Will the left finally forgive Dick Cheney, now that he’s endorsed Kamala?
One thing that occurred to me when I first heard about Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris was, wow, Cheney’s still alive. Twenty-five years ago, when he was on the verge of becoming Bush’s VP, I didn’t think Cheney was long for this world, because his heart disease was so bad at the time. But due to the wonders of modern medicine, Cheney got a heart transplant in 2012 and is apparently still going strong at 83, making him the oldest living US ex-VP.
And now, thanks to his Harris endorsement, he won’t need to have any discord at the Thanksgiving table when he gets together with daughter Liz.
Cheney’s Harris endorsement may surprise those on the left who haven’t followed the Bush contingent and aren’t aware of the depth of their hatred for Trump, but it’s formidable and hardly new. Cheney is a very unpopular figure on both sides, so his endorsement is one of those things that I doubt will have a lot of effect on anyone, although the newspapers and Democrats will try to make some use of it. But at least he and Bush have some personal reasons for their deep antipathy, reasons I outlined in this piece I wrote that originally appeared in October of 2015. The gist of it is that Trump had a ton of negative things to say about Bush and company during the Bush administration, including (for example), during a 2008 interview with Wolf Blitzer, in which Trump said that Bush should have been impeached for lying us into the Iraq War and another time when he said that Bush was “probably the worst president in the history of the United States.” [NOTE: The original links are now broken, but you can still find the quotes here and here.]
However, Cheney’s endorsing Harris is a whole ‘nother ballgame from simply not endorsing Trump or criticizing Trump. Here’s the reason Cheney gave:
In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.
As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.
Perhaps Cheney’s former conservatism was mere “partisanship,” because it certainly doesn’t seem to have been principled. After all, Trump actually left power peacefully, and his use of power during his presidency was less than that of the Biden administration of which Harris has been an integral part, and certainly less that what the left has planned for a Harris presidency. In addition, if anyone tried to “steal the election using lies” it was the left – or perhaps the word “rig” is more to the point.
Oh, and the answer to the rhetorical question I posed in the title of this post is “No, but they’ll try to use him if they can.”
The Left is already singing his praises. Incredible rehabilitation, indeed. No doubt a photo-op will take place at some point soon.
Was the original owner of Cheney’s heart a Democrat?
I would enjoy watching Dick Cheney fellate a cactus.
Ransom of red chief
To state the obvious, Dick Cheney is relic from a bygone era whose opinions are almost entirely irrelevent and will have no bearing on the outcome of this election one way or the other despite the leftwing media’s attempt to make something out of less than nothing. His Republican party is long dead, for better or worse. He represents a tiny, bitter, hateful contigent who refuse to accept their irrelevancy and shamelessly attempt to curry attention from those who hate them. It’s sad.
Nonapod: He represents a tiny, bitter, hateful contigent who refuse to accept their irrelevancy and shamelessly attempt to curry attention from those who hate them.
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Unfortunately they aren’t tiny enough. They are one of the reasons Trump isn’t far ahead. While useless in the ordinary sense, they are useful to the Left on occasion. And there are enough of them to influence some on the Right. I think they help keep some people like the Powerline guys, and Jazz Shaw on the edge.
Note, this refers to group he represents, not Cheney himself. He’s irrelevant as Jimmy Carter.
At the time we went into Iraq, I thought the CIA, the Brits, the French, and other intelligence services were telling Bush that Hussein had WMDs ready to use, and that Bush believed them. It turned out Hussein did have some, but not even near ready to use. He was bluffing, and died for it. And then the State Department convinced Bush (who was already so inclined, probably) that modern democracies could be created in the Islamic Middle East.
It was in the aftermath of all this that I stopped believing our intelligence services, the upper echelon State Department bureaucracy, and much of our domestic bureaucracies.
What Cheney knew and believed is unknown to me.
I want to know what Dick thinks about the Afghanistan Bug out, because with Harris you will get more like that.
