Dick Cheney speaking at the AIPAC Policy Conference in 2006. Photo: White House.

The poor sometimes object to being governed badly. The rich always object to being governed at all.

– G.K. Chesterton

Dick Cheney told the deadliest lie in American history: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” He paid no price for orchestrating this still-unfolding catastrophe and upon his death was celebrated by political elites and the mainstream press as a “patriot” and “devoted public servant.”

Democratic Party leaders like the Clintons, who have scorned Mamdani, have heaped praise on Dick Cheney. And they wonder why they poll worse than Trump…

The bipartisan whitewashing of Dick Cheney is as much of a perversion of US history as Trump’s eliding any mention of the horrors of slavery, the internment of Japanese-Americans and the genocide against the indigenous population of the US from national parks and museums.

As Andrew Cockburn reports in his scathing obituary for Cheney, the Yale dropout and former electrical lineman from Wyoming once discounted ethical and legal concerns about torturing people by waterboarding them until they nearly drown as a mere “dunk in the water.”

Trump isn’t smart, but he possesses shrewd, if crude, political instincts. He knew that Cheney was the dead-eyed face of a war most Americans had long ago turned against. Unlike Kamala Harris, a political illiterate, who doomed her faltering and aimless campaign by refusing to condemn the genocide in Gaza and aligning herself with the most ruthless and unrepentant neocon of them all, Dick Cheney.

As a “devoted public servant,” Cheney helped steal an election, shot a man in the face and covered it up, lied the US into a war, set up a black ops unit inside the White House to run kidnappings and torture sessions, authorized mass surveillance of Americans, and steered long-term no-bid contracts to his former corporation, which is was still deeply invested in…

Biden has always considered himself an “institutionalist,” which is another way of saying a member of the elite political class that runs the permanent government. As such, Biden and Cheney circled in the same orbit for nearly 50 years, more often in synchronous alignment than not. When Cheney needed help, Biden was usually there to give it. In 2001 and 2002, when Cheney wanted the Authorization for Military Force (AUMF) and the PATRIOT Act sped through Congress, Biden was there for him. When Cheney wanted to go to war in Iraq, Biden helped to stifle Democratic resistance in the Senate and push it through. When Obama briefly considered pursuing charges against some Bush officials, Biden advised against it. This is what Biden means when he praises Cheney’s devotion to “public service,” though he was well-compensated for his “sacrifices.” Cheney’s compensation package from Halliburton: $12.5 million in salary, $18 million in stock options, retirement $20 million, deferred compensation $2.4 million, bonuses $1.45 million. Total $54.5 million.

Clinton’s affinity for Cheney can be explained by the fact that Clinton transformed the Democratic Party into an interventionist neoliberal operation much like the Republican machine that Cheney played such a key role in engineering and fine-tuning from his time in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I White Houses. What Clinton calls Cheney’s “sense of duty” included having his Deputy Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, out a CIA officer (Valerie Plame) in retaliation for her husband (Joe Wilson) writing that the Niger yellowcake story promoted by Cheney to justify invading Iraq was a hoax.

This kind of bi-partisan garbage is a big reason why we ended up where we are: The Democrats ran three presidential candidates who voted for Cheney’s manufactured war on Iraq and then, when Obama, who opposed the war, had a chance to hold Cheney, brashly asserted the unitary power of the vice presidency, and his repellant crew accountable, he appointed Iraq war supporters to be his VP and run the State and “War” Departments and then shrugged it all off with: “I guess we tortured some folks.”

“Impact” = 4.5 million deaths in the Forever Wars Cheney instigated.

ABC’s Jonathan Karl provides a prime example of the courtier press at work, just as two decades earlier Tim Russert, who Alexander Cockburn described as being “always there with his watering can to fertilize myths useful to the system,” nodded his head as Cheney told America on Meet the Press that “US troops would be greeted [by Iraqis] as liberators.”

Back in 2000, Al Gore–the man who first invoked Willie Horton against Mike Dukakis–was so desperate to find something similar to fling at George W. Bush that he actually put Newt Gingrich in a campaign ad to attest that “Dick Cheney is even more conservative than I am.” (As Cockburn and I revealed in our biography of Gore, Gingrich and Gore had been pals in the 80s, when the two young southern guns considered themselves the leading “futurists” in Congress.)

One of the worst after-effects of Trump’s radioactive personality is that he is so reviled by many Americans that he has softened the reputation of one of the most evil and destructive figures in American history: Dick Cheney.

I often........

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