We can be thankful he lived to see the Cheney family being evicted from the Republican party in humiliating style; in no small part because of how ruinous his policies were for the right wing's strategic position. An unfortunate trend in history is a lot of these sort of people never have to confront how disastrous their legacy was. If there was an expectation that they have to see consequences of their failures in their own lifetime maybe that'd spur some standards that more ephemeral concepts of legacy do not.
VP Cheney’s extremely troubling wars in the Middle East and civilian death counts of between 146,000 and >700,000 should be a permanent stain on his legacy.
> Theres a high level of dislike for him probably justly earned.
Pretty much. At the same time, he didn't blow it all up. Cheney sits in the same class as figures like Kissinger. You can view them as Machiavellian overlords doing terrible things in pursuit of their personal agendas, sure.
But those agendas turn out... maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight? I'm not saying the Iraq war wasn't a terrible mistake or that the end result of the fighting in Vietnam was worth the horrifying suffering of its people. But the post-war and post-cold-war USA hegemony was defined by a single nation with a strong executive able to wield these terrible powers to terrible effect, with really very little check on its external (or internal) actions.
And, again, they didn't blow it all up. And I think that counts for something. Especially in the current climate where we're looking at a much less temperate regime actively trying to blow it all up.
I guess I'm saying that I'd trust Cheney with the buttons and levers and know that my kids could fix what he broke. I'm not so confident now.
In February 2006, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney, during a quail hunting trip on a private ranch near Corpus Christi, Texas. Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun when Whittington stepped into the line of fire after retrieving a bird. The pellets struck Whittington’s face, neck, and upper torso.
Whittington was hospitalized and later recovered. The incident became a major news story, partly because the White House delayed releasing details for nearly a day, raising questions about transparency. Cheney later called the event “one of the worst days of my life” and publicly accepted responsibility.
The shooting has since become one of the most remembered and parodied moments of Cheney’s vice presidency.
What's missing from this story is that Dick Cheney had the man he shot do a press tour apologizing to Dick Cheney and his family for causing any duress.
>"Roses are red, violets are Blue, if I go to jail, you're gonna go too!" -Scooter Libby
>"Dear Dick: Remember when you shot me in the face? Well down here in Texas, when I go any place, they say 'There goes the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face!'" -Harry Whittington
Cold Opening: Dick Cheney briefs Condoleeza Rice - Saturday Night Live
>Rice: But they have information like the titles of the president's briefing on August 6.
>Cheney: No problem. What was that again?
>Rice: Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States.
>Cheney: Ok, THAT's bad. Uhh.
>Cheney: All right, let's practice. When they make you say that title, there's going to be an audible gasp in the room. So you've gotta cough, cover up the gasp. Ok, let's practice. [...]
Widely regarded as the most powerful US vice president, in terms of operational authority and policymaking control. He may be one of the people most responsible for the expansion of executive branch authority in place now. Nobody is more responsible for the post 9/11 loss of civil liberties. In comparison most other VPs, including the current one, have been ceremonial. Cheney almost made Bush 2 ceremonial.
> "In our nation's 248 year-history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump
And yet, the same person has advocated and pushed for greater powers to the presidency increasing the risks of such individual threats.
It's no coincidence that in the list of countries in the last 50 years that drifted from democracies to authoritarianism the tier of those that succeeded (the likes of Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey) are ALL presidential republics.
Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, while not being shy of power hungry smart individuals? None of them is a presidential republic. The play in such countries is the party-state identification, where the party takes control of key institutions, press and in the right situation can also grab more. But it's never as simple or easy as in presidential republics.
In fact, I think that Sri Lanka is the last fully parliamentary democracy to shit into full authoritarianism, and that happened almost 50 years ago.
I can't but wonder whether US citizens realize that the constitution is dated, written for different times and with much less experience and lessons to learn from other democracies. It shows all the cracks of presidential democracies:
- constitutions where 2 or more branches of government can claim public mandate through elections (in US case president + congress) which unavoidably clash, for no greater good.
- hard to impeach/remove branch. Say what you want about many democracies in Europe for changing governments frequently, but you're always one single majority vote away from having to resign.
- cult of personality. Presidential republics, by electing an individual instead of a parliament/coalition are much more prone to personality cults.
US has all of those ingredients and Cheney made sure to make these problems worse.
He had been one of the signatories of the "think-tank" Project for the New American Century's [1] founding statement of principles, alongside 24 others, including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
During the Clinton administration, the PNAC had lobbied for invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then Iran from two sides, to install puppet regimes and secure the oil supply.
When GWB took over, Cheney became vice president and the administration got filled with many other PNAC members.
... and the rest is history.
