Former US Vice-President Cheney Dies
reuters.com
reuters.com
HW Bush was the exception, but he raised taxes and generally pissed everyone off.
W and Trump are a return to form. Vance (channeling Thiel) and Stephen Miller are running the actual show.
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. [...]
I 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.
It's strange to watch someone you'd otherwise be against with every fibre of your being, do something principled you agree with.
> Upon his re-entry into politics, Cheney received a $35 million retirement package from oil services firm Halliburton, which he had run from 1995 to 2000. Halliburton became a leading government contractor during the Iraq war.
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.
Khan and Caesar brought peace to millions. Life is complicated. But some worlds are worse than others, and Dick Cheney's actions sit solidly in the middle of the pack. They're part of the universe of discourse and action that the rest of us can live with and recover from. Not all leaders fit that mold.
"Just so you know", as it were.
They make a desolation, and call it peace
As always, wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica
Does that make them good people or me a Yuan dynasty apologist? No. But it makes the world complicated and not well suited to the kind of quips that you're flinging at Cheney.
Again, we could do a lot worse. We may already have.
nice job slipping "social progress" into your argument. I wonder what your sources actually say?
> Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but as a rare situation which existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist
yay social progress!
That's an incredibly Machiavellian take, on par with Alex Karp justifying the building of SkyNet/1984 because we can't lose our global leadership position.
The root cause of the terrible stuff you (and I) cite, is that the US has terrible power. Cheney used a little of that power to do terrible things, as did Kissinger. But notably neither attempted to create a circumstance where the ultimate authority over the use of that power rested anywhere other than with the American electorate. When it turned out that Americans wanted to do something different, they walked out the door and handed over the keys, peacefully and happily.
Things can go much, much worse. And in particular we're currently looking at a regime that seems decidedly unwilling to hand over the keys.
It's a marker that your argument is so unbelievable, I had to go back and read it again to make sure I got it right.
> But notably neither attempted to create a circumstance where the ultimate authority over the use of that power rested anywhere other than with the American electorate.
Cheney famously lied to Congress and the American people about the pretext for the Iraq War. He is also most famous for unprecedented expansion of executive power. He launched multiple wars without Congressional approval, which is also unconstitutional.
> When it turned out that Americans wanted to do something different, they walked out the door and handed over the keys, peacefully and happily.
First of all, they stole the election from Gore. Gore was certainly partly to blame for folding so easily, but the GOP candidate's brother being the governor of Florida and manipulating the election is not a small factor in that "victory".
Second, "the next guy did something even more terrible" is not tantamount to "maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight," as you put it.
When the US hegemony and (likely) the free world fall, we won't be able to trace it to a single act. It will have happened because of many unforgivable acts, many of which were effected by the Bush administration (including stealing the election from Gore and their horrendous SCOTUS appointments).
You didn't. I had to repeat it.
If and when the current regime succeeds at ending the republic, I would be willing to entertain that debate, especially considering that good things never come from an unpopular coup. But at this point, based on actual results, there is no one so much worse than Cheney that we can become nostalgic for Cheney.
Your debating style in your thread is also very patronising, which doesn't help.
If you fail to see the perspective of all those killed, or of the whole of the Middle East region, but only choose to see it from the point of view of the US or humanity as a species, then of course you're right.
I genuinely can't see where you get this except by deliberately misconstruing. I'm saying that "bad" is a nuanced position, and that we (collectively, including all the oppressed groups you're imagining) got through the last century or so in a much better position than we might have had the leaders we picked (yes, including Cheney) been more reflective of the ones ruling the rest of the world.
> If you [...] see it from the point of view of [...] humanity as a species, then of course you're right.
Well... yeah? It sounds like you're admitting to some nuance, but want it not to reflect the world we actually live in? Well... it does.
Maybe it sounds a little dark or edgy, but this thought gives me peace. Imagine what an immortal tyrant could do to humanity...
Tomorrow is the 5th of November after all.
"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."
