The MRC Is Still Taking It Out On Liz Cheney
The Media Research Center raged that Liz Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president -- then tried to parse and explain away Donald Trump's violent rhetoric toward her.
The Media Research Center has had it in for Liz Cheney ever since she grew a conscience and broke from Donald Trump after he incited an insurrection due to his inability to emotionally accept that he lost the 2020 election, then became a member of the congressional committee that investigated the riot. When she reappeared to join her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, in endorsing Kamala Harris, the MRC was back in meltdown mode, insisting that wasn’t news. Alex Christy grumbled in a Sept. 7 post:
PBS News Hour host Geoff Bennett and New York Times columnist David Brooks desperately tried to spin the news that former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Rep. Liz Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris as some profound, potentially game-changing moment in the campaign.
Bennett hyped the elder Cheney’s credentials, “So, Dick Cheney, stalwart conservative, no one can accuse him of being a RINO, Republican in name only. He served, I think, four Republican presidents, if memory serves me correctly. What do you see as the significance of their dual support for Kamala Harris?”
After joking that perhaps Cheney will become a hippy, Brooks declared, “For a lot of Republicans, character comes before policy and I think the Cheneys are among those Republicans and there were a lot of Bush Republicans for whom that was just an article of faith.”
[…]
Every election cycle, some Republicans support the Democrat and vice versa. A Kennedy and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate have endorsed Trump, and the Teamsters’ boss spoke at the RNC, but PBS only focuses on Republicans for Harris because she is their preferred candidate.
Is Christy hyping the Teamsters boss’ endorsement of Trump because Trump is his preferred candidate?
Christy huffed further in a Sept. 19 post:
CBS’s Stephen Colbert might as well rename The Late Show to The Kamala Harris Fan Club because on Wednesday he and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow marveled about how supposedly everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Dick Cheney and from the military to Scientific American loves her.
Christy’s response to this was incredibly lame: “Two can play this game because Trump has a coalition ranging from Tulsi Gabbard to Nikki Haley.” So a Republican and a woman who became a Republican a month later is a “coalition”?
Mark Finkelstein spent an Oct. 4 post cheering that a CNN talking head reinforced the MRC’s not-news narrative:
Q. How do you know that Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris is entirely unlikely to shift the election in any detectable way?
A. When a CNN liberal admits that its impact will likely be limited to “one lady in Wisconsin.”
Those were the surprising words of legal analyst Elliot Williams, who served for eight years in the Obama administration, on today’s CNN This Morning. His remark earned a round of laughter on the panel, though former Biden aide Meghan Hays suggested that “One lady might decide this entire election!”
GOP strategist Matt Gorman was in rare form. Responding to Trump calling Cheney a “stupid war hawk,” Gorman said, “I think that was the name of my college mascot.” He added “I’m not going to pretend that Liz Cheney’s endorsement going to have an effect in this race, except make extremely online liberals feel good about a Republican for once” and granting a “media moment” — because “Republicans attacking other Republicans is going to be catnip for the mainstream media. “
Putting aside the wan hope that the one lady in Wisconsin could end up swinging the whole election to Harris, there was no serious suggestion on the panel that Cheney’s endorsement would have any measurable impact on the election. But it does give media Democrats a reason for good cheer, joy and vibes and all that.
The same day, Jorge Bonilla portrayed the Cheney endorsement as part of a sinister liberal-media plot to show that reasonable people endorse Harris, angry that CBS covered her first appearance with Harris at a rally in Ripon, Wis.:
The Regime Media have developed a Strange New Respect for conservative Republicans of a certain inclination, now that they can be used as rungs on a ladder that leads to Republicans voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. The most prominent of these, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, was prominently featured on the network evening newscasts.
Watch as Norah O’Donnell of the CBS Evening News makes sure to create that permission structure:
[…]
The highlighting of Ripon seems to me to intend to convey conquest, not unlike American troops operating out of Saddam Hussein’s palaces during the Iraq War. Except that in this case, there is no conquest! This whole exercise is merely the Democrats’ unsavory attempt to woo one wing of the Party. This is the same media that, having nicknamed Vice President Dick Cheney “Darth Vader”, now want to turn his daughter Liz into a political Princess Leia. Or, at least, pretend to do so for purposes of political expediency.
In keeping with the January 6th theme, Cordes sprinkled some of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s filing into her report, as did NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez, who at least showed that not all Republicans are impressed by Cheney, and noted her primary blowout loss:
[…]
None of these reports featured anyone questioning how Cheney voting for individuals seeking to impose censorship of “disinformation” defends the Constitution. Those inconsistencies don’t matter. The Regime gets to display the Cheneys in a manner reminiscent of a hunter hanging a 12-pointer’s head above the fireplace.
