Dick Cheney

Former vice president Dick Cheney, who died on Monday at age 84, loathed Donald Trump. In a 2022 election campaign ad for his daughter, Liz, a congresswoman from Wyoming, he declared: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” Yet Cheney was more responsible for Trump’s rise than almost anyone else in the Republican establishment. He helped to mastermind the calamitous Iraq War and preached the unitary executive theory of the presidency. Instead of vilifying Cheney, MAGA-world should offer him a bouquet of appreciation. Recall that it was during the 2016 South Carolina primary that Trump first showed his real independence from the folderol surrounding the Iraq War.

As Donald Trump marches to the Republican nomination a third time, Americans are divided into two radically opposed camps. On one side are Trump supporters who believe Democrats stole the 2020 election. On the other are Trump detractors — Democrats and homeless NeverTrumpers — who say that denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election amounts to a desire to overthrow democracy itself. The country is not on the brink of a civil war, and deep partisan divisions are nothing new. But reality itself is contested today in a way that goes beyond anything in earlier US history. The split over the 2020 election is one intensely political manifestation of a wider rift.

You have to wonder what Liz Cheney feels her relationship to the Republican Party to be today. Having spent years denouncing Donald Trump as a faux Republican and a disgrace to the party, much of the past year implicitly accusing him of treason as vice-chair of the January 6 Committee and the two months since her defeat in the Wyoming primary characterizing half (at least) of the GOP as “very sick,” she is co-sponsoring a bill with Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, to reform the Electoral Count Act in order to “protect the rule of law and ensure that future efforts to attack the integrity of presidential elections can’t succeed.” Representative Lofgren was one of seven impeachment managers in President Trump’s trial for his first impeachment in 2020.

Cockburn was finishing a bottle of brandy the other day when he nearly spat out his drink. A columnist from the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart, compared Liz Cheney to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Capehart said on PBS: I keep thinking about the scene in Star Wars: Episode IV, when...Obi-Wan says to Darth Vader, "If you strike me down, I will come back more powerful than you can imagine." And to me, Liz Cheney is Obi-Wan Kenobi. If she loses...she could very well come back more powerful than Donald Trump has imagined. After laughing hysterically for the better part of four hours, Cockburn decided to weigh Capehart's point. Unfortunately he was forced to conclude that Liz Cheney is nothing like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here's why.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney had a supposedly shining moment this week as she sat on the January 6 committee to lecture the Capitol attackers and anyone in league with former President Donald Trump about the importance of the rule of law. Cheney has long said the committee was about “fidelity” to the Constitution. Seriously? Liz Cheney? Dick’s neocon daughter? People are buying this? I don’t even know where to start. In 2011, when libertarian-leaning Republican Justin Amash and many in the Tea Party movement insisted that President Barack Obama did not have the constitutional authority to bomb Libya, Cheney, Senator John McCain and other establishment politicians said to hell with the Constitution.

What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s football and wrestling teams. Successful candidate for office, easily reelected to Congress twice before he left to join the Richard Nixon administration. There he proved a success at navigating both the federal bureaucracy and the internal politics of the scandal-consumed administration. He survived Nixon’s resignation and soon became Gerald Ford’s chief of staff — and after that, the youngest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, taking charge of a newly-minted all-volunteer force whose morale and discipline were in shambles after Vietnam.

Donald Trump has called the Iraq war the ‘worst single mistake’ in US history. Most Americans, including our military, agree with the president. That grand mistake should be an example to all of the tragic unintended consequences inherent in regime change. It should be an enduring reminder of the misery that can be unleashed when our leaders don’t think soberly about what happens after they start a war. The Iraq war was started by Dick Cheney along with President George W. Bush in 2003. In the 16 years he’s had to reflect, the former vice president has been clear for many years that he would not hesitate to do it all over again. His daughter, Rep.

There have been darker days for the House of Cheney. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney left office amidst two imprudent wars and a capsizing economy. A decade on, the times are surprisingly kind to a family once among the most controversial in American politics. Dick’s daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, is looking at a Senate run. ‘She’s got pretty good foreign policy, national security chops,’ Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said unironically earlier this month. ‘She’d be a great addition.

It was no cakewalk for Vice President Mike Pence. He had showed up in Sea Island, Ga., reckoning that he would schmooze with the wealthy donors to the American Enterprise Institute and answer some prearranged questions from Dick Cheney aka Vice. No dice. Cheney, the wily veteran, took a look at the parvenu occupying his old office and decided to go off script. Where were all the ‘softball’ topics, Pence remarked. Cheney was having none of it. There wasn’t much gratitude for the administration that had finally gotten around to pardoning his former aide I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. Instead, Cheney breathed fire.

Donald Trump is trashing America. Garbage is piling up from California national parks to the Washington mall as Trump insists on keeping the federal government shutdown over his request for a totemic border wall. The longer he’s cooped up in the White House, the crazier his pronouncements seem to become. Once upon a time a defiant Trump declared, ‘I am proud to shutdown the government.’ He figured this would be enough to scare Chuck and Nancy into compliance. It didn’t. Instead, they were emboldened. Schumer, who previously offered Trump a cool $25 billion in wall money in exchange for liberating the Dreamers, isn’t budging. And Pelosi is openly scoffing at him.