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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It feels like more of an honor to be kicked out of the current Republican Party, an honor Dick Cheney did not deserve.

I don't think his legacy was the reason him or his daughter were kicked out of the Republican party.

It was solely due to speaking out against Trump.

A not insignificant reason for the rise of Trump were the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Cheney is directly responsible for.

Odd that so few folks supposedly opposed to those wars appear to be speaking out against war with Venezuela.

> Odd that so few folks supposedly opposed to those wars appear to be speaking out against war with Venezuela.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Venezuela and Nigeria have vast oil and rare earth deposits. Eh also Greenland. Hmm, there might be a pattern :)

Do you actually not understand or is this a political quip? If you spend any time around normal Americans its really not surprising. Having thousands of soldiers stationed for a decade+ over seas in a war zone in a war of attrition with no real objective, is seen as very different than "bomb the commies bringing drugs into the country". US people are really anti war, very pro bombing communists, terrorists, and drug cartels. One puts American soldier's lives at risks, one doesn't. Go to your local working class dive bar and talk politics for an hour and it should clear up why this is a very popular move, but being in Afghanistan isn't.

War profiteering seems like a plank of the Republican party both pre-Trump and within the Trump era.

You're positive there are zero democrats with no financial stake in defense contractors?

To me it seems an issue of individuals, rather than "parties".

Something being a party plank does not mean every member of other parties must oppose it.

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.

Rendering it somewhat redundant...

Edit: this comment was made before the person I was responding to edited their post to include the second line.

> 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.

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.

Democrats did not started nor caused war in Ukraine. They were not the ones invading or threatening to invade. There is in fact difference between helping a victim of invasion to self defend and being the attacker celebrating manly man invasions.

We're not talking about starting wars versus getting involved in existing conflicts, we're not even talking about right versus wrong, we're talking about Pentagon spending and who benefits. The U.S. giving Ukraine our older weapons stockpiles so we can create NEW stockpiles doesn't speak to who started what, but that Democrats were sure in favor of increased spending while Republicans weren't. The assertion was one party always wants more spending on "defense" while one party doesn't. It simply isn't true, both parties are happy to find justifications to increase the Pentagon's budget.

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