The real big lie: You can’t question elections

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…

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…

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…

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…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.