Dick Cheney

 

I have a friend (maybe you have such a friend too) who, for many years, anytime he hears of the untimely or sad death of a decent human being, has said as his standard response: “And Dick Cheney continues to walk the earth.”

Cheney died Monday, aged 84, his unbeating Wankel engine of a heart winding down at last.

My spiritual blogfather Atrios seems haunted these days by memories of the outrage he poured out, constantly and voluminously, during the Bush-Cheney years, to depressingly little effect. Here is his short post on Dick Cheney today:

Eschaton: We Will, In Fact, Be Greeted As Liberators

Dick Cheney, liberated from life, like countless Iraqis.

In hell, being shot in the face by his friends FOREVER.

I should give Atrios the last word. Like many others today, I am stewing over the bitter irony that living through the Bush-Cheney administration seemed to me like the horrifying low point, the bottom, of American political history. Looking around at 2025, civil society wise, I often feel I would go back to 2002 in a second. Since the rise of Trump, Dick Cheney and especially Dick’s daughter Liz Cheney earned praise (mostly from Democrats) and paid a real cost (from Republicans) as advocates for an earlier iteration of the Republican Party. Many hearts long for those days when we still believed in centrism and bipartisanship. They cry out, Bring back the Bushes and the Cheneys, Karl Rove and Bill Gates and Marc Andreesen, bad as they were. Take away Trump and Bannon and Elon and Zuckerberg.

We shouldn't trust that feeling. It’s not simply that things have gotten worse since the Dubya years, but that they’ve been revealed to be worse than we ever realized. The seeds of Trumpism were there long before Bush-Cheney were elected, and all of us, leaders and followers, have just been playing our parts in the always-unfolding cosmic farce. Or something. This post is both too short and too long; I should have given Atrios the last word.

To my friend and everyone else who held up Dick Cheney as the ultimate symbol of an unjust universe: We will have to come up with a new poster child. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.

Maybe the images of the White House literally being torn down were what sent Dick across the rainbow bridge.

I went back and searched this blog to jog my memory of what I wrote about Cheney in closer-to-real time.

The Kids Today might not know: It was widely believed, from the moment Cheney was announced as the GOP running mate in 2000, that Dick Cheney was smarter and more capable than George W. Bush, his boss. Dubya was more charismatic and gave a livelier speech, but Dick was the adult in the room and much savvier about using the levers of power, both military and bureaucratic. Starting with the fact that Cheney was an old friend of Dubya's father, Cheney loomed over Bush in an odd, unprecedented way. Dick was the most powerful VP in history, until he wasn’t, until the scandals and failures associated with the War on Terror mounted up. Subsequent VPs have been problematic in different ways. Maybe the point here is that Vice President is a strange office, poorly defined, and when we overhaul our Federal constitution,* we should get rid of it. ( *and pigs fly)

I hadn't thought much about Valerie Plame and Scooter Libby in a long time, but I thought about them a lot in 2006-7. Plame was a CIA agent, an actual weapons expert, doing important and dangerous work. But she and her husband Joseph Wilson were sharing information that contradicted what Cheney was saying about Saddam Hussein and WMDs. When the facts contradicted the ideology, the facts had to be quashed. Somebody leaked Plame's identity to collaborators in the media in 2003; she was outed, discredited, her CIA career over. Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby took the fall, indicted in 2005 for perjury etc. and convicted in 2007. 

Then, and maybe my outrage was misplaced, but I was infuriated by the stream of politicians and media figures who argued that Scooter Libby mustn't go to prison. He's not a street thug but a leading member of the federal tribe, doing his job. All is fair in love, war, and national-security infighting. The relationship between Bush and Cheney was strained by this time, but Bush did his part by commuting Libby's prison sentence; Libby never served a day in the clink. Few of us think about Valerie Plame (who ran for Congress in 2020 and lost) or Scooter Libby (pardoned by Trump in 2018) anymore. But to me the throughline from 2007 to today is clear. We are paying for our erasure of white-collar crime. We have allowed our standards of truth and decency to erode calamitously. We do not recognize, cannot agree on, the difference between patriotism and treason.

I was on a flight out of Minneapolis/St. Paul one day in October 2004, awaiting takeoff. The flight attendant came over the speaker, in an exasperated voice, telling us we were delayed because John Kerry's campaign plane was taking off and all other flights had to wait. (The passengers murmured their discontent.) A few minutes later, the pilot came on, saying that actually the problem was due to Dick Cheney's campaign plane. (Laughter and LOUD sounds of discontent from the passengers.) 

I learned the next day that in fact it was Kerry's plane. Was the pilot just fucking with us? Conducting a little poli sci experiment? Looking back, this incident probably caused me to overrate Kerry's chances and heightened my eventual disappointment. The fliers of Northwest Airlines that day were not a good proxy for the American voting populace.

Why the laughter, though? We were predisposed to believe it. Of course it was Dick Cheney: jumping the line, inconveniencing us lowly coach passengers, and lying about it to deflect blame. Bullying, arrogance, disinformation: hallmarks of the career of Dick Cheney.