Very sad. Does he know about the open border, rising crime, ruinous inflation, and a weak foreign policy that has tempted Putin and the Mullahs of Iran to wage war? Surely, he cannot be for more of the same. Not the Darth Cheney that we knew.
TDS is a deeply irrational malady. It causes people to actually abandon their own best interests in an attempt to strike back at Trump.
I liked the Dick Cheney who was SecDef during Desert Storm, and VP during the GWOT.
I even sent him a copy of my book (The Wisdom of Walter) in 2005. (A lot of it takes place in Wyoming.) He was kind enough to send me a handwritten note about the book. So, it’s very sad to know he is no longer in favor of what is in the best interests of the USA. 🙁
The Cheneys, father and daughter, apparently actually believe the nonsense about the Jan. 6 riot being a calculated effort to overthrow the government. Sad.
[Trump] tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.
And Time magazine lavishly praised the half-billion dollars provided by Mr. Zuckerberg as Grand Influencer of coordinated legal changes applied to selected Democrat constituencies to boost their vote counts and let EVERYONE vote, citizen or not. That was a superb distortion of the rule of law, snuck into the system during the Covid excitement specifically to ‘save OUR (Dem) democracy’, and stupidly ignored by the Republicans who still don’t believe that the other party will win monolithic governance by all means necessary.
.
Woody Guthrie named that sort of theft very accurately as robbery with a fountain pen.
The Cheneys, father and daughter, apparently actually believe the nonsense about the Jan. 6 riot being a calculated effort to overthrow the government. Sad.
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They don’t. It’s just a long running information op.
If they don’t believe it, they are deliberate liars. That is also sad.
I know it’s early but now coming up on the 23rd anniversary of that dark day, we can sadly say we lost, yes we got bin laden zarquawi awlaki, but in the big picture, the Islamists won at least 100 yards, the Taliban emirate is more well armed then they ever were on september 10th, the other branches of the brotherhood, are very active in fact they flaunt their insolence on the streets of a 100 cities in a dozen countries, the Arab Spring did much to cement their numbers, war by other means, the Iranians are much more ahead in their hegemonic ambitions from Yemen to Morocco, I guess there is some movement that Prince Salman has done trying to rectify his father’s works,
those that failed us most aggregiously at the Company, Brennan, Hayden, Freeh at the Puzzle Palace at the Bureau, they did very well, those like in any order you would care to name, John O’neil Rick Rescorla, Pat Tillman, well not so much, and so many others in the Long Expedition that was launched by W and Cheney, someone as able as General Flynn is persona non grata, but Colonel Blimp types like Milley and Austin, they get acres of good press, on a lower line, you have MacCrystal and Petraeus, I was under the foolish delusion the first was an honorable man, of Petraeus the less said the better,
Given that so many elected Dems said things as bad or worse than Trump said about Bush, I doubt that Trump’s words factor much into Bush’s antipathy for Trump. I think it has a lot more to do with insiders vs an outsider.
While the issue of WMD in Sadaam’s Iraq presumed we’d find a bunch of shiny, new artillery shells loaded with Sarin, that wasn’t it. Made good press, I suppose, and not finding them disappointed those who wanted to make the case they were right.
But the real issue was how fast Iraq’s chemical weapons industry could be reconstituted. According to the inspectors–who got more run-arounds than someone wanting to prove innocence would arrange for–unfettered Iraq could crank that up so fast that the time from spotting it to getting something done about it would be too short.
The “human capital”–guys who’d done if for the Iran-Iraq War, were still around. The technical issues had been solved by any interested nation since about 1917.
How do you make phosgene? Derail a train near East Palestine, OH and light the cargo on fire. Nerve gas…see the guys at the Raid factory.
The difficult issue is getting it from the mixmaster to the end-use munitions without leaking and killing the entire shift and contaminating twenty-eight city blocks. See 1917.