The PNAC's membership lists and manifestos were at the time publicly available on their web site, now on archive.org [2].
It repeatedly surprises me that so few people didn't and still don't know about the PNAC.
The successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in twenty-first-century America.
…
Cheney understood the catastrophe of 9/11 as an opportunity to accomplish and cement long-standing objectives. In the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cheney’s Pentagon commissioned a study on the future course of American power from Paul Wolfowitz, an adviser who would later enjoy great influence in the Bush administration. The draft document prioritized the active prevention of a peer competitor to US power from emerging. The objective of US grand strategy would be to preserve military, economic and geopolitical preeminence indefinitely. As he would when he became vice president, Cheney relied on a corps of neoconservative intellectuals he cultivated to supply the pertinent rationales. For Cheney, the virtues of dominance were self-evident. After 9/11, they drove him to favor invading not only Afghanistan, but the unconnected country of Iraq, whose regime was an outlier in the world America bestrode. A document contained in an energy task force Cheney convened before 9/11, and that he went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret, detailed “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.“
…
In the months after 9/11, these Cheneyite lawyers, wielding their boss’ influence, created in the shadows an architecture of repression. Addington wrote a draft directive permitting the National Security Agency, in defiance of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, to establish a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American. Flanigan, aided by Yoo, wrote the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that made the world into a battlefield at the direction of the president. They further permitted, encouraged, and protected the CIA in launching a regimen of torture-as-geopolitical-revenge, masquerading as intelligence gathering, as well as a network of secret prisons to detain the agency’s alleged-terrorist captives indefinitely. They declared that battlefield captives could be held as “unlawful enemy combatants,” deserving none of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and corralled them, without charge, into the military base at Guantánamo Bay until an end of hostilities that might never arrive. With the exception of CIA torture and much of the wholesale domestic acquisition of Americans’ metadata, these authorities and practices, in one form or another, persist to this day.
Cheney did all of this because his deepest conviction was that the presidency was an elected monarchy. Misconstruing an argument of Alexander Hamilton’s from Federalist 70, Cheney pursued what became known as the Unitary Executive Theory. It was predicated on the idea of an unencumbered presidency empowered to control every aspect of the executive branch, regardless of any affected office or agency’s intended independence from political decisions. Cheney had understood the post-Watergate reforms from Nixon’s criminal presidency as a congressional usurpation, and he intended to roll them all back. Excluding Congress from wresting any transparency from his secret Energy Task Force was, to Cheney, part of the point. After 9/11, Yoo contended that during wartime – a circumstance conceivably permanent in a War on Terror – presidential authority is all but plenary. He likes his argument a lot less now that Trum...
37 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 58.5 ms ] threadI suspect that they were not lobbying to end any of these wars and were profiting greatly off of soldiers deaths.
Theres a high level of dislike for him probably justly earned.
Pretty much. At the same time, he didn't blow it all up. Cheney sits in the same class as figures like Kissinger. You can view them as Machiavellian overlords doing terrible things in pursuit of their personal agendas, sure.
But those agendas turn out... maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight? I'm not saying the Iraq war wasn't a terrible mistake or that the end result of the fighting in Vietnam was worth the horrifying suffering of its people. But the post-war and post-cold-war USA hegemony was defined by a single nation with a strong executive able to wield these terrible powers to terrible effect, with really very little check on its external (or internal) actions.
And, again, they didn't blow it all up. And I think that counts for something. Especially in the current climate where we're looking at a much less temperate regime actively trying to blow it all up.
I guess I'm saying that I'd trust Cheney with the buttons and levers and know that my kids could fix what he broke. I'm not so confident now.
Whittington was hospitalized and later recovered. The incident became a major news story, partly because the White House delayed releasing details for nearly a day, raising questions about transparency. Cheney later called the event “one of the worst days of my life” and publicly accepted responsibility.
The shooting has since become one of the most remembered and parodied moments of Cheney’s vice presidency.
Thats real power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5dwsLWR7uY
>"Roses are red, violets are Blue, if I go to jail, you're gonna go too!" -Scooter Libby
>"Dear Dick: Remember when you shot me in the face? Well down here in Texas, when I go any place, they say 'There goes the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face!'" -Harry Whittington
Cold Opening: Dick Cheney briefs Condoleeza Rice - Saturday Night Live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKl4oAcWBp4
>Rice: Sir, with all due respect, I'm still not certain how to address some of these facts.
>Cheney: Two words: It's classified! Eh heh heh heh heh heh.
>Rice: But they have information like the titles of the president's briefing on August 6.
>Cheney: No problem. What was that again?
>Rice: Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States.
>Cheney: Ok, THAT's bad. Uhh.
