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Former US Vice-President Cheney Dies
- pbiggar 11mo ago[flagged]
- roenxi 11mo agoWe 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.
- ngetchell 11mo agoI 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.
- ecshafer 11mo agoA not insignificant reason for the rise of Trump were the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Cheney is directly responsible for.
- zitsarethecure 11mo agoOdd that so few folks supposedly opposed to those wars appear to be speaking out against war with Venezuela.
- throw0101c 11mo ago> 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.
- willvarfar 11mo agoVenezuela and Nigeria have vast oil and rare earth deposits. Eh also Greenland. Hmm, there might be a pattern :)
- ecshafer 11mo agoDo 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.
- paulryanrogers 11mo agoWar profiteering seems like a plank of the Republican party both pre-Trump and within the Trump era.
- dekken_ 11mo agoYou're positive there are zero democrats with no financial stake in defense contractors? To me it seems an issue of individuals, rather than "parties".
- paulryanrogers 11mo agoSomething 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.
- dekken_ 11mo agoRendering it somewhat redundant... Edit: this comment was made before the person I was responding to edited their post to include the second line.
- quitspamming 11mo ago> 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.
- watwut 11mo agoDemocrats 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.
- draw_down 11mo ago[dead]
- dyauspitr 11mo agoIt feels like more of an honor to be kicked out of the current Republican Party, an honor Dick Cheney did not deserve.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- NickC25 11mo ago[flagged]
- Octoth0rpe 11mo ago> I do find it ironic, however, that someone as far right as him (and his extremest daughter) are still seen as DINOs by Trumpers. IIRC, his _other_ daughter is gay, leading him to be noticeably silent during the period when passing anti-gay-marriage legislation was a core issue of the GOP, which explains a great deal of the RINO accusation (I assume you actually meant RINO, not DINO :) )
- OrvalWintermute 11mo agoVP Cheney’s extremely troubling wars in the Middle East and civilian death counts of between 146,000 and >700,000 should be a permanent stain on his legacy.
- the_real_cher 11mo agoHis company Haliburton also was the supplier for the Vietnam war. The quintessential example of the military industrial complex.
- philipwhiuk 11mo agoAnd a big piece of Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, for which they largely escaped criticism.
- the_real_cher 11mo agoIt just gets worse and worse
- the_real_cher 11mo agoHis company Halliburton was the supplier for all the Gulf Wars and the Vietnam war. 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.
- nine_zeros 11mo ago[dead]
- gadders 11mo agoHis daughter Liz is keeping the love for war going.
- fatbird 11mo agoHis daughter Liz left the MAGA Republican party long before it was obvious they'd return to power, and actively opposed them at great political cost. It's strange to watch someone you'd otherwise be against with every fibre of your being, do something principled you agree with.
- gadders 11mo ago...to make sure the war money keeps flowing.
- shortrounddev2 11mo agoHalliburton gave Cheney $34mil when he left the company to go be Vice President
- disqard 11mo ago(from TFA) > 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.
- 11mo ago
- roschdal 11mo agoIn February 2006, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney, during a quail hunting trip on a private ranch near Corpus Christi, Texas. Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun when Whittington stepped into the line of fire after retrieving a bird. The pellets struck Whittington’s face, neck, and upper torso. 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.
- blitzar 11mo agoHarry Whittington Apologizes for Getting Shot in the Face by Dick Cheney. Thats real power.
- righthand 11mo agoWhat's missing from this story is that Dick Cheney had the man he shot do a press tour apologizing to Dick Cheney and his family for causing any duress.
- potato3732842 11mo ago100yr from now shotgun buyers and sellers will still be cracking jokes about shooting lawyers.
- uvaursi 11mo agoI remember the “20 ways Dick Cheney can kill you” posters. Unbelievable energy.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 11mo agoHappy Valentine's Day from The Cheney Family - SNL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5dwsLWR7uY 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 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. [...]
- logicchains 11mo ago[flagged]
- baggachipz 11mo agoYou'd think so, but somehow I doubt it.
- wonderwonder 11mo ago[flagged]
- thunderfork 11mo ago[dead]
- logicchains 11mo agoEven someone who condemned tens of thousands of people to death largely just for personal financial gain?
- potato3732842 11mo agoWould "it was never about the money, we really believed in it" be a better justification for same acts?
- wonderwonder 11mo agoI don't think he did it largely for personnel gain. I do think he personally gained but look at every political decision ever made. There are winners and losers. Almost none of them are 100% based on altruism. How does any Senator enter government with a net worth of a 100k and 5 years later is worth millions on a salary of 174k while supporting 2 households (DC and home state). All of them grift. All of them vote for things that end up killing or harming people. That is the nature of government and the nature of military super powers. Don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting he was a good person just that he was a person.
