The Cheney Reversal

How the war whores became the darlings of Globalism

In one of the most predictable moments of the 2024 US election campaign, former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney (who apparently has also dabbled in politics as an enthusiastic amateur) declared that they would both be voting for Democrat Presidential candidate, current Vice President and former arm candy for hire Kamala Harris.

In typically pompous, self-blind fashion the Cheney father-daughter act cast their voting intentions as part of a mythic battle to save American Democracy from the most popular candidate and the terrible chance that people might vote according to their own assessment rather than that of the Cheney family and similar US political dynasties:

“In our nation’s 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.

As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris.”

The explanation is a now well-worn set of cliches and falsehoods, which both enemies and friends knew word for word before it was delivered.

All of the elements of the most dishonest commentaries of modern times are there, except perhaps Dick Cheney telling us that he now identifies as a woman.

It’s a masterpiece, in it’s way, of the inversion of reality that is the language of the Globalist elite, and especially its Washington DC branch. There’s the attempt to give the authority of the ages to the prejudices of the present by invoking the entire history of the Republic. Globalists want to present themselves as the experts on everything, and history is no different. Like Science, it exists only to be invoked as a kind of flapping banner raised against anyone they hate or anyone who dares to disagree with them.

That “in our nations 248 year history” is a perfect example of one of the most fraudulent aspects of the political establishment, the claim that they actually know anything. It’s a statement that at one and the same time claims sweeping awareness whilst proving that such knowledge is not actually possessed at all.

After all, think of the threats to the Republic that actually have existed in the period Cheney mentions, or in the whole length of US history from the moment the idea of casting off British rule was formed. Was the British Empire in the War of Independence less of a threat than Donald Trump? Really? Of course not. The Republic could have been (and nearly was) choked to death in its crib. Was Benedict Arnold less of a threat to the Republic than Donald Trump? Again, its absurd to think that he was, even if you happen to hate Donald Trump.

Or let’s touch briefly on some of the other threats the Republic has faced and triumphed over, both domestic and foreign.

Donald Trump is a greater threat to the Republic than Adolf Hitler was, than the entire vast and mighty war machine of Nazi Germany. Really? Does that sound like a rational assessment to you? Total US casualties in World War amount to 1,076,245. 405,399 battle deaths. 12,000 civilian deaths. 670,846 wounded. 72,491 people missing or taken as prisoners of war.

What would these figures had been like if the grandiose dreams Nazi scientists and leaders had for various super-weapons programs been fulfilled? What would have been the fate of the Republic, do we think, if the Nazis had developed a nuclear weapon before the US did (and Germany had some of the foremost physicists in the world, together with some of the best ballistics and rocket experts in the world, many of whom would be spirited out of Germany at the end of World War Two and recruited to NASA and US military weapons research).

Or how about the threat to the Republic from Stalin, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War? An ongoing threat of mutually assured total nuclear destruction lasting decades and determining all US foreign policy for generations was less to worry about, apparently….than Donald Trump?

And it’s not just significant wars and foreign foes who render Cheney’s comments fatuous to an extent that should provoke guffaws of contempt. How about the bloodiest conflict on US soil?

Take Cheney’s explanation for his Harris vote seriously, and Cheney is saying that Donald Trump is a bigger threat to the Republic….than the Civil War was.

Between 620,000-750,000 deaths. Four years of bloody toil, struggle and death. The existence of the Republic teetering in the balance, its fate decided by civil war. The secession of 11 US States, with 2 more declaring secession but never fully under Confederate control. The literal existence of a broken Union and a Confederate alternative.

Jefferson Davis was less of a threat than Donald Trump? Really?

But perhaps its unfair to take Cheney rhetoric at all seriously and really look at the kind of threats you have to forget about or be completely historically ignorant about to believe what Cheney is saying?

Perhaps it’s a just a ‘bigly’ statement, like Trump’s when he strays into saying that everyone he likes is the greatest guy in the world?

Even there though, couldn’t we say its actually more dangerous and (well, well, well) divisive to cast a contemporary political rival as more of a threat than any war in US history (including the Civil War) than it is to be prone to bombastic statements about yourself and your allies? Aren’t the likes of Cheney supposed to be the moderate, responsible, and reasonable ones, the ones who use the careful, considered and expert approach and the language that goes with it?

On a rational level, for anyone who lived through both the Bush-Cheney administration and the Trump-Pence one, what Cheney says should immediately sound absurd.

What was there that Trump did in office that justifies this kind of rhetoric?

Perhaps he weaponized the Department of Justice and pursued all of his political rivals through the courts? Well no, although he has been the victim of that under the Biden-Harris administration.

Perhaps he rounded up hundreds or thousands of the supporters of his main political rival and put them in prison for years without trail, in secret facilities where they were tortured? No, he did not….although again this is what happened to Trump supporters following J6 under the Democrat Presidency that followed.

Perhaps he was a dangerous war-monger who launched wars on the basis of concocted or false evidence, costing trillions of US dollars and thousands of US lives? Well, no, because that’s the one EVERY US administration of modern times EXCEPT the Trump one can be charged with.

Cheney and Liz of course represent a political dynasty especially associated with the last of those things.

Dick Cheney was perhaps the chief architect of the War on Terror and the 2nd Iraq War following 9/11. Cheney was the leading Republican Hawk. Hardly surprising when his entire political career was funded by military contractors. Cheney served as the CEO of Halliburton, which received billions of dollars in US military contracts resulting from the perpetual war policy that Cheney advanced. In 2003, while Cheney was Vice President, a typical example of war profiteering saw the policies Cheney advocated lead directly to a 30 million dollar contract which Raytheon and a Halliburton subsidiary (KBR) both benefited from.

No single individual in US politics with the possible exception of the Democrat’s Victoria Nuland was more intimately and deeply connected with and the creature of the military industrial complex than Dick Cheney. No other Republicans other than John McCain and Lindsey Graham were more consistently pro war than Dick Cheney. Nobody was more likely to back a CIA regime change coup, no matter how reckless and stupid it might be. Nobody was quicker to demand US military intervention abroad.

Nobody was as deeply, personally, and reputationally tied to the terrible choices made immediately following 9/11 (even more than the Bush clan) than the Cheney family. Terrible choices which consisted of launching decades of pointless and expensive wars that were counter-productive for US security and influence, AND initiating that cycle of wars by going after a country that actually had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

And when one of them talks about threats to the Republic, we should recall this. So here is what The Atlantic said about Dick Cheney back in 2011:

“Dick Cheney’s role in the run-up to war was uniquely irresponsible and mendacious…the vice president became aware that no certain evidence existed of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…the vice president nevertheless proceeded to misrepresent the facts in his public statements, claiming that there was no doubt about the existence of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and that a full-scale nuclear program was known to exist.”

The Atlantic article (Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney, by Conor Friedersdorf) quotes above from even earlier sources (the 2007 article The People v.Richard Cheney by Wil. S. Hylton). In that, Hylton pointed out that Cheney had been supplied with a report from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, a National Intelligence Estimate compiled by the intelligence services, plus an addendum supplied by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research ALL describing the idea that Iraq possessed a nuclear program, a chemical weapons program or a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction as highly unlikely.

Cheney responded to these assessments with multiple declarations that all of these things existed and posed an immediate and credible threat to the US Republic. Receiving intelligence reports stating one thing, he publicly stated the exact opposite in order to get the US to go to war. His public commentary was as contrary to the truth and the best interests of the nation as the famous WMD dossier supplied by an equivalent war-hungry liar in the UK, Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell. Both Cheney and his UK counterparts were lying to Congress, to Parliament and to the world with information they knew to be fabricated and directly contrary to real threat assessments supplied to them.

In other words, he has some significant form in lying about threats to the Republic, AND he lied knowingly in ways that resulted in 20 years of US military engagement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and trillions of dollars of wasted US war spending…well, wasted if you wanted to see any benefits for the US, but not wasted if you were one of the military contractors funding Dick Cheney’s career.

For the military contractors and the military industrial complex, the war whore Cheney family were one of the best investments they ever made.

That of course is not the full extent of the pernicious and disastrous impact Cheney’s have had on US politics. Dick Cheney was not content with being just one of the biggest backers of the perpetual war policy that generated vast profits for his donors and sponsors.

Cheney was also one of the people working alongside the intelligence services to demand the huge post 9/11 expansion of those agencies (plus the creation of new ones), together with a whole infrastructure of constant surveillance of US citizens and constant monitoring of the activities of people with no terrorist links at all.

In a Time magazine piece Barton Gellman (author of the bestselling Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency) wrote this:

“Cheney had devised, and Bush approved, an NSA operation to monitor the phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens without a warrant, part of which later became known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. After more than two years of going along with “the vice president’s special program,” the Justice Department concluded that parts of it were illegal.”

While the Atlantic piece added the following:

“…it is beyond dispute that at Dick Cheney’s urging the federal government spied on millions of non-terrorist Americans without a warrant, and that Cheney wanted the program to continue even after it was declared illegal.”

All of this is pretty damning, and all of it comes from Globalist mainstream media sources.

But these are the same sources that now reconfigure the Cheney legacy. Since both are now owned by the same masters, they find each other much more palatable than they used to.

Because magazines like the Atlantic are no longer highly critical of the Cheney family. They aren’t publishing articles linking Dick Cheney to wars based on lies, or to CIA torture techniques such as water-boarding, or to the mass surveillance of US citizens in illegal ways.