>Cheney: All right, let's practice. When they make you say that title, there's going to be an audible gasp in the room. So you've gotta cough, cover up the gasp. Ok, let's practice. [...]
It's a pretty stark difference depending on the political alignment. Scan the tone of these comments, and then scan Castro's for example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886
Jack Welch is also another that didn't receive much love here:
(and he certainly was not as controversial or brutal as Castro)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464733
And yet, the same person has advocated and pushed for greater powers to the presidency increasing the risks of such individual threats.
It's no coincidence that in the list of countries in the last 50 years that drifted from democracies to authoritarianism the tier of those that succeeded (the likes of Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey) are ALL presidential republics.
Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, while not being shy of power hungry smart individuals? None of them is a presidential republic. The play in such countries is the party-state identification, where the party takes control of key institutions, press and in the right situation can also grab more. But it's never as simple or easy as in presidential republics.
In fact, I think that Sri Lanka is the last fully parliamentary democracy to shit into full authoritarianism, and that happened almost 50 years ago.
I can't but wonder whether US citizens realize that the constitution is dated, written for different times and with much less experience and lessons to learn from other democracies. It shows all the cracks of presidential democracies:
- constitutions where 2 or more branches of government can claim public mandate through elections (in US case president + congress) which unavoidably clash, for no greater good.
- hard to impeach/remove branch. Say what you want about many democracies in Europe for changing governments frequently, but you're always one single majority vote away from having to resign.
- cult of personality. Presidential republics, by electing an individual instead of a parliament/coalition are much more prone to personality cults.
US has all of those ingredients and Cheney made sure to make these problems worse.
During the Clinton administration, the PNAC had lobbied for invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then Iran from two sides, to install puppet regimes and secure the oil supply.
When GWB took over, Cheney became vice president and the administration got filled with many other PNAC members.
... and the rest is history.
The PNAC's membership lists and manifestos were at the time publicly available on their web site, now on archive.org [2].
It repeatedly surprises me that so few people didn't and still don't know about the PNAC.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208013451/https://www.newam...
Maybe it sounds a little dark or edgy, but this thought gives me peace. Imagine what an immortal tyrant could do to humanity...
…
Cheney understood the catastrophe of 9/11 as an opportunity to accomplish and cement long-standing objectives. In the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cheney’s Pentagon commissioned a study on the future course of American power from Paul Wolfowitz, an adviser who would later enjoy great influence in the Bush administration. The draft document prioritized the active prevention of a peer competitor to US power from emerging. The objective of US grand strategy would be to preserve military, economic and geopolitical preeminence indefinitely. As he would when he became vice president, Cheney relied on a corps of neoconservative intellectuals he cultivated to supply the pertinent rationales. For Cheney, the virtues of dominance were self-evident. After 9/11, they drove him to favor invading not only Afghanistan, but the unconnected country of Iraq, whose regime was an outlier in the world America bestrode. A document contained in an energy task force Cheney convened before 9/11, and that he went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret, detailed “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.“
…
In the months after 9/11, these Cheneyite lawyers, wielding their boss’ influence, created in the shadows an architecture of repression. Addington wrote a draft directive permitting the National Security Agency, in defiance of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, to establish a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American. Flanigan, aided by Yoo, wrote the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that made the world into a battlefield at the direction of the president. They further permitted, encouraged, and protected the CIA in launching a regimen of torture-as-geopolitical-revenge, masquerading as intelligence gathering, as well as a network of secret prisons to detain the agency’s alleged-terrorist captives indefinitely. They declared that battlefield captives could be held as “unlawful enemy combatants,” deserving none of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and corralled them, without charge, into the military base at Guantánamo Bay until an end of hostilities that might never arrive. With the exception of CIA torture and much of the wholesale domestic acquisition of Americans’ metadata, these authorities and practices, in one form or another, persist to this day.
Cheney did all of this because his deepest conviction was that the presidency was an elected monarchy. Misconstruing an argument of Alexander Hamilton’s from Federalist 70, Cheney pursued what became known as the Unitary Executive Theory. It was predicated on the idea of an unencumbered presidency empowered to control every aspect of the executive branch, regardless of any affected office or agency’s intended independence from political decisions. Cheney had understood the post-Watergate reforms from Nixon’s criminal presidency as a congressional usurpation, and he intended to roll them all back. Excluding Congress from wresting any transparency from his secret Energy Task Force was, to Cheney, part of the point. After 9/11, Yoo contended that during wartime – a circumstance conceivably permanent in a War on Terror – presidential authority is all but plenary. He likes his argument a lot less now that Trum...
No one talks about the 100k Iraqi civilians who died during that time.