by Joe Courter
Throughout my life, the Viet Nam war, Central American wars, and on to the Middle Eastern conflicts, Dick Cheney was a stubborn right wing ideologue. The peak of his prominence was after the 2001 9/11 attacks when he used his role as vice president under a wishy-washy George W. Bush to build the Executive Branch into a powerbase that, in the paranoid hysteria of the time, went unchecked. Surveillance of citizens, declaring wars based on flimsy intelligence or outright lies, and the creation of ICE all trace back to the early 2000s and Dick Cheney was a key driver of all that.
Come 2016 and the rise of Donald Trump, we saw a man pivot and become a Never Trumper. All that power Cheney thought was so important for a president to have he now saw was not going to play out well with an unstable narcissist with no real political savvy at the helm. He was the guy who built all that power up, and now he saw that the door had swung open for an authoritarian ego-maniac to stroll right in. In a way, Trump is his monster.
But, tragically, he remained a lonely voice, he and his daughter Lynn. Republicans got in line behind Trump, the corporate media saw that Trump was an easy story good for their bottom line, and the Democrats largely just went along, a bit powerless as the Congressional deck became stacked against them, and they became more concerned with fending off the left flank of their party (i.e., Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020) .
I looked through so many words about Cheney’s passing, but none captured my feelings so here is this. I almost feel sorry for the man, his last chapter must have felt lonely and tragic. But the horrors he helped perpetrate with his policies outweigh any sympathy I might have had.