For us outside of the GOP world, this story is pretty overblown. Yes, Republicans tossing one of their leaders who refuses to go along with the bullshit 2020 conspiracy theories does have implications for all of us in the next election cycles. But overall it’s not terribly interesting and has been dragging on far too long. Like it’d be nice if we could just report she’s been canned and move on, rather than having this day-to-day micro-drama with Liz Cheney, Kevin McCarthy, and Elise Stefanik dominating the news cycle way more than it ever should, especially here on National Zero.

However, there’s one important plot point the Washington Post reported Saturday, and quite possibly what set all of this renewed push to kick Cheney out of House Republican leadership. The Post reports that at the GOP conference retreat in Orlando last month, NRCC staffers briefed members about the latest polls in battleground districts, they purposely omitted an important finding: Trump’s favorability in ratings in these districts were underwater by 15 points, which is obviously pretty bad news when Trump plans on holding MAGA rallies and handing out endorsements to House candidates in the next election cycle. The same thing had happened in March at a retreat for House GOP committee ranking members, the Post reports, adding “Both instances, [Cheney] concluded, demonstrated that party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid the truth.”

So like Dennis Quaid’s rogue climatologist protagonist Jack Hall in 2004’s over-budgeted B-movie The Day After Tomorrow where Los Angeles gets destroyed by tornadoes before three 3,000 mile-wide polar hurricanes where the eye is a vortex of air so cold it can freeze gasoline plunges the Northern Hemisphere into a new ice age, the people in power aren’t listening to Cheney’s dire warnings of disaster. And in a cruel twist of irony that we’d be remiss to leave out of this dumb article, Jack Hall’s main political antagonist in The Day After Tomorrow is Vice President Raymond Becker (pictured above on the right), a skeptical asshole who was pretty obviously based on then-real life Vice President Dick Cheney, Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s father. While there’s no indication in the film’s ending of what happens to Jack Hall after he manages to rescue his son from the frozen wastelands covering the entire United States, specifically whether or not he keeps his job, Becker gets promoted to President after the his boss freezes to death in a motorcade trying to escape from the super blizzard hurricane. That guy didn’t really look like George W Bush though.

Anyway, this isn’t going to end well for the GOP if their suppressed internal polling is to be believed. We know they’re between a rock and a hard place, but it’s also hard to escape the feeling they’re still going to fuck up and fail upward like the fake Dick Cheney did.