I'd imagine an immortal tyrant would do nothing to humanity since humanity would be insignificant to him.
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...
I think the more interesting question is why isn’t it colloquial knowledge the Rumsfeld et al were basically in bed with a foreign country? It’s especially important today given how our current presidents are still unable to control Israel. Both Biden and Trump want a ceasefire, deescalation etc yet Netanyahu (who played a large part in the clean break report linked to in your Wikipedia link) constantly rebukes them. Either they’re ok with it in private or they don’t have power…both of which should be very concerning.
See also: Project 2025. Or various propaganda strategies that are proposed publicly, in specific detail, then used verbatim. They don't even have to hide it, and still get away with it. It's totally bizarre.
It makes a little more sense if you figure that there's a sizable contingent of folks are actually supportive of these plans, but perhaps want to save face by downplaying them in the moment or acting surprised.
It's not because of lack of education, lack of engagement, or genuine surprise, it's motivated reasoning from a value system that is fundamentally different than yours or mine.
No one talks about the 100k Iraqi civilians who died during that time.
The quintessential example of the military industrial complex.
It was solely due to speaking out against Trump.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
To me it seems an issue of individuals, rather than "parties".
That said, there is one party that is consistently hawk-ish and boasts about war spending. And there is another party which most often campaigns on reducing war spending.
Edit: this comment was made before the person I was responding to edited their post to include the second line.
Maybe if you only look at the war on terror years, but look at WWI and WWII and most recently Ukraine. Both parties love Pentagon spending when it's _their_ war.
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.
…
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 Trump uses it to murder fishermen in the Caribbean, but, like his Bush administration colleagues, takes no responsibility for authoring the authoritarian usurpations of power that he now bemoans.
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)
He may have eventually have 'found religion':
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[69]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics
However this was probably much later and when his image was less influential; his earlier career and fame probably really helped accelerate financialisation, and was probably never reset by his later opinions (partly because they may not have been as widely publicized).
Though on climate change:
> Welch identified politically as a Republican.[66] He stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis".[67] Yet he said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not ... because the world wants these products".[68]
* Ibid
Rather odd to see this quote coming from Welch, the man who almost single-handedly destroyed the notion that corporations had a duty to employees, and society at large first, and shareholder value coming as a result of those.
His actions, and management style completely defined the era of corporate behaviour we live since the 1980s: the layoffs, the carelessness on axing whole departments of companies which underperformed for a couple of quarters, only looking through short-term financials, all the focus on quarterly reports and financialisation of the economy come from his "teachings".
It was very hard for me to believe he uttered these words, rot in hell, Jack.
Pretty much sums up his HN death post, while you'll find mostly praise for Castro.
You'd think Welch executed and tortured people and Castro was a saint.
"Yeah his fingerprints are all over every bad policy decision of the era but at least he shot an old lawyer in the face"
Probably a lot of permanent D.C. types lost track of whether to lionize or demonize the man in public (they always loved him privately)
Oh, what a tangled web ...
Castro was in a foreign country I’ve never been to, and did most of his stuff before I was even born. His death was largely a realization that somebody from the history books had still been alive.
Cheney, in contrast, fucked with my home while I was an adult. He and his cabal did massive damage to my country very recently. I’m not going to make travel arrangements to visit his grave so I can piss on it, but I am tempted to.
Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.
I'd say the assessments are accurate. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
You forgot the mention the political prisoners, torture, executions, and the authoritarian regime overall.
Thousands have risked their lives trying to escape it.
The juxtaposition of the comments between Welch and Castro is appalling.
Cheney and Castro are closer in terms that they both caused unnecessary death, but one gets praise upon death, and the other condemnation.
How many glorifying top comments did you scroll through to find him being called evil?
Fidel Castro executed and tortured people.
Jack Welch fired some people.
The general sentiment towards Welch's death was very negative.
The general sentiment towards Castro's death was very positive.
Does that clear things up?
You can't be arguing in good faith as it's clear as day the general sentiment difference between the posts.