Dick Cheney, Architect of Our Modern Trumpian Malaise, Dies at 84

In his 2008 missive defending his policies that are widely classified outside the Bush administration as torture, he also hypocritically and condescendingly lectured then President-elect Obama, saying that “counterterrorism policy’s designed to defeat the terrorists. It turns on intelligence. You can’t do anything without collecting first-rate intelligence.” This brings us to another major Dick Cheney legacy: a lot of really sketchy stuff happening around his office and bad intelligence, like this 2003 Washington Post report about how he “and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq’s weapons programs and alleged links to Al-Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee later found in another investigation in a 10-5 vote that the Bush-Cheney “Administration prewar statements” were not exactly straightforward, and “on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq.” In the wake of Al-Qaeda launching the 9/11 attacks on the United States from Afghanistan’s soil, Bush and Cheney aggressively sold the world a vision that their ideological enemy and someone who Osama bin Laden despised, Saddam Hussein, was harboring weapons of mass destruction to lead even larger attacks alongside an organization he had been squabbling with for many years.

This lie about WMDs eventually collapsed public support for the war when the United States could not produce evidence of its claims, and it spilled out into immensely serious legal territory with the Valerie Plame affair. Her husband, the diplomat Joseph Wilson, was sent to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had purchased uranium from it, and he wrote a 2003 op-ed in the New York Times titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” A week later, journalist Robert Novak reported from “two senior administration officials” that Plame, a covert CIA officer, had suggested sending her husband to Niger despite the fact she wrote a memo in 2002 arguing the opposite. Her existence was highly classified information, and it led to a criminal investigation where no one was charged in the leak, but Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby was convicted of lying to investigators. Libby was that “most senior aide” in that 2003 WaPo report about Cheney’s “unusual hands-on role” which came “on the heels of mounting concern from intelligence officials and members of Congress that administration may have exaggerated intelligence they received about Iraq to build a case for war.”

In 2009, Time reported that the Bush administration’s final month was spent with Cheney “pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby” and that “aides had reported” to them that the Libby pardon “had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to the breaking point–and perhaps past it–over the fate of his former aide.”

Bush told Cheney that Libby was undeserving of a pardon, and that “A top adviser to Bush says he had never seen the Vice President focused so single-mindedly on anything over two terms.” On Bush’s last day in office, he commuted Libby’s sentence, but the guilty verdict was left in place right up until Donald Trump finally acquiesced to Cheney’s “crusade” and pardoned his chief of staff for lying to investigators. The Bush-Cheney years were what they looked like in so many ways, and it culminating in a Great Financial Crisis defined by rank fraud was a fitting conclusion to what to that point, was America’s dumbest presidency of all time.

Our Very Serious culture wants to respect the dead, and that is an admirable thing to want in a civilized society, but respect is earned and we must have a civilized society first. The fact is that Dick Cheney worked tirelessly against civil society and oversaw an intelligence framework illegally surveilling it, as Edward Snowden later revealed. In slight fairness to a man who did expose some kind of humanity in his time on earth, Cheney did stand up against his party’s rabid anti-gay marriage crusade in 2004 that Karl Rove put on the ballot across America (that resembles the modern anti-trans crusade that Stephen Miller is putting on the ballot across America). He publicly broke with his president who wanted to outlaw gay marriage by saying in 2004 that “freedom means freedom for everyone” while referencing his lesbian daughter Mary.

But that momentary flash of relatability through his love of his daughter pales in comparison to the brutal math presented by websites like Iraq Body Count, or studies in The Lancet which found that “As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions.” Many people at the time called accounts like these hysteric overreactions, similar to their reaction over a recent study on excess deaths in Gaza published in The Lancet which used similar methodologies to the Iraqi study that is now accepted as the truth of the heinous matter. Time is a flat circle to a degree and the commonalities between Cheney and Trump prove it.

When immensely powerful people like Dick Cheney die, the proper reaction is to contextualize how they used their power and how it affected other people. Not to lionize them. If you want glossy PR profiles of people in power, go to Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post or The Free Press. That’s why those lobotomized outlets exist. If you want to know what Dick Cheney’s legacy really is, you don’t even need to read some radicalized elder millennial take like mine. Just go to his Wikipedia page about his vice presidency, and see the top section headers titled “Iraq War, Disclosure of documents, CIA leak scandal, Shooting of Harry Whittington,” and an assassination attempt outside Bagram Airfield that he survived in Afghanistan in 2007, which killed 23 people and wounded 20 others.

Cheney made a lot of enemies in his life, and it’s a testament to the comforts America provides its elite that he never had to answer for any consequences, and he even enjoyed being rehabbed to a degree by a Democratic presidential run last year. Barack Obama and the Democrats ran on the depravities of the Bush administration, then came into office and opted to move forward and not prosecute people for crimes they were suggesting they committed one year earlier, helping lead America to our modern disillusionment with politics that reelected Trump for the lolz. Cheney’s ultimate legacy is the defining ethos of this moment: in America, there really is no rule of law for the elite, only power. Dick Cheney understood that better than anyone, right up until Trump came along.