her characterization to go on I figured this was going to be bad. For one she had finally run up on someone who was way out of her league. What had been so irritating to me about Liz Cheney wasn't just that she was all over cable news, but that she was almost always paired with someone sympathetic to her or at the least someone who was not very confrontational. Because of this she was allowed to say whatever the hell she wanted to without much if any pushback or fact checking on the spot. But you had to know that James Carville wasn't going to go for that.

She also has a bad habit of filibustering with long ass diatribes so that the other party doesn't have time to respond and when they do respond she loves to try to talk over them. Again that wasn't likely to happen with Carville either. I have to believe that she didn't know she would be paired up with him or she wouldn't have shown up. Having finally seen the video, if she ever really had any electoral ambitions its likely that she will forever wish she never did show up.

At first I was a little ticked that I couldn't find the video anywhere but CNN and of course their video is pretty long. But the truth is I think its good to watch her whole appearance unfold as time goes on. Carville is masterful as usual not allowing her to talk over him and by the end of her time on the show Larry King himself is constantly admonishing her about interrupting. Not only that Carville kept pointing out her filibustering that by the end of her appearance Larry King was making note of it too. All in all it was a case study in how any opponent of hers can make her look like an ass and incompetent all at the same time. Oh she brings the same sloganeering as usualy but it falls completely flat when Carville challenges her with fact.

In the end her ridiculous "birther" comments are just the cherry on top, especially when Carville calls her and her party out for encouraginig those whackjobs.



If she ever decides to put her name on the dotted line to run for elected office you can expect more of that kind of EPIC FAIL.