Liz Cheney challenges us: With whom shall we stand?

In 1975, a quote in The Oak and the Calf carried a warning from one of the most profound thinkers of the era. "In our country," Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, "the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state."

It gave me great pause until, now, I myself have seen the truth of it. Here.

But how do you begin a national discussion about it? By saying, "I can't believe this is happening?" Or, maybe: "This has to be some kind of mistake, right?" Or, how about a simple "There's no way this can be true"? And then the unwary say?

"What? What can't be true?" they say.

"The fact that one of the oldest political parties in the United States has purged a member — a leader of the party, to be exact — for telling the truth. The truth. Not for telling a lie. For telling the truth."

"Nah?"

"You heard me. That's what can't be true."

And when people pass it off with a yawn, you know for sure that it's true. What you don't know is who cares. Anybody? Which, in the end, is really a worse situation.

That's what is turning all political morality upside down. And in our own time. Here. Where such things "do not happen."

Which is where the discussion really begins.

Because if it is true, who do they think is harmed by it? Liz Cheney? Get real. Liz Cheney is right up there with George Washington now. Any child who ever heard of George Washington has known that we need someone to remind us that truth — trustworthiness — is an essential component of leadership for a good long time now.

No, in the end it will not be Cheney who suffers from this debacle. The people who will be harmed are the people who did it. One hundred and forty-seven Republicans voted to expel Cheney from her leadership role for admitting that President Joe Biden won the election, not Donald Trump. Eighty percent of Republicans, the polls say, agree with Cheney's purge for telling that truth. So it's their lie now; not simply Trump's. It belongs to the people who are denying us the integrity we're looking for, and because of whom we know without a doubt now that we can't expect any integrity from them either.

After all, it's one thing to have members of Congress disagree on which form of a policy will best solve a given problem. But to remove a national figure from leadership because they tell the truth simply tells us the truth we need to know about them: they will tell any lie necessary in order to get power and keep it under any circumstances.

Regardless of what happens to the country because they lie.

In Germany, the "Big Lie" was "Jews? What Jews? We didn't do anything to the Jews."

In the United States now the "Big Lie" is "Lose? No, Donald Trump didn't lose the election. It was stolen from him." (At least he thinks it was. Maybe.) But as long as we silently accept his big lie, as long as we do nothing to expose it, he will see that the people he lied to about it keep voting its carriers into office.

Of course, there are a few little lies that have go with it to keep the big lie in place. Like "There was no insurrection at the Capitol. It was nothing but the usual raucous crowd of tourists."

And "No, we aren't doing anything wrong by lying about that. We just want to keep our Congressional seats, and our committee chairmanships, and our pay checks, and our pensions. And we're being very open about that. So that's very honest, isn't it?"

Indeed it is. It tells us plainly that the leadership in this party has abandoned honor and honesty for the sake of dishonest gains for personal profit.

It tells us that thanks to partisanship — the-do-it-our-way-or-we'll-purge-you-crowd — we have created ourselves a Congress that has no conscience and leaders that allow no conscience to operate. It reminds me of the Chinese soldiers manufactured and buried all together by the Qin Dynasty to affect a display of military might. All of those nameless artifacts in dusty terracotta. So goes democracy.