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The Real Big Lie: You Can't Question Elections
COMMENTARY
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By Frank Miele
May 24, 2021
The Real Big Lie: You Can't Question Elections
(AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades)
Liz Cheney doesn’t get to decide what is true for the rest of us; neither, as hard as it is for some of them to believe, do the media pundits and philosopher-kings whom our society breeds like rats in a junkyard.
But they sure do try, and for the most part they have gotten away with it for decades.
Cheney has become the darling of the oligarchs the last several months because she first voted to impeach Donald Trump and because she then elected to condemn the Republican Party for disagreeing with her.
Cheney, the lone Wyoming representative in Congress, has deemed herself the conscience of the GOP. Of course, what is obvious is that she is the latest in a long line of self-appointed saviors of the party who believe the way to save the village is to first destroy it.
Her pretend friends in the media take offense when Cheney is described as a traitor, but anyone who still thinks the Republican Party stands for something fundamental and principled certainly is within their rights to question her loyalty, as her obsession with destroying Donald Trump and excising the 75 million Americans who voted for him has only one effect — to give aid and comfort to the Democrat Party and to its agenda of transforming America into a post-constitutional Marxist regime.
Listen to her preening speech the night before she was stripped of her title as chair of the House Republican caucus:
"We must speak the truth. Our election was not stolen. And America has not failed. Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy. This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans. Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president's crusade to undermine our democracy."
Cheney’s arrogance is only exceeded by her ignorance. The only truth is Cheney’s truth, which just so happens to coincide with the Democrats’ truth. “Our duty as Americans” is apparently to accept election results without question, and to sacrifice our rights and responsibilities on the altar of the “rule of law.” But despite her certainty that the 2020 election was not stolen, many of us remain unconvinced. According to Cheney and her media champions, we are being deceived by the former president. Apparently, it is impossible for the elitist establishmentarian to conceive of an electorate that thinks for itself.
There have always been politicians like Liz Cheney, those who see their role as protecting the people from themselves, but it is a much more recent phenomenon for the media to take the side of politicians over the people, and in particular to accept the word of politicians without testing it against the evidence. The Watergate break-in’s connection to President Nixon never would have been discovered if the media were as obeisant to authority then as they appear to be now, but there is virtually no mainstream reporter who has done a deep dive into the many anomalies that marred the last election.
What we have instead are dutiful pundits who parrot the official party line of Democrats and call it journalism. They never tire of repeating the provocation that this was the most secure election in American history. You can read their mournful condemnations of Trump and anyone who still believes in him virtually every day at RealClearPolitics and other political websites.
At the heart of every such story or column lies one fundamental fact — the authors were too lazy (or too biased) to investigate the evidence of a corrupt political process for themselves. It’s as if they had never heard of Watergate, or the alleged weapons of mass destruction that justified a deadly invasion of Iraq, or the Steele dossier. Last week, I read one such condemnation of Trump — and paean to St. Cheney — by an author who should have known better.
Elizabeth Drew covered Watergate, and hundreds of other stories of political and government malfeasance, in a long and celebrated career as someone with a reputation for objectivity and common sense. I grew up watching her on PBS and “Meet the Press” and thought I could trust her to keep her head when others were losing theirs. But it turned out that Drew was more in love with Washington than with her job. When Donald Trump came into office on a pledge to rip the guts out of the bureaucratic Deep State that was auctioning off our American heritage, she instinctively sided with the politicians over the man she called bombastic, crude, and “manifestly unprepared” to be president.
Her lengthy list of articles attacking Trump was unknown to me at the time I read her recent column, but the title of her new piece told me everything I needed to know about Drew’s politics: “The Big Lie and Its Consequences.” The teaser declared that “By questioning the very integrity of America's electoral system, [the Republican Party] now represents an open threat to the U.S. constitutional order.”
Talk about a Catch-22! If you fear that someone is tampering with elections, you are a threat to the Constitution, but if you actually are tampering with elections, you have nothing to worry about because those who figure it out will be denounced as enemies of the Constitution. That’s a sweet deal for the bad guys.
Still I plowed on, hoping that this childhood hero of mine wasn’t completely out of touch with reality. That hope was dashed by the second paragraph when Drew informed a gullible public that “the U.S. constitution’s promise and central premise — that the people elect the president — has never been totally fulfilled.” I have two issues with that sentence. First, Drew and/or her editors lower-cased “Constitution,” which gives some suggestion of how low a view they hold of that remarkable document. Second, what bizarre theory is she advancing when she claims that popular election of the president is the “central premise” of the Constitution?
That proposition does not exist in the Constitution, not even as a “promise,” and certainly not as a “central premise.” It is well known – Drew certainly knows it -- that the nation’s Founders feared the results of allowing direct election of the chief executive, and installed the Electoral College as a protective mechanism to guard against demagogues and democratic (small d) mobs.
So here we have Elizabeth Drew, who can’t even tell the truth about a basic historic fact, scolding millions of Americans for supposedly promoting a “Big Lie” because we have questions about what happened on Nov. 3, 2020. The underlying assumption of Drew’s column, like that of all the columns that paint Trump as the author of the so-called Big Lie, is that election fraud is impossible, and that therefore anyone who tries to prove it is a fraud or worse. In Drew’s case, this is not a guess. She admits it:
“To question the veracity of the official election result is to undermine the assumption of the integrity of the election system.”
To me, that sounds like top-down Soviet-style orthodoxy. But that is what the Democrats and their fawning phalanx in the media most passionately desire. In their perfect world, they talk and the rest of us just shut up and listen. Or even better, we are supposed to dutifully embrace the party line and become true believers like Liz Cheney. Free thought and free speech be damned.
Drew ends her column by invoking the “rule of law” as her presumed ally, just as Cheney did in her speech to Congress. But Drew makes it clear that for her, the rule of law is nothing but the yoke of subservience. For her, “democracy cannot succeed without voluntary cooperation, trust and restraint.” What she doesn’t grasp is that the same can be said much more accurately about dictatorship.
The real Big Lie is that America is great because Americans are obedient. In fact, America is great because Americans are independent, rebellious and rowdy — just like Donald Trump. “Voluntary cooperation” be damned. Let the evidence speak for itself, and let the people make up their own minds. We certainly don’t need Liz Cheney and Elizabeth Drew to tell us what to think.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Parler @HeartlandDiary.
The Real Big Lie: You Can't Question Elections
