Dick Cheney Changed American Politics Forever. And Not for the Better.

"CNN has begun the soft-pedaling of his resume, calling him: ... America's most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the war on terror,' who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions. God, that's a pretty egregious misspelling of made the United States into a country that routinely tortures people and then lied the country into a destructive war that solved nothing but cost the lives of almost 5,000 Americans and God knows how many Iraqis."

"Oh, please. Cheney literally laid every brick in the foundation of every anti-democratic excess committed by the current president. And it didn't start with the attacks of September 11, 2001, either. For that, you have to go back to 1987, when Cheney was in Congress, and when he was the primary mole on the joint congressional committee charged with investigating the Reagan administration's crimes in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal."

"In his final years, however, Cheney, still a hardline conservative, nevertheless became largely ostracized from his party over his intense criticism of President Donald Trump whom he branded a coward and the greatest-ever threat to the republic. In an ironic coda to a storied political career, he cast his final vote in a presidential election in 2024 for a liberal Democrat, and fellow member of the vice president's club, Kamala Harris, in a reflection of how the populist GOP had turned against his traditional conservatism."

Richard Cheney served as vice president from 2001 to 2009 and became a dominant, polarizing force in Washington. He was a chief architect of the war on terror and helped lead the United States into the ill-fated Iraq War on faulty assumptions. His policies contributed to the institutionalization of torture and deception that cost nearly 5,000 American lives and many more Iraqi lives. Cheney’s push for expanded presidential power traced back to his 1987 role on the Iran-Contra investigatory committee and the minority report he authored. In later years he criticized Donald Trump, was ostracized by the populist GOP, and voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.

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