“Sadaam doesn’t have yellowcake!”, repeat half a million times, (approx). US troops get to Baghdad and, without a “woops, sorry”, it’s “Stupid Bush isn’t guarding the yellowcake and it’s killing Iraquis” Presumably the Iraqis were taking it for potting soil and their kids’ sandboxes. 2004, shipped near six tons of the stuff to a processing facility near Montreal. I have relations–very welll educated, let them tell you–who still believe the first.
But Trump’s mouth is unnecessarily offensive. Could have said Bush moved prematurely, making the case that waiting until Iraq had loads of Really Bad Stuff would have been a better idea.
Nation building is oversold. Any improvement in the infrastructure designed to facilitate military presence can help the locals….so….sell it that way. Pretty much any country on the face of the planet, except the US, has had at least a couple of weeks’ experience with parliamentary government. Not a problem starting it up again. The manual’s around here someplace.
And, no matter how benighted the place, the urban centers can take on western customs and institutions to a certain extent. Most have also had those experiences. And the hillbillies can be kept out of the way.
I think you could make the case that all of the experiments with nation building failed because of external pressure. Obama bailed on Iraq before they could keep the organized extremists from invading from Pakistan or elsewhere. The Taliban were external to Astan while we were there. Reorganize, re arm, come in from Pakistan. Nobody’s won a war where the other guy has a sanctuary. That’s not the same as failed nation-building.
Additionally, combining the Westphalian model with non-state actors of massive strength–not seen since the Templars folded up their military arm–makes for some serious confusion about what to do to whom and where. We “invaded” Asan originally to get to al Q whom the Taliban were sheltering. Who’s the bad guy in that situation under Westphalia? Is Astan’s sovereignty sovereign (sorry) if they shelter and support a non-state actor which acts against other naions?
New situations, new answers required and slinging around insults as Trump does is no help.
My understanding was that Bush was inexperienced, naive, and easily swayed, and Cheney was more determined in pursuing regime change in Iraq.
except Trump did a great deal more progress in four years, than others did in 16 years, because in part it was decided that military means was the last not the first,
there were some punitive actions against Syrian bases, which seemed to work, the strikes against Suleimani Baghdadi and the Yemeni branch leader did work
the threats against Kim il Sung did work, maybe it was a bit of flattery on the latter point subsequently what has all the bluster like the Big Bad Wolf accomplished in Afghanistan, and other places, along with groveling of the most insufferable sort, ‘the return of the grown ups’ sigh, what did they accomplish in the positive,
now with hindsight, we can admit that debaathification as carried out was not helpful, that failing to cut off Bin Laden at Tora Bora wasn’t either, not securing law and order in the first months of the Iraq warwell that didn’t help things, those are just some policies that Cheney was attached to,
Somethings like Abu Ghraib in the big scheme of things have been overblown, except to showthe general chaos of the enterprise,
Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz has just left the Democrat Party.
Over their antisemitism.
Apparently antisemitism is fine with good ol’ Dick.
Niketas:
Of course Democrats said that stuff about Bush. But Trump was not a Democrat. And he was a very famous guy.
Nor did those Democrats later become president, as members of the GOP.
If you read my piece, you’ll see that at the time I wrote it, Trump was also demolishing Jeb Bush in the Republican primaries. That was another huge outrage as far as the Bushes were concerned, and it was done by a Republican.
Kate:
I think they have convinced themselves of it.
Never try to Nation build an Islamic Nation.
Just defeat them in battle and let some despot , hopefully a semi secular one, rise to power .
Trump was also demolishing Jeb Bush in the Republican primaries. That was another huge outrage as far as the Bushes were concerned, and it was done by a Republican.
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Jeb Bush was outpolled by Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson. Bush was the principal candidate of the donor crew Glitch McConnell cultivates. He took their money and made a bonfire with it. About 70% of the Republican primary vote went to Trump and Cruz, both anathema to McConnell and his minions. Another 5% went to non-insiders (Dr. Carson, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Huckabee).
abraxas
Since we don’t know what happened in the years before Sadaam died of old age, it’s hard to make a judgement.
