The liberal backlash against Liz Cheney is well underway

Well, that didn’t take long.

Liz Cheney, the Republican who sacrificed her seat in Congress for her country, who stood nearly alone among conservatives in defiance of Donald Trump, has begun to provoke the murmurings of ... wait for it ... Democrats.

Yes, Democrats. The American left.

The mighty rampart of liberal support for Cheney has already formed some serious cracks.

A few liberals, well actually quite a few, are offended by all the fuss their fellow lefties are making over Cheney.

“This is not the savior of democracy,” said Sunny Hostin, liberal co-host of ABC-TV’s “The View,” in a stormy mood.

“She’s a wealthy woman. She comes from a wealthy family. How brave is it to go against democracy if you’re going to lose your job?”

The backlash against Liz Cheney was inevitable

Some of us saw this coming.

I wrote a column headlined, “Enjoy Liz Cheney while you can, Democrats. One day you’ll hate her.”

A soothsayer, you say? No. This was easy. This was inevitable.

I’ve been around Democrats long enough to understand the essential nature of the most ardent among them.

Another view: What to do now with 'hot mess' that is the GOP?

They’re fanatics.

I knew Liz Cheney would never be pure enough for the true believers who have made liberalism their holy grail, their new religion. They are what Commentary magazine’s Noah Rothman calls “The New Puritans,” in a new book out this summer.

You’d expect that from Rothman; he’s a #NeverTrump conservative.

'We're the fun-suckers now,' Maher says

But liberals like Bill Maher have grown weary of the rising pieties on the left, the kind of self-righteous haughtiness once reserved for Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson on the Religious Right.

It’s all too nauseating, says Maher. His party has become the one that “sucks the fun out of everything.”

“Once upon a time the Right were offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and black lists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Now that’s us. We’re the fun-suckers now. We suck the fun out of everything: Halloween, the Oscars, childhood, twitter, comedy.”

The Liz Cheney lovefest.

A high-profile Republican from a dynastic Republican family has scooched over to Democrats’ side of the aisle, pointed back at her fellow Republicans and shouted, “You’re wrong!”

And what do Democrats and their liberal allies do?

They kvetch.

It's not enough to stand up to Trump

“Liz Cheney is still a right-wing fascist, she’s just not a populist so it looks different,” tweeted Nina Turner, a Democratic former member of the Ohio State Senate. “She still believes in suppressing people’s votes, destroying bodily autonomy & is pro-war. She just didn’t care for the insurrection attempt.”

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones writes, “If not for Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the election, she would still be backing him.”

Murphy seemed to savor Cheney’s electoral defeat in Wyoming. “Perhaps her fate might also be a lesson to the aspiring public servants out there – that the movement you cynically stoke might someday come for you, too.”

Charles Blow, a liberal columnist at The New York Times, was also having none of it.

“I have no intention of contributing to the hagiography of Liz Cheney. She is a rock-ribbed Republican who supported Trump’s legislative positions 93 percent of the time. It is on the insurrection and election lies where she diverged.

“In a way, she is the Elvis of politics: She took something – in this case a position – that others had held all along and made it cross over. She mainstreamed a political principle that many liberals had held all along.

“Excuse me if I temper my enthusiasm for a person who presents herself as a great champion of democracy but votes against the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.”

Democrats' love is extremely conditional

Shun her!

Peter Kalmus, climate scientist and high-profile leftist, picked up his torch:

“The love-fest liberals are having over Cheney is gross. Yes, she’s anti-Trump. She’s also a climate denier, against voting rights, against abortion rights, against health care rights, against taxing the rich, pro-wall building, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-bombing innocent people.”

Banish her!

“This is why y’all can save all that Liz Cheney is a hero s---,” tweeted leftist sportscaster Jemele Hill. “Basically if Trump wasn’t a walking felon, she was completely cool with his bigotry, and misogyny.”

Burn the heretic!

When Olivia Julianna, Democrat and political strategy coordinator for Gen-Z for Change, learned Cheney might run for president, she wrote:

“No more of that ‘I’d vote for Liz’ nonsense. ‘She can beat Trump!’ Yeah well Joe Biden DID. He is our president and it is asinine to assume that Liz Cheney would be better fit to run our country when her voting record is abysmal.”

In my column last week, I had written that “the love of Democrats is conditional. Conditional in the extreme.”

GOP hasn't cornered the market on ignorance

Here’s an example from Eddie Vale, Democratic strategist, reacting to Liz Cheney:

“If she actually wants to run and try to win – either a Republican primary or in the general as an independent – the people telling her to do this are delusional and/or handcuffed to a green room installed on an Acela (high-speed) train,” Vale told The Hill newspaper.

“‘If her goal is to stop Trump, and is running to be a human wrecking ball every day to his dishonesty and assault on Democracy while in the primary, that is of course helpful,’ Vale said, with a caveat: ‘If she then encourages anyone who doesn’t support Trump to vote for Biden in the general election.’”

Or else what?

Or else she’ll get the back of Democrats’ hand.

When Donald Trump in 2016 won the Nevada Republican Primary, he exulted, “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated.

“I love the poorly educated,” he said.

This reinforced Democrats’ positive image of themselves as the smart ones, the educated, the people of science and reason and advanced degrees.

And how do the fanatics on the left express all this high learning?

They slap away any conservative who for a moment agrees with them.

A reminder that Republicans haven’t cornered the market on ignorami.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Liz Cheney learns if you agree with Democrats you'll pay a price