Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is out as Republican conference chair in the House of Representatives. The story has dominated American news outlets over the
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is out as Republican conference chair in the House of Representatives. The story has dominated American news outlets over the past week. Most Americans are probably hard-pressed to care about the story, but to the political press in the United States, the story has mattered deeply. This past Tuesday night, as rockets rained down on Tel Aviv from Gaza, the press was focused on Cheney’s pending ouster, which happened Wednesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, while President Joe Biden was holding a press conference about the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, MSNBC was holding a panel discussion about Cheney and the future of the Republican Party. Chris Cillizza, CNN’s regurgitator of convention hot takes, wrote, “The maneuvering to get Cheney out on Wednesday bodes very poorly for House Republicans.” One would think the House GOP conference chair was an important position. It is not. One would assume Americans care. They do not. To understand the salacious, constant coverage of Cheney by the press, we must venture across the Atlantic to Great Britain and consider an essay by former Prime Minister Tony Blair on the collapse of the global progressive movement generally and his Labour Party in particular. Writing in the New Statesman, Blair notes that Biden won not because of some sweeping progressive agenda but because former President Donald Trump was “considered by centre-ground voters to be uniquely strange and unacceptable in his behaviour.