However, prudence–given his prior actions–suggests that regime change was the better option. Presuming you don’t have a democrat president following up the win. That should always be a consideration.
actually looking over the last half dozen cases, one can’t argue it really worked, in Libya most disastrously, Qaddafi was not anyone’s cup of tea, but the factional strife that seized the country, after his fall, Benghazi was only the smallest spoon on the tea cup, as militias ran red down the Niger River, to Mali and parts south,
in Egypt and Tunisia, a little better because the regime elements were able to reassert themselves, but that wasn’t really in the cards was it, they wanted to wipe out the old order, and bring in the new, Morsi was new in that sense,General Asisi who has proved decidedly not a neutral party in the last years, we learned few lessons from our haphazard pressure campaign against the Shah, which let loose the tornado of events we see today,
Why did they choose Iraq at this time,because the security forces had contacts with some terrorists, you might as well invade Yemen to the South, (I don’t recommend it)
the Tikriti regime was a rotten edifice, but the society that was underneath was little better,
Most regular folk aren’t allowed on the transplant list for something like a great when they are seventy years old.
“[Cheney]. . . is apparently still going strong at 83, making him the oldest living US ex-VP.”
Good grief! I have more than four score years on my personal odometer, and I didn’t even know that ‘oldest living us ex-VP’ was a category in the competition for veneration or whatever we’re bestowing on the long-past VP.
A long time ago I held GWB and Dick Cheney in high regard. It hurts me to say I no longer do.
Miguel Cervantes —
The thing about Qaddafi and Libya that angers me is before Obummer and Hilary started supporting anyone looking to overthrow him, he had seen the light. Basically, he was saying to the US at that point, “You want me to jump? How high?” Instead of trying to work with him, our fearless leaders threw money at any little faction working to overthrow him. They are responsible for what happened to Chris Stevens and the other Americans in Benghazi — because of their pretty much indiscriminate funding of any little anti-Qaddafi faction. Which I thought would make any little dictator question the wisdom of working with the US.
Ditto the rise of ISIS in Syria — Obummer was throwing money at pretty much any little faction trying to take on Assad. Assad is a nasty piece of work, but until our government starting funding groups fighting him, Syria was kind of stable-ish. And for all the slaughter he (and his father) wrought, the body count would probably have been lower if ISIS had not come to power.
Someone+Else (4:26 pm) said: “Most regular folk aren’t allowed on the transplant list for something like a great* when they are seventy years old.”
* [I figure that Someone+Else meant “heart” in place of “great” here]
For what it’s worth, I received a kidney transplant when I was just short of 72¾ years old, and I’m pretty “regular”.
(I did clear a few physical fitness hurdles before acceptance to The List.)
This is *not* intended to quarrel with Someone+Else, but it’s a data point nonetheless. It *can* happen to regular folks here and there.
Carry on . . .
I would like to believe that Cheney is suffering from onset of dementia/senility, or even Alzheimer’s, and that he would not be doing this if in control of his faculties.
I know that Trump has gratuitously made many enemies who should be supporters; and that TDS is not necessarily irrational. But to think that any sophisticated, rational person would endorse Harris is simply ‘a bridge too far’ for me. And yet, the list is fairly long.
I would respect him and his daughter more if they just kept their mouths shut. I can understand why they despise him, but they have to know that Kamala Harris would be far worse than Joe Biden ever was.
having investigated the matter a little, the rebellion because of a uprising among islamist prisoners at ali salem prison, then some other elements, joined in,
the worst factions the libyan fighting group, ended up murdering kadaffi, they went about islamicizing the country, in the West, they were the local Al Queda branch, why Qaddafi actually filed a complaint against Bin Laden with Interpol
The problem with lifetime politicians is they don’t care for competition or criticism. Even the worst businessmen recognize both are an inescapable part of life you have to rise above to succeed. Notice Cheney stayed quiet even when Trump criticized the “neocon” policy mistakes of his predecessors but talking about efficiency commissions and dismantling the administrative state was too much for him. For all his flaws Trump scares the comfortably connected who make a living off the friends and family connections of wealth and power that use our lives and money to promote their personal gain in the name of saving us from something or other.