There was also no one on to warn Cheney that the influence and desirability of this breed of conservative has a limited shelf life, as Adam Kinzinger discovered. Nothing matters but the conquest.
Bonilla didn’t explain why he put “disinformation” in scare quotes. Is he claiming that there is no objective definition of facts and truth? Also, we remember when the MRC had Strange New Respect for Robert Kennedy Jr. when he was running as a Democrat, only for it to quickly dissipatewhen he switched to running as an independent (and, thus, might take votes away from Trump).
Curtis Houck similarly raged about this joint appearance:
On the heels of ABC, CBS, and NBC singing the praises Thursday night of longtime Northern Virginia resident Liz Cheney (who pretends to reside in Wyoming), the same networks also devoted time on their Friday morning news shows to cheering “staunch conservative” Cheney campaigning with Vice President Kamala Harris, calling it “an astonishing sight” and “a major moment” in the election and emblematic of “the difficult choice” Republican voters face.
Unsurprisingly, ABC’s Good Morning America was the most ebullient. Mary Bruce – Disney’s resident North Korean news lady for Democrats – was pathetic:
[…]
Bruce then called Cheney “the most prominent conservative to cross party lines in this race” and “[stood] shoulder to shoulder with Kamala Harris on a mission to convince her fellow Republicans to put country over party.”
Eagerly sharing that Cheney “argu[ed] Trump is a danger to democracy”, Bruce pivoted to Trump’s campaign rally in Michigan, huffing that he “repeat[ed] false assertions about the 2020 election and a series of other subjects.”
The walking Biden-Harris regime tool closed with more approved talking points, gushing “Harris receiv[ed] another notable endorsement” with “Bruce Springsteen offering his support with a similar warning, saying ‘Trump doesn’t understand what it means to be deeply American’” and Barack Obama plans to stump for Harris next week.
Of course, the MRC’s walking Trump-Vance regime tool would say such hateful things. He ended with a stupid rhetorical question: “Exit question for Cheney: If Trump is ‘unprecedented’ in the ‘threat he poses to America, does that mean he’s more dangerous than the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor or, say, the 9/11 hijackers who killed thousands?” Can Houck name another presidential candidate who incited an insurrection because of his anger about losing an election? Didn’t think so.
Of course, Tim Graham spent his Oct. 4 podcast in similar rage:
The network newscasts could hardly restrain themselves from gleefully reporting on special counsel Jack Smith’s latest anti-Trump dump of a document. They dearly loved Liz Cheney, the “hardcore Republican,” campaigning with Harris. But they wouldn’t touch claims that Kamala’s husband Doug Emhoff slapped a girlfriend silly.
Leftist journalists love to define Cheney as a staunch conservative, when no staunch conservative would endorse a candidate who landed to the left of Bernie Sanders during her Senate career.
We’re clearly in October of an election year, because the shamelessness quotient of the double standards is rising. It’s time for dramatic bias by commission against the Republicans, and bias by omission for the Democrats.
Fox News regularly engages in bias by commission against Democrats and bias by omission for Republicans. Why doesn’t Graham ever complain about that?
Cheney also got a mention in an Oct. 5 roundup post by Geoffrey Dickens ranting that “leftist journalists and celebrities ended their summer of hate for the Trump-Vance ticket.”
Bonilla ranted in an Oct. 22 post:
The Regime Media takes delight in exhibiting recently conquered conservatives as role models for others to emulate. Such was the case during Adam Kinzinger’s tearful heyday, but the Regime now has a bigger prize: former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.
As part of her endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, Cheney is touring the country in hopes of wrangling disaffected conservatives over to Harris at events festooned with imagery meant to evoke Reaganite nostalgia. But such conversions require an abandonment of prior deeply-held beliefs. Such is the case with Cheney and abortion, which the networks gleefully featured.
Watch as CBS’s Nancy Cordes highlights Cheney’s battlefield conversion and subsequent ditching of the unborn in furtherance of “conserving conservatism”:
[…]
These “Country Over Party” town halls occupied much of today’s pillow-soft coverage of the Harris campaign with two weeks to go until Election Day, seeking to cast her as magnanimous and welcoming towards any Republicans who, like Cheney, are willing to offer some of their most deeply held beliefs upon the altar of Regime acceptance.
By contrast, the MRC had virtually nothing to say when Trump arguably sold out the unborn when he ordered the Republicans to tone down opposition to abortion in the party platform, offering those once deeply held beliefs upon the alter of Trump loyalty.
The same day, Mark Finkelstein groused about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s support of Cheney:
So let’s do a little thought experiment. What if, by some miracle, Liz Cheney had won the Republican nomination? And if that is too far-fetched, what if Nikki Haley, or, say, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, John Thune, or even Mitt Romney, were the Republican nominee?
