The Cheneys that Bind Harris
Cheney and Kamala Sittin' in a Tree....
It would be hard to find a less likeable political figure than Dick Cheney. Not even his daughter—who in kinder social media rants is frequently compared to Miss Piggy for her blond bob haircut—can match the old man in sheer dislikability. Serving many terms as United States Representative of Wyoming, Cheney eventually clawed his way to the Vice Presidency under George W. Bush, but when he had to pack up his things and leave D.C. when the term was over, his popularity was 13%, certainly one of the lowest ever recorded. Considering how many millionaires he made in D.C., mathematically that means that 0 people liked him except the ones he made rich. Cheney is mainly remembered as the guy who stirred everyone up to get us involved in the War on Iraq, searching for those terrible weapons of mass destruction that proved to be as elusive as Big Foot. The war was a huge mistake, but it made Cheney rich, so he’s happy. And now Kamala is happy for him.
Cheney is also remembered by more iconoclastic political mavens as the sitting vice president who shot a man while dove hunting in Texas. (This is not a unique honor; Aaron Burr was a sitting vice president when he shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. The difference is that Hamilton knew Burr was trying to shoot him.) In the Cheney case, the victim, 78-year-old Harry Whittington, was shot in a hunting accident. Cheney allegedly tried to shoot at some doves and shot Whittington in the face and upper chest. Whittington was wearing a bright orange hunting vest at the time. The accident occurred on February 11, 2006 and a few days later, Whittington went to the hospital for a heart attack caused by some of the pellets lodging near his heart. (He had about 200 pellets lodged in his face and upper body.) Whittington survived and was mum about the incident until near the time of his death on February 2023 when he went on record to state that while he realized Cheney shot him by accident, Cheney had never once apologized to him for his negligence. Cheney broke two major rules in hunting and was absolutely 100% at fault for the shooting, even if it was not intentional. (The two rules: you never shoot at a bird unless you can see blue sky underneath the target. The other rule, you never shoot at a person even if he is standing near a bird on the ground.)
Dick Cheney had Secret Service protection at the time. I wonder if they have protocols to keep their protectees from shooting people? Apparently not. Even so, Cheney the father, like Cheney the daughter, were never ones to be bothered about the rules. Liz Cheney, who also endorsed Harris suborned perjury in the January 6 Select Committee kangaroo court by coercing Cassidy Hutchins to testify to a looney-tunes story about Trump overpowering a Secret Service agent in a moving vehicle. Neither Liz or Dick Cheney care much about rules—they’re for the little people.
Dick Cheney is the neocon’s neocon. His professional ties to Halliburton taught him that war was a great business model, providing you waged war cheaply and prolonged the conflict as long as possible. That’s why Cheney liked to work the political side of the war business as well as the financial side.
Under Vice President Dick Cheney, the United States practiced an active campaign of torture of political enemies. Since a lot of this is cloak-and-dagger stuff, we cannot really say if Cheney started or revived torture as a U.S. policy, but he certainly did enjoy it. Torture became one of the pillars of U.S. foreign policy starting with Dick Cheney, which is why the very name Cheney is repugnant to so many people, both Republicans and Democrats.
Both Liz and Dick Cheney recently endorsed Kamala Harris for President. Instead of running away from these endorsements like a person fleeing from an angry skunk, Kamala rejoiced. It is almost as if she considered Dick and Liz Cheney her kind of people.
Still, it came as a surprise when Kamala advertised this support; having Cheney in your corner is sort of like having Puff Diddy support you. (Another story for another day…)
Kamala and the Cheneys share an important political ideology, namely the convenient flip-flop. That is, they state one policy until it becomes too ugly or unfavorable to hold that position, whereupon they simply reverse the position and act like they never supported the opposite. They easily make a 180-degree change without repudiating their prior position. Kamala Harris said in 2019 that there is “no question I am against fracking.” In 2024, she said she would allow fracking and she acted flummoxed that there was even a shred of confusion about this. She thought everyone knew she was unrelenting and unwavering in her pro-fracking stand. She refuses to revisit the past or explain the flip-flop. Kamala has always been the Queen of Fracking and it is heresy and maybe treason to say otherwise.
Every day is a new set of policies for Kamala. I guess that’s why she’s always rambling on about “unburdened by what has been.” If anyone is unburdened by their past, it’s Kamala.
Same with Dick Cheney. In 1978, Cheney voted against making Martin Luther King (MLK) Day a national holiday, but in 1983, when the holiday proved popular, he decided he was for it. He never said another word about being against it; he acted like he had been the leader of the MLK parade all along.
