the 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.

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This 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.

What'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.

Yet he was surrounded by his family by the very end. Pretty much died under his conditions, unlike all the other lives he affected

> Imagine what an immortal tyrant could do to humanity...

I'd imagine an immortal tyrant would do nothing to humanity since humanity would be insignificant to him.

(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)

Straight from The Great Dictator.

"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."

The great equalizer

Until you learn it's not individuals, but groups of them with ideas that persist for multiple generations.

There'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.

Harry Whittington Apologizes for Getting Shot in the Face by Dick Cheney.

Thats real power.

What'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.

100yr from now shotgun buyers and sellers will still be cracking jokes about shooting lawyers.

I remember the “20 ways Dick Cheney can kill you” posters. Unbelievable energy.

Halliburton gave Cheney $34mil when he left the company to go be Vice President

War is a Racket - Smedley Butler

> Theres a high level of dislike for him probably justly earned.

Pretty much. At the same time, he didn't blow it all up. Cheney sits in the same class as figures like Kissinger. You can view them as Machiavellian overlords doing terrible things in pursuit of their personal agendas, sure.

But those agendas turn out... maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight? I'm not saying the Iraq war wasn't a terrible mistake or that the end result of the fighting in Vietnam was worth the horrifying suffering of its people. But the post-war and post-cold-war USA hegemony was defined by a single nation with a strong executive able to wield these terrible powers to terrible effect, with really very little check on its external (or internal) actions.

And, again, they didn't blow it all up. And I think that counts for something. Especially in the current climate where we're looking at a much less temperate regime actively trying to blow it all up.

I guess I'm saying that I'd trust Cheney with the buttons and levers and know that my kids could fix what he broke. I'm not so confident now.

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His daughter Liz is keeping the love for war going.

His company Haliburton also was the supplier for the Vietnam war.

The quintessential example of the military industrial complex.

I 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.

War profiteering seems like a plank of the Republican party both pre-Trump and within the Trump era.

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What bias? Looks pretty neutral to me.

I 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.

His 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.

You'd think so, but somehow I doubt it.

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> 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 :) )

It’s natural for people to care more about things that directly affect them.

Castro was in a foreign country I’ve never been to, and did most of his stuff before I was even born. His death was largely a realization that somebody from the history books had still been alive.

Cheney, in contrast, fucked with my home while I was an adult. He and his cabal did massive damage to my country very recently. I’m not going to make travel arrangements to visit his grave so I can piss on it, but I am tempted to.

What exactly do you want to say in here? The Castro is called evil a lot in that discussion. Welch is criticized. People here right now seem to complain about Cheney.

Jack 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 :-/

Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.

Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.

I'd say the assessments are accurate. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

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Yeah, but Cheney's an interesting one especially here.

Probably a lot of permanent D.C. types lost track of whether to lionize or demonize the man in public (they always loved him privately)

Oh, what a tangled web ...