Dick Cheney has died. I do not know how he lasted this long, with his bad heart, his transplanted heart, his sinful, evil life, but there you go. He didn't last as long as the even more horrific Henry Kissinger, an obituary I should have had the energy to write, cause there's a grave worth dancing on.
There is nothing good to say about Dick Cheney. He did nothing good in his life. Everything he touched made the world worst, until, maybe, the last couple years when he turned on Donal Trump. That is not enough to redeem him, though it is to his credit. The rest? from dodging the Vietnam war (which he obviously supported), to working for Nixon, to Haliburton, to his stint as VP to the lesser Bush, at absolutely the wrong time for authoritarian villains to be in charge, he made everything worse. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 probably sank this country - certainly did massive harm to everything good about it. Rule of law and international respect and not having secret torture prisons and - just awful. And ruining the economy almost as an afterthought. A nightmare that has only gotten worse since.
It makes you think of Trump's depredations. I remember what it was like in 2003 or 4 - people predicting that Bush and Cheney would cancel elections, send the troops into the street. They did not. But now in 2025, people are worried about the same things - and not theoretically, at least as far as the troops in the streets goes. Will we have elections next year? Probably - will they be fair? They haven't been fair in decades, but this one is likely to be worse than ever, with Republican states desperately scrambling to gerrymander the Democrats out of existence. It is bad - and it is, really, continuous with what Bush and Cheney did. Not as overtly, maybe, but they were hacking away at democracy wherever they could back in the day. Trump is just cruder about it.
And yet - Cheney did turn on Trump. So did Bush, and a lot of that gang. With Cheney, I more than half suspect it is because Trump turned on his family - it was personal. Cheney never cared a fig for the country - but he does care about his family. I guess that is something, and if it translates into something good for the country, we can take it. But it's not much, and doesn't change the fact that Cheney and company started us down this road. That's about all I have on that subject.
Other subjects? I do find it interesting to compare that period to the present. in some ways it is not that different - and we did worry that Bush/Cheney would do the things Trump is trying to do. But would they? There is a weird element to Trump I have noticed before, compared to the villains of the past - bad as Bush was, it is hard to say that he didn't, in his warped and ugly way, love his country. That bunch didn't want the same USA that I want - but they seemed to want the USA to exist. They respected - something about it. Maybe the sentimentality - but maybe more. This is a feeling I get more from Bush 2, and some of those around him - Powell, Rice, maybe even Rumsfield - a sense that they were proud to be Americans, and wanted to maintain something about that country. Maybe.
There is none of that with the Trump mob. Trump doesn't care about this country in the least. He doesn't care about the constitution or the laws or the ideals of the USA - he doesn't care about the country as a force for anything in the world, he doesn't care about its well being, he doesn't care about its power. He wants to burn it down and steal the parts. And the people around him - Miller and the rest - want the same thing. That - I never got that impression from Dick Cheney. He might not have cared much about the constitution or democracy or American ideals or anything like that, but he wanted the USA to survive and thrive, to be a source of power he could wield. He and his were Imperialists - and they wanted to preserve and strengthen the American Empire. Trump? wants to steal the copper from the white house.
That's not a lot to say good about Dick Cheney, but in the end, it is not nothing. For all his evil, he was unlikely to commit treason. He didn't - he and his lot did all they could to manipulate elections and suppress dissent and all the other bad things he did, but when he lost, he took it. Again - I can find a cynical explanation - he knew he wasn't really going to suffer, that he could make a buck no matter who won, that the system itself was designed to protect people like him, and they could do a lot better preserving it that destroying it. But even that - low a bar as it is, he got over it. Trump and company cannot get over that bar.
You have to be bad to be worse than Dick Cheney, but there are plenty of them around right now.
How much of that is his fault? That might have to be the subject of another post (which I'm unlikely to write.) But - well - it is something.
