Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio was aggressively competing to be the most interview spot for Liz Cheney on Monday's Morning Edition. Anchor Leila Fadel was every bit as promotional as say, Asma Khalid was with Kamala Harris a year ago. Cheney is now in the pantheon of Democrat heroes. The headline was a typical repetition of Liz's message:
Democracy is at stake if Trump is reelected, Liz Cheney warns in her new book
Fadel surely enjoyed the idea of ripping House Republicans as spineless traitors to the Constitution:
LEILA FADEL: Now, you don't hold back in this book. You name names. Former speaker Kevin McCarthy comes off as a hypocrite and a coward. You write that he told you Trump knew he'd lost the election. And yet McCarthy repeats these lies and ends up publicly defending the president after the attack on the Capitol. You also write about current speaker Mike Johnson, also an election denier. You say he was easily swayed by flattery from Trump, and you criticize their cowardice, the party's cowardice. Why was it important for you to call out party leadership by name in this moment?
Cheney claimed Johnson was oh so destructive:
CHENEY: And Mike played a particularly destructive role. He claimed to be a constitutional lawyer. He claimed to be somebody who was committed to the rule of law and then time and time again, really did ignore the rulings of the courts and made assertions to our colleagues that were not supported by the facts or by the law or by the Constitution. And the story of the role that he played, I felt, was a very important one to tell, even, you know, before he was in a role of prominence that he is now.
And I think that history really has to be informed by specific individuals and by people understanding that it doesn't take very much, tragically and frankly, in a way that I find heartbreaking. It didn't take much for people to decide that they were going to ignore the most fundamental obligation, I believe, elected officials have.
Fadel asked small, facilitating questions to let Cheney spool out her story of the rotting of the Republicans: "What was it that stripped away that unanimity [after January 6]?" And: "What's at stake here for the country?" Then came the obligatory question about if she's a Republican, which nobody should imagine at this point, not with how the liberal media are spoon-feeding her:
LEILA FADEL: The Republican Party is in your blood, right? I mean, the daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president. In the book, you describe a lot of towering figures in the Republican Party from the generation before you and your current generation. You still describe yourself as a conservative with these conservative values. But are you a Republican?
LIZ CHENEY: I am certainly not a Trump Republican. I think that the Republican Party as it exists today is dangerous to the country. I think that we have to work to rebuild a conservative party. And I don't know whether that means that, you know, the Republican Party, which has gone so far down this path of a cult of personality, whether it can come back or whether we will need to build a new party, another - you know, a party that truly stands for conservative values.
She also asked if she might run for president, and drew the usual deferral. NPR also made a video for YouTube:
