What’s behind conservative support for Cheney and Barr is their lack of embarrassment. Most Washingtonians, no matter their party, find it important to be held in esteem by the city’s tastemakers, who are overwhelmingly liberal. Not these two. The classic Cheney moment was his 2004 exchange with Pat Leahy on the Senate floor. Cheney complained that Leahy had called him a war profiteer. Leahy responded that Cheney had said he was a bad Catholic. So Cheney ended the conversation by telling Leahy to perform a physically impossible four-letter act. “You’d be surprised at how many people liked that,” Cheney recollected in a 2010 interview. “It’s sort of the best thing I ever did.” He’s selling himself short.
Republican fans of Barr circulated clips of his Senate appearance Wednesday even as media coverage of his testimony was uniformly negative. No Democrats are held in less esteem by conservatives than the ones on the Judiciary Committee. They will never live down their treatment of Brett Kavanaugh. Trump supporters nodded in agreement when Barr said the controversy over his March 24 description of the Mueller report is “mind-bendingly bizarre.” They chuckled when he said Mueller’s March 27 letter to him was “a bit snitty and I think it was probably written by one of his staff members.” They guffawed when Barr described the verb “spying” as “a good English word.” They cheered when Richard Blumenthal asked for notes Barr had taken of his phone conversation with Mueller and Barr told him no. “Why should you have them?”
Heh. Read the whole thing.™