Today, publications like The Atlantic maintain a silence on those things, and instead present Dick Cheney as a guy they might not have agreed with on everything, but nevertheless a serious statesman and a respectable figure with the best interests of the Republic at heart. Today, Dick is one of the good guys.

Liz Cheney, of course, is even more emblematic of the reversal both of the surface-level loyalties of the Cheney family and the attitude towards them from the Democrats and the mainstream media. Liz Cheney is the brave, courageous and principled Republican who set aside party loyalty for national loyalty. Liz Cheney was prepared to lose her seat to do what was right. Liz Cheney bravely and courageously served on the J6 Committee and Liz Cheney became one of the most vocally and persistently critical of Trump’s Republican opponents.

Like her father, Liz has made a habit of describing Trump as an existential threat that America may not survive.

Like her father, she’s happy to continue with that rhetoric immediately after the idea being expressed prompts a nearly successful assassination attempt on Trump.

What we see in all this is in reality a stunning set of reversals all tied to the same issues. It might be useful to list just how many reversals and inversions are going on here because it gives us a sense of what a confusing and startling period we are living through:

1. Donald Trump has moved from being a beloved Democrat to being a Republican hated by modern Democrats, including those who previously loved him the most.

2. Dick Cheney has moved from being a despised and loathed Republican Vice President to being a revered elder statesman who embodies the greatest civic virtues according to the Democrats who once hated him the most.

3. Perpetual war policies have moved from being ‘Republican greed’ to being Democrat ‘sensible foreign policy’.

4. The Democrat Party has become the War Party and the MAGA Republicans have become the Peace Party.

5. The Democrat Party has become the Intelligence Agencies friend, and the Intelligence Agencies have become the partisan agents of the Democrat Party.

6. The MAGA Republicans have become the champions of basic civil liberties while the Democrats are the Party of the censoring, monitoring, spying and imprisoning Police State.

7. Liz Cheney has moved from describing Kamala Harris as a huge threat to describing her as the salvation from the huge threat of Donald Trump.

8. And of course, the greatest reversal of all and the one used to justify the rest, which is that stealing the 2020 election is described as saving it from an attempted steal, and protesting against an illegal result obtained by breaking the Constitution is described as launching a failed insurrection.

In many ways the trajectory of the Cheney family has been the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s journey. Where he has gone from being celebrated to being hated by the Democrats, they have gone from being hated to being celebrated by the Democrats.

The key point of contention, the surface level explanation of why this happened and why Dick and Liz now endorse Harris and Waltz is the dishonest one they offer, which is that Trump’s behavior on J6 was shocking, vile and a departure from American norms. That J6 was an attempted violent overthrow of the US system.

But anyone sensible knows that is not true. The rally that became a (minor) riot was a peaceful and legal attempt to prevent a theft. What elements there were that were dangerous and that created violence were all created and orchestrated by the side that claimed to be the decent victims that day. The FBI encouraged violence, not Trump. The Democrats wanted violence in order to to rush through their theft. The capitol police were not killed, they were the killers. The protesters were not the architects of same great plot to steal power…they were the victims of it, as were all other honest voters. The violence that did come was not there because Trump wanted it…it was there because Democrats wanted it and got the police to fire tear gas at the crowd and beat and shoot unarmed J6ers.

The evidence of electoral fraud was immediate, obvious and overwhelming. Anyone genuinely interested in preserving the Republic from collapse (moral and practical) would have acknowledged that and allowed a legal process with a pause of certification (ie, what Trump was asking for). Honest authorities would have preferred THAT to an engineered riot and a rushed certification.

Instead, dishonest players who saw Trump as an existential threat (like the Cheney family, like the Democrats and like the intelligence agencies) cast stealing 2020 as a great noble deed and opposing that as a hideous moral crime.

Which leaves Cheney statements today about the threat Trump poses in the curious position of being both massive lies and secret truths. Because a second Trump term today is exactly what it was in 2020. A point at which the perpetual wars might end. A point at which the entire funding and corrupt donor support system, the Washington ecosystem that makes the Cheney’s rich, might be endangered.

When they call him a threat to the Republic they are lying if your idea of the Republic is the US Nation and its people. If the Republic is that thing which was born in the American Revolution their description is absurd.

But if by ‘the Republic’ you mean the interests of Washington DC, the precious and corrupt ecosystem of those paid by the military industrial complex, the perpetual war policy and the money that flows from that, the donors from that complex, the companies of that complex, the politicians of that complex….then it makes sense.

Because that’s the final reversal going on, the one by which a Cheney or a Pelosi will describe a threat to their interests as a threat to American interests and most especially do that when their interests are the REAL threat to American interests.