The Media Research Center’s rage at Liz Cheney for leaving the Trump plantation over his incitement of the Capitol riot continued on other issues as well. Jorge 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. 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 ruashe 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:
Alex 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.
Again: Who, exactly, is Cheney sending to war? Nobody. Nevertheless, Jorge 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.”
NIcholas 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.
Tim 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 posts out 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.