Never forget that the left uses words as blunt instruments, not as something with distinct and understandable meaning. It reflects their rage and reveals the anti-intellectual core of their politics.
Look at this gag supposed interview (video at the bottom of the article) with Harris and Walz, the questions cut pretty deep. *
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/09/comedy-break-jp-sears-as-he-hilariously-roasts/
Not my leftist brother-in-law, he has been harping on charging and trying GW Bush and Cheney for war crimes for as long as I can remember. I suspect he would say he/they doesn’t need Cheney’s endorsement to fight Trump.
Someone+Else
My view is the us and Khadafi had a deal.
He gave up nukes and supporting Terrorism, and the us left him alone.
And the us broke it, and overthrew him with the us supporting France, Italy, and UK’s aerial war (leading from behind). Or Hillary’s comment of “we came, we saw, he died”.
Bottom line is no country can trust the U.S. to keep an agreement.
The left demonized Cheney as a war criminal who should be in jail. Now he endorses the same people. Kind of make you think the elite classes don’t believe a world they say.
The left demonized Cheney as a war criminal who should be in jail. Now he endorses the same people. Kind of make you think the elite classes don’t believe a world they say.
The same media that enabled the demonization of George W. Bush also gave jobs to a surprising number of his relatives–surprising if we believe elites mean what they say. But the Bushes are very connected people and so are the elites in media. The sooner we come to realize that what our governing and elite classes say is not what they mean and is largely performance, the better.
The same media that enabled the demonization of George W. Bush also gave jobs to a surprising number of his relatives
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I half agree with you. However..
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but IIRC there have been two members of the Bush clan who landed plum media jobs, his cousin William Hall Bush (aka Billy Bush) and his daughter Jenna Bush Hagar. Billy Bush’s career in media began thirty years ago in local radio when W was in business in Dallas and followed an ordinary career progression. Both he and his cousin specialize in goofy reporting on the entertainment industry and household matters. They also look like television hosts. Chelsea Clinton (who also had a spin in the media) has her assets but her face and voice are not among them. You’ll recall that Billy Bush was absurdly pilloried and his career all but destroyed when NBC news in September 2016 pulled out a twelve year old tape of a surreptitiously recorded conversation between him and Donald Trump during which he was pleasant to Trump while DJT made vulgar remarks.
FWIW, a person going through a heart transplant loses vast numbers of brain cells while under general anesthesia and, as a necessary result, suffers significant intellectual diminishment. I think this is part of the explanation for Cheney turning into a sock puppet operated by his shallow corporate-Republican daughter.
of course the little noticed part of that interview was how it was a microcosm of corporate culture around 2006, not only at CBS but other network, yes chelsea has a face for radio, thats why shes part of the family grift, the Clinton Foundation stuck with Saudi magnates Russian oligarchs and the like, one particular newsreader was mentioned and apparently the reputation was wide spread,
of course in the previous years, the goal was to pin the tail on Roger Ailes, because reason and Shannon Carlson and Megyn Kelly lend themselves to the task, Shannon helped wreck the Miss USA pageant subsequently and Megyn,well her stint at NBC didn’t last, in truth, the corporate suites in all the networks were more like Anchorman, then anyone care to admit,Re Liz Cheney, she did get her share of the contempt of the left when she was in the State Department’s Middle East bureau, what part she played in the installation of Maliki is unclear, he was of like minds with Obama on the Iraq War but Suleimani was allowed be kingmaker in that era, on Iraq policy, selecting the designate Da’wa or SCIRI figurehead, and its charitable to say that did not work out, now State’s preferrence was for ministers that were not popular even among the Sunni community like Pachachi, a one time UN Ambassador in the pre Baath era,
around the time of UN resolution 242, when we play these games without a playbook thats what ends up,
The young in the UK believe that Bush used Tony Blair to lie the country into war with the US in the ME — because of the WMD threat in particular.