- theultdev 11mo agoNow I didn't like the man or his legacy, but I always find it interesting to compare the HN response for controversial figures' deaths. 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 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) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464733
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- fifticon 11mo agoJack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love. If you had to say something positive about him, it would be something like "well if he hadn't done it, someone else would have". That is not a high bar. You can give him credit for showing us that the foundations of our approach is rotten. He's a bit like Trump in that :-/
- throw0101c 11mo ago> Jack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love. 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 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
- delichon 11mo agoWidely regarded as the most powerful US vice president, in terms of operational authority and policymaking control. He may be one of the people most responsible for the expansion of executive branch authority in place now. Nobody is more responsible for the post 9/11 loss of civil liberties. In comparison most other VPs, including the current one, have been ceremonial. Cheney almost made Bush 2 ceremonial.
- red-iron-pine 11mo agothe lesson of Nixon's later years (and heavily alcoholism) and Reagan's dementia and "plausible deniability" is that the GOP needs a face, while the plutocrats run the show. Chaney got his start under Nixon and was a Big Dick under Reagan. 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.
- gadders 11mo ago[flagged]
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 11mo agoseemed to be sullivan, nulland and blinken
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- xhkkffbf 11mo ago[flagged]
- wat10000 11mo agoGerry didn't invent gerrymandering. The practice predates his example, and he wasn't even the one who made it happen in his famous example. He merely signed the bill enacted by the legislature. All he did was happen to be associated with a prominent example that got a name that stuck. It's not really something that can even be invented. Once you have elections in districts with boundaries that can be altered, it follows straightforwardly that people will try to alter those boundaries in ways that benefit them electorally.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 11mo ago[flagged]
- hasperdi 11mo agoI think a lot of people would disagree with that statement that he is a patriot. My own opinion is that he's more of a profiteer than a patriot.
- wat10000 11mo agoI think he was a patriot. That’s what made him so dangerous. He believed he had the best interests of the nation at heart. He probably convinced himself that Iraq really did pose a threat.
- random9749832 11mo agoDo you know what a psychopath is? They aren't that rare you know.
- smt88 11mo agoHis administration admitted to lying about weapons of mass destruction in order to invade Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, thousands of Americans died, and trillions were wasted. He was a traitor to his country, not a patriot. I don't care one way or another that he's dead, but let's not whitewash his legacy.
- yawpitch 11mo agoVaya con dios, Dick… vaya con dios.
- tempfile 11mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- epolanski 11mo ago> "In our nation's 248 year-history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump 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.
- silexia 11mo ago[flagged]
- wat10000 11mo agoWhat bias? Looks pretty neutral to me.
- uvaursi 11mo agoWhat a legend.
- rahmalu 11mo ago[flagged]
- polotics 11mo agoGood old Dick. This article from The Economist, about Abu Graib and Cheney's way to make friend, is I think a fitting obituary: <|trigger warning alert|> https://www.economist.com/culture/2008/05/15/tortured-truth https://www.economist.com/culture/2008/05/15/tortured-truth <|seriously, Dick?|>
- Findecanor 11mo agoHe had been one of the signatories of the "think-tank" Project for the New American Century's [1] founding statement of principles, alongside 24 others, including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. 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_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208013451/https://www.newamericancentury.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070208013451/https://www.newam...
- sndjdbs 11mo agoThis group is basically just the Israel lobby, which thankfully many more Americans are becoming familiar with due to recent events. They were immensely powerful back then (Buchanan was sidelined for going against them), and they still are today. 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.
- thomassmith65 11mo agoIsrael and America allied for straightforward reasons during the Cold War. The theory that Israel 'controls' America is as stupid as it is popular.
- phantasmish 11mo agoWhat's amazing is that these folks can straight-up publish what they plan to do, and then people still act surprised when they do it. It's so weird. 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.
- yomismoaqui 11mo agoDon't you find liberating that any human, no matter how powerful they may be, how good or bad they are, cannot escape from death? Maybe it sounds a little dark or edgy, but this thought gives me peace. Imagine what an immortal tyrant could do to humanity...
- fatbird 11mo agoThere's apparently an old Japanese saying that goes "Asleep, one mat; awake, half a mat." It refers to the space on a mat that everyone, even the Emperor, occupies.
- willvarfar 11mo ago(Interestingly, some of the world's dictators do seem to have an interest in the current state of the art in prolonging life. For example Xi and Putin chatted about organ replacement https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko)
- theultdev 11mo agoUntil you learn it's not individuals, but groups of them with ideas that persist for multiple generations.
- al_borland 11mo ago“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.” Tomorrow is the 5th of November after all.
- xnx 11mo agoThe great equalizer
- nyantaro1 11mo agoYet he was surrounded by his family by the very end. Pretty much died under his conditions, unlike all the other lives he affected
- 11mo ago
- Gud 11mo ago[flagged]
- CHB0403085482 11mo agoThe successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in twenty-first-century America. … 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.
- kjsingh 11mo agoEveryone talks about 4.5k US soldiers dead due to Iraq War when they talk about the Cheney years. No one talks about the 100k Iraqi civilians who died during that time.