The Worst of Them All

The death of Dick Cheney and his enduring legacy of suffering.

For almost the entirety of the global and historical world population, shooting your friend in the face would rank as the worst thing one could do; for Dick Cheney, it doesn’t even rank in the top ten. While the singular impact of any individual, however prominent, is almost universally overstated, Cheney represents the rare figure that has done unique harm to the world. His death in his mid-eighties, surrounded by family, with his daughter established as a welcome figure in mainstream politics, represents a deep failure of anyone in power who politically opposed him.

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of Cheney’s legacy is of course the Iraq War. Besides serving as one of the most vocal advocates for further Middle East incursion, long before he appointment himself as George W. Bush’s vice president, Cheney’s primary contribution was to continually manipulate intelligence reports to manufacture consent among a very willing media class, and reluctant public. Some dismiss this as aspect as unnecessary, because under the succeeding administrators little effort was needed for similar military action, but that was the case in part because of Cheney’s efforts to set this precedent. Forever War exists in part because Dick Cheney made it a fundamental part of the politics.

The necessary encroachments on executive power, now quaint in comparison to modern presidents, to continually justify the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are similarly a part of Cheney’s enduring legacy. His expansion of power, and willingness to push the Bush administration go around congress, paved the way for the erosion of some of the few barriers that served to at least slow the creep of fascism in the United States. His near obsession with secrecy also made opaque some of the crucial mechanisms of executive governance that laid the ground work for further expansions to happen as part of the natural flow of politics, rather than as a deliberate intrusion into the existing infrastructure.

Both domestically and internationally, there was a near complete annihilation of even a pretense of civil liberty or due process. Torture and often violent suppression became so normalized that the heated protests of the 2000s in the lead up to both of the key wars by the Bush administration were slowly replaced with planned demonstrations in pre-agreed upon locations. The type of spontaneous disobedience was so successfully pushed back on, the mistreatment of foreign combatants, a term still poorly defined, that these norms were soon adopted by the opposition party. Cheney made the cruelty of empire nearly impossible oppose within the existing political infrastructure.

While any one of these should secure Cheney’s place in history as a uniquely damaging figure, what will make him appear genocidal is his now oft forgotten Energy Task Force. The melding of the private sector’s energy industry with the federal government, something happily embraced by Obama, Trump, and Biden, secured the most devastating impacts of global warming as inevitable. There is no consequence, even death, that future generations would have seen is sufficient for Cheney; the fact that he suffered no consequence at all, should deem the rest of the country as liable.

Many of the contradictions and cruelties revealed in the last decade have been attributed to Trump, however it’s the George W. Bush administration, lead by Dick Cheney, that set the precedents. In his death, his final escape from any justice or accountability, his daughter a sought after endorsement from the party that ostensibly opposed him, the failure of the American political system to self-correct is made clear. It must be corrected.