I try telling them that they are wrong. The chief worry after 9/11 was copycat imitators bent on Jihad against the West, meaning the US. The earlier Bojinka (sp?) plot to use more trans-Pacific airliners to crash into West Coast city buildings sure supported the fears of this new mode of Islamic terrorism.
What’s missing by Cheney and Trump both is this? What do you do after 9/11. Coming in a time when the Muslim world faces a demographic transition — when the old are few and the young are too many and too idle not to do The Devil’s work.
The strategic thinking back after 9/11 was to staunch the destabilising ingredients — mostly young and idle unmarried males — which history shows us is the needed ingredient for war and revolution. Thus, the need to tame and divert their youthful Warrior drives, just as literacy was becoming the norm in the Middle East and elsewhere among Muslims.
On this base of World historical understanding came Thomas P M Barnett’s lecture on C-span and article and then book, “The Pentagon’s New Map.”
Namely, the huge gap of economically un-interconnected Muslim World and the rest of the globe — remember the freight train of globalization?
The lesson drawn in the 1990s was that nations with McDonalds do not go to war against each other because both sides in a potential conflict have skin in the game, and governments risk more losses than gains by going to war.
Well, that naïveté of then never met post Modernist president Xi, under demographic collapse. Nor Putinist Russia, where countries with McDonald’s do go to war with each other. And not even secular Kamalist Turkey taken over by the Islamist Erdogon.
So, here’s my beef with the Bushites and Chaney as well as Blair, and Trump and Tucker — given the necessity to act defensively after 9/11 in the above historical context, what would have been better for the US to do?
What I never see from them or their mouthpieces is engagement with these facts.
Meanwhile, the US grew tired of wars. Overseas. And my question remains mostly unanswered. Except by the rare and few who take up and herald the gains, despite our losses.
I think they thought Iraq was one bridge too far, and the planning was inadequate,
the political establishment never owns their mistakes, now did Iraq really fuel the rise of Al Queda and ISIS, that does seem to be the considered opinion of many,
I’m not entirely sure, but the mismanagement certainly allowed bad actors to take advantage, like Baghdadi like Zarquawi, the latter could have been stopped in 2003, before he entered Iraq, the former was a relatively minor figure, harder to gauge his import at the time, he was the fourth figure of the Emirate, that would become Islamic State, after two Egyptians, who were scratched off the coalition lists, add to that the way debaathification angered a whole strata of Iraqi society as practiced, the collapse of law and order, much as what happened in Beirut in the 70s, empowering the local militias, were we undersourced as to manpower, probably would a larger footprint have made a difference probably not,
yes the Democrats were unhelpful as were the media, the hydra, which are tied together at the trunk, the Times making too much of Abu Ghraib, was a factor, but the bidonvilles that comprise, Tower Hamlets, Malbeek, St Denis, this where the martyrs came from at least of a third of them, some of them graduates to midlevel management in Islamic State, the first Fallujah offensive, who was involved in that, the subsequent approach to the tribes of the Awakening how successful was that really, and did it do more to empower bad actors, the Obamas haphazard withdrawal, which left the door open to these same players,
Can anyone explain to me why “4 more years” is not a slogan for the harris campaign if this 4 years have been as prosperous and peaceful as harris campaign claimed? Why does biden need to step down and why is harris distancing herself from the extraordinary accomplishments of this magnificent administration instead of simply taking credit and vows to continue this incredible direction established by the almighty president biden?
Very strangely when both candidates have four years of governing in the highest office in the country on their resumes for comparison, why are the cliched attacks against trump such as “trump is a failed businessman who bankrupted 6 times” “trump is a convicted felon” “trump is a rapist” “trump will ends democracy and declare himself as the supreme emperor and will never leave” are back in full swing when a simple “our four years are better than trump’s” will suffice?
Slightly off topic, but in the ballpark by a toenail — herewith a pretty danged hilarious satiric sendup of Kamala’s CNN interview, video runs about 5 mins: https://x.com/TONYxTWO/status/1832060915375608011