Berl Falbaum
Media rehabilitation can do wonders for a political career and character building.
Just ask the following four: Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney; former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin; former White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews; and former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson. (For this column I will refer to the latter three as one with the letters GMH.)
Given their uncompromising criticism of Trump, they have become heroes in the media, and long forgotten are the parts they played in making Trump Trump. Never mind that they helped spread tens of thousands of lies, covered up unending corruption and incompetence, or that these women turned a blind eye to his perverse sexual history. All is forgiven and forgotten.
When ABC’s Jonathan Karl recently interviewed GMH, he gave the word “fawning” an entirely new meaning. The only thing he did not do during the interview was shine their shoes.
Let’s turn to specifics and we’ll begin with Cheney, who recently published “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” (Little, Brown and Company, December 2023).
If you follow politics there is nothing new in the book. Yes, there are “revelatory” details behind some events we’re familiar with but they are relatively meaningless.
As a “memoir” it suffers somewhat from amnesia. However, her warning, to be fair, is loud and clear.
She minces no words on what a second presidency would mean to this country. It would be the end of democracy. If I have any criticism on this part of the book, it is very repetitious; she issues the warning over and over again. Maybe that’s what’s needed.
As to the amnesia. Sadly, she does not address her support of Trump from his first candidacy through his failed effort to win a second term. She voted for him in 2016 and again in 2020 and supported his policies more than 90 percent of the time.
Perhaps most indicting, she voted against the first impeachment and as head of GOP “messaging” on the issue, called the hearings “shameful.”
In her book, she is silent on all of this when, perhaps a page or two stating “I was wrong” would have been welcome and redemptive.
GMH are no less guilty of complicity with Trump and Trumpism. All three played major roles as enablers.
Griffin finally had it after Trump’s lies about winning the 2020 election, resigning on December 4, 2020. Matthews resigned the day of the January 6 insurrection.
Hutchinson, however, remained in her job even after January 6, explaining she still felt “loyalty” to Trump. Now sit down: Then she applied for a job with Trump when the former president returned to Mar-a-Lago. She wasn’t hired.
She, of course, became the heroine of heroines because of her testimony before the January 6 committee. Thus, consider me unkind, but might Karl have asked her (among many other questions):
“If the former President had hired you at Mar-a-Lago post-January 6, would you have testified?”
I am going to go out on a limb — way, way out and venture: I don’t think so.
To paint a clearer picture of my concerns, let’s try this analogy: Cheney and GMH are members of a street gang that engages in robberies, burglaries, carjackings and car thefts but one day, the gang commits a crime they abhor. They leave the gang.
Would we hold them up as paragons of virtue, integrity, and honesty? Would be pay them five-figure stipends to speak on the importance of values and ethics? Would we give them contracts to write books? (Hutchinson authored, “Enough” with her portrait on the cover.) Would we invite them to analyze the world of crime and their former colleagues in the underworld?
Yes, they deserve some credit for seeing the light even if it was somewhat late. But consider the following: What if Cheney, GMH, former Republican Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who became a vocal Trump critic, Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who voted for impeachment both times, and all the other Trump officials who testified before the January 6 committee, had joined to stop Trump right after he rode down that golden elevator in 2015? There was no question about who or what he was -- a corrupt, pathological lying demagogue who does not have a decent cell in his body. What if they had spoken out when it could have made a difference?
One man did: former Republican Arizona Senator Jeff Flake. Knowing his criticism of Trump would lead to a loss, he sacrificed his job and in an emotional speech on the Senate floor October 2017 (note the date) told us:
“We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country - the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.”
So, how have we repaid Flake? He is long forgotten while Cheney and GMH appear regularly on political talk shows, chair panels, write books, give speeches, and, given laudatory media support, don’t even recognize their own hypocrisy.
Given how they are embraced, indeed, why should they even care?
Just ask the following four: Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney; former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin; former White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews; and former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson. (For this column I will refer to the latter three as one with the letters GMH.)
Given their uncompromising criticism of Trump, they have become heroes in the media, and long forgotten are the parts they played in making Trump Trump. Never mind that they helped spread tens of thousands of lies, covered up unending corruption and incompetence, or that these women turned a blind eye to his perverse sexual history. All is forgiven and forgotten.
When ABC’s Jonathan Karl recently interviewed GMH, he gave the word “fawning” an entirely new meaning. The only thing he did not do during the interview was shine their shoes.
Let’s turn to specifics and we’ll begin with Cheney, who recently published “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” (Little, Brown and Company, December 2023).
If you follow politics there is nothing new in the book. Yes, there are “revelatory” details behind some events we’re familiar with but they are relatively meaningless.
As a “memoir” it suffers somewhat from amnesia. However, her warning, to be fair, is loud and clear.
She minces no words on what a second presidency would mean to this country. It would be the end of democracy. If I have any criticism on this part of the book, it is very repetitious; she issues the warning over and over again. Maybe that’s what’s needed.
As to the amnesia. Sadly, she does not address her support of Trump from his first candidacy through his failed effort to win a second term. She voted for him in 2016 and again in 2020 and supported his policies more than 90 percent of the time.
Perhaps most indicting, she voted against the first impeachment and as head of GOP “messaging” on the issue, called the hearings “shameful.”
In her book, she is silent on all of this when, perhaps a page or two stating “I was wrong” would have been welcome and redemptive.
GMH are no less guilty of complicity with Trump and Trumpism. All three played major roles as enablers.
Griffin finally had it after Trump’s lies about winning the 2020 election, resigning on December 4, 2020. Matthews resigned the day of the January 6 insurrection.
Hutchinson, however, remained in her job even after January 6, explaining she still felt “loyalty” to Trump. Now sit down: Then she applied for a job with Trump when the former president returned to Mar-a-Lago. She wasn’t hired.
She, of course, became the heroine of heroines because of her testimony before the January 6 committee. Thus, consider me unkind, but might Karl have asked her (among many other questions):
“If the former President had hired you at Mar-a-Lago post-January 6, would you have testified?”
I am going to go out on a limb — way, way out and venture: I don’t think so.
To paint a clearer picture of my concerns, let’s try this analogy: Cheney and GMH are members of a street gang that engages in robberies, burglaries, carjackings and car thefts but one day, the gang commits a crime they abhor. They leave the gang.
Would we hold them up as paragons of virtue, integrity, and honesty? Would be pay them five-figure stipends to speak on the importance of values and ethics? Would we give them contracts to write books? (Hutchinson authored, “Enough” with her portrait on the cover.) Would we invite them to analyze the world of crime and their former colleagues in the underworld?
Yes, they deserve some credit for seeing the light even if it was somewhat late. But consider the following: What if Cheney, GMH, former Republican Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who became a vocal Trump critic, Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who voted for impeachment both times, and all the other Trump officials who testified before the January 6 committee, had joined to stop Trump right after he rode down that golden elevator in 2015? There was no question about who or what he was -- a corrupt, pathological lying demagogue who does not have a decent cell in his body. What if they had spoken out when it could have made a difference?
One man did: former Republican Arizona Senator Jeff Flake. Knowing his criticism of Trump would lead to a loss, he sacrificed his job and in an emotional speech on the Senate floor October 2017 (note the date) told us:
“We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country - the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.”
So, how have we repaid Flake? He is long forgotten while Cheney and GMH appear regularly on political talk shows, chair panels, write books, give speeches, and, given laudatory media support, don’t even recognize their own hypocrisy.
Given how they are embraced, indeed, why should they even care?
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