Would Joe Scarborough, great Kirkian conservative that he is, be supporting that Republican candidate today?
We’ll never know. But we can make a reasonably-educated guess. Scarborough knows which side his bread is buttered on.
As does Finkelstein.
Trump’s violent rhetoric
But when Donald Trump made disparaging remarks about Cheney that could be perceived as a threat, the MRC scrambled to keep from turning Cheney into a victim. Nicholas Fondacaro rushed to defend Trump in a Nov. 1 post:
So desperate was CNN to make something stick against former President Trump in the last few days of the election, they spent much of their Friday newscasts peddling the false claims that he threated Liz Cheney with a firing squad. Host Jake Tapper got more than he bargained for on The Lead, when Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty confronted him over his network’s “distortion” of Trump’s comments, even calling out their political motivations.
“Are you comfortable with the part of what he said when he talked about the guns trained on her face, nine barrels shooting at her?” Tapper ridiculously asked Hagerty.
Hagerty tried to simplify Trump’s argument so even a CNN journalist could understand, explaining how war hawks like the Cheneys don’t see the horrific consequences of the wars they promote[.] […]
In a pathetic attempt to protect CNN, Taper proclaimed: “You know, we ran the clip, we ran the whole clip. And we’re not saying he’s calling for her to be assassinated or killed.”
But that was a BIE LIE [sic]. Earlier in the day, during Inside Politics, host Dana Bash described Trump’s comments as “very, very violent imagery of her facing guns and an assassination” (Clip included in video and isolated here).
Tapper proceeded to play dumb about how they were willingly taking part in a Democratic hoax about the nature and meaning of Trump’s comments; and played dumber about the Cheneys’ hawkish attitudes on war:
Christy called on Bill Maher to push an anti-media spin in a Nov. 2 post:
HBO’s Bill Maher scolded the media on Friday’s edition of Real Time Overtime for their claims that Donald Trump called for former Rep. Liz Cheney to be shot. Maher’s rebuke was not out of any love for Trump, but a demand that the media not “lie to me” because the real context of Trump’s actual remarks was something that “hippies used to say.”
[…]
People can have their own opinions on the merits of Trump’s and Cheney’s respective foreign policy views, but it is the media’s job to tell the truth about what Trump said and let the voters decide for themselves.
Christy whined in a different post that day:
During Friday’s edition of CBS Mornings, White House correspondent Nancy Cordes falsely accused Donald Trump of musing “about executing Liz Cheney” the previous night. Not only did Cordes pervert Trump’s words, she used the misrepresentation to claim that they affirm Kamala Harris’s argument that “he is a wannabe autocrat bent on revenge.”
Before Cordes’s report, there was correspondent Kris Van Cleave, who introduced a clip of Trump’s remarks, “Campaigning in Arizona, former President Donald Trump hurled insults at politicians and directed this violent rhetoric at former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has endorsed vice president Kamala Harris.”
That “violent rhetoric” was actually Trump’s claim that “she’s a radical warhawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
The great irony in all of this is that Trump is employing the chickenhawk argument that liberals used to make against the Cheneys. Still, Van Cleave added, “Cheney responded this morning in a post on X writing, ‘This is how dictators destroy free nations, they threaten those who speak out against them with death.’”
Jeffrey Lord used his Nov. 2 column to defend Trump and bash the media:
The meaning was not only plain but common. His point — and it is a point heard well beyond the Cheneys over the decades, and often at Dick “Five Deferments” Cheney when he was vice president — is that war hawk Liz Cheney sits comfortably in Washington or Wyoming while wanting to send American kids off to combat, condemning them to death or disfigurement at the hands of a violent enemy. Yet never going herself. The point is one of the oldest in American politics when potential or actual war is on the horizon.
[…]
There was not a word of truth to the idea that Trump had advocated that “Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.” Liz Cheney herself accepted the lie and replied “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death.”
It would be one thing if all of this were an accidental one-off from a mainstream liberal media that mysteriously heard the entire tape of what Trump said and somehow didn’t hear him accurately.
But alas, mainstream liberal media bias — and not just toward Trump but on more topics than one can count — is as common as rain in a hurricane.
Lord (and Trump) ignored the fact that Cheney is no longer a sitting member of Congress, meaning that she is not currently “sitting comfortably in Washington or Wyoming while wanting to send American kids off to combat” — making Trump’s attack nonsensical. Still, Clay Waters had a narrative to advance in his Nov. 3 post:
It’s an intriguing parallel: Father and daughter Republican political figures Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, insulted as warmongers and chicken hawks by different political parties, twenty years apart. But the coverage in the New York Times from 2004 and 2024 couldn’t have been more different.
When Donald Trump attacked Republican turned Kamala Harris supporter Liz Cheney as a “radical warhawk,” he was clearly, in his own crude way, making the same anti-war “chicken-hawk, warmonger!” argument that self-righteous liberals spluttered during the Second Persian Gulf launched by George W. Bush in 2003 – the idea that politicians who advocate for wars without having fought themselves are contemptible, or should volunteer to fight themselves.
Waters tried to defend Trump’s purported anti-war bona fides in another Nov. 3 post:
PBS entered the last weekend before Election Day maintaining the deceitful form in which it has covered the race for the last two years, joining the rest of the press in spreading the same anti-Trump lie just four days before the vote.
[…]
Trump, who made his anti-Iraq War views clear earlier in the talk with Carlson, went on to say, “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in the nice buildings saying ‘Oh gee well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.”
In fact, Trump was an early supporter of the Iraq war and didn’t criticize it until 18 months after it started.
Again: Who, exactly, is Cheney sending to war? Nobody. Nevertheless, Bonilla proclaimed all of this to be a “hoax” (as he is prone to do):
The Washington Post’s owner Jeff Bezos was absolutely right when he said that Americans don’t trust the news media. One of many reasons why the public no longer trust the Regime Media is because of their insistence in repeating Democrat-friendly narratives that spring forth from online video clips that are stripped of context.
Case in point, what is now known as The Cheney Hoax. During a recent town hall with Tucker Carlson, former President Donald Trump mused about how a “war hawk” such as Liz Cheney might feel were the guns pointed toward her, and were she to deal with the consequences of having to go wars she (and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney) are all too willing to start.
This is the standard “chickenhawk” argument we’ve heard since Vietnam and, most recently, during the runup to Operation Iraqi Freedom. “Fortunate Son” in plain Trumpspeak, which becomes obvious to reasonable individuals, regardless of their position on American foreign policy, once the statement is played in its full context.
However, that is not what happened. Democrat operatives and their allies in the media seized (or pounced, if you will) on the partial clip and howled that Trump threatened political violence against Liz Cheney. What’s worse, they continued doing so even after the full video emerged online.
The Regime Media lied, and continue to lie with the presidential election less than two days away. Watch as the Regime Media’s Sunday political affairs shows all continued to showcase the partial clip as proof evident of violent rhetoric, compared to the remarks in their full context[.]
Finkelstein bashed Scarborough again in a Nov. 4 post:
For his part, Scarborough twice recycled the lie to which he had devoted endless airtime last week. As he put it today, Trump “called to have Liz Cheney shot by a firing squad.” That lie has been so thoroughly debunked by people across the political spectrum, that it took a special kind of Scarborough shamelessness to mouth it again today.
In another post that day, Joseph Vazquez whined that “NBC drummed up fake outrage on the pseudo-scandal involving former President Donald Trump’s so-called ‘violent rhetoric’ against and NeverTrump former Rep. Liz Cheney. Trump jabbed at ‘war hawk,’ Cheney, asking how she might feel if the guns were pointed toward her in a war? How would she deal with the consequences of wars that her and her father — former Vice President Dick Cheney — have pushed for? Rather, NBC, along with ABC and CBS for that matter, pushed disinformation suggesting Trump was threatening political violence.”
Fondacaro joined in the whining:
On the eve of Election Day, the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View were so confident in Vice President Kamala Harris that they spent a good portion of it begging Republicans to vote Democratic. They even trotted out rejected former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney to try to appeal to them. Moderator Whoopi Goldberg even floated their guest as the next attorney general of the United States, and possibly the director of the FBI or CIA.
Since facts don’t matter to ABC and they needed Harris to win the election, Sunny Hostin pushed the already debunked hoax the liberal media cooked up last week claiming former President Trump called her Cheney to face a firing squad.
In reality, an honest showing of the full context (which The View didn’t do) proves Trump was talking about war hawks like Cheney not being witness to the wars they support, and how her opinion would change if she was there.
Graham had Bonilla on his Nov. 4 podcast to talk about it:
We also address all the claims Trump wants Liz Cheney dead, and Liz said this is how “dictators” talk. On Sunday, CBS Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked: “Will the gender gap widen with Trump’s sexist comments and his violent rhetoric like this mention of Liz Cheney?’ Meet the Press host Kristen Welker echoed: “Plus, violent threats. Donald Trump suggests sending Liz Cheney to war and says she should have guns trained on her face.”
Again: All these MRC writers refused to admit the obvious fact that Cheney is no longer in Congress and has absolutely no power to send soldiers into war. Also: The MRC’s sudden concern with words being placed in context is quite entertaining, given how it got years of outraged postsout of stripping the context away from President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark. And there was absolutely no discussion about Trump embracing the “chickenhawk” argument despite it being used against Republican politicians for decades.