Way back when, Representative Dick Cheney in Congress did not want to impose sanctions on South Africa for apartheid, but later excused his pro-apartheid stance as being anti-sanction rather than being pro-apartheid. In other words, he was always against apartheid, he just didn’t like sanctions. Very in tune with the Kamala vibe—take a stand and then see what the prevailing opinion is and adjust. (And just for the record, the same kind of guy who would vote down MLK day is the exact kind of guy who embraces apartheid.)
Dick Cheney was in power during the era of the Soviet Union, which he wanted to see dissolved. But it went beyond the political system—he wanted Russia torn apart. Cheney literally wanted us to invade and hack up Russia into pieces, just because he thought it would be fun (maybe he could torture some people). Then when this proved politically unpopular—as many psychopathic policies do—he was OK with letting Russia survive.
And it was Dick Cheney who convinced the Saudis to let the U.S. build military bases in Saudi Arabia. For a war monger like Cheney, this made perfect sense—he had his pig-like eyes on a Middle Eastern war, and he was building up bases to fight a long endless war that would make him a lot of money. (Cheney always lived a double life; his other career was running large military-industrial type businesses, like Halliburton.) However, some people objected to letting the U.S. establish a military presence in Saudi Arabia, particularly since there was no reason to do this other than to launch a neocon war. You may have heard of one of those guys who took umbrage at this—his name was Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden had a strenuous religious objection to building military bases near holy sites and cities in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden likely also had political objections (Bin Laden was a Saudi citizen at the time). But Cheney enjoyed stoking up international conflict; he is the epitome of the neocon bully, the ugly American.
And just so you don’t think this was some isolated incident of being up to no good, it was under Cheney that the United States invaded Panama and deposed its leader, Manuel Noriega. The U.S., led by Cheney, invaded a sovereign nation (something for which we condemn Russia), took Noriega into custody, and brought him to Miami and tried him as being a drug dealer. He got locked up in 1990 and in 1992 was sentenced to 40 years. He’s still in prison in Miami. It’s hard to keep up with all the damage Dick Cheney did in countries where he had no business being.
Can you imagine if some foreign power invaded the U.S. and hauled Biden off in handcuffs and charged him with drug dealing? Imagine if China or Russia or India sentenced Biden to 40 years in some foreign prison? I like Biden less than the average person, but that would annoy me. And looking at what we did to Noriega for drug trafficking, I wonder why we’re currently A-OK with allowing unlimited amounts of fentanyl to come over the border. (But that’s another story for another day.)
And in 1991, it was Cheney who sent over U.S. troops to Somalia, ostensibly to deliver humanitarian aid but with a heaping side dish of “security,” which meant military activity. The list goes on. Cheney never met a war he didn’t like and the Democrats never saw a war they couldn’t make money from.
I bet if you threw a nickel on the floor of Congress, the first person who would make a nosedive to scoop it up would be a Democrat. Then he or she would lie and say, “There wasn’t any nickel there, what are you talking about?”
Cheney always had parallel careers, one foot in politics and one foot in making the supplies to feed the war machine his politics demanded. Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, which benefited from government contracts. When he retired in 2000 from Halliburton, his net worth was pegged as high as $86M, most of which was earned during his tenure at Halliburton. Adjusted to 2024, that’s approximately $158M. Not bad for five years’ work. In fact, it works out to $32M a year or over $3,600 an hour based on a 24/7 workweek.
Kamala goes to sleep at night dreaming about numbers like that.
Despite all of her alleged joyful vibes, Kamala Harris appears to have a war-loving spirit. The Biden/Harris regime inherited world peace, and now in a mere 3.5 years Biden/Harris have
Serious conflicts in the Middle East (the Hezbollah attack on Israel on October 7, 2023)
American hostages in Israel from October 7, 2023
Americans never rescued out of Afghanistan
The Houthi pirates closing down the Suez Canal and bombing ships (including our ships)
The war in Ukraine, which started under Biden/Harris who are unable to manage any diplomatic efforts to end the conflict apart from shipping Zelekenskyy hundreds of billions of dollars every few months
Iran gearing up for war with Israel or maybe vice versa
Serious “unrest” bordering on war in Chad
Ongoing skirmishes in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda
The collapse of the government of Haiti
Mexico dissolving into a narco-state
China licking its lips over Taiwan
Chinese warships sailing dangerously close to Alaska
Russia, with more nuclear warheads than the United States and China combined, making vague threats about using them
The Doomsday Clock reset to the most dangerous level in history, meaning World War III is imminent
While the Biden/Harris regime seems very adept at allowing such wars to start and doing all they can to egg the wars on, Harris is singularly disinterested in any sort of efforts at stopping them or even mitigating the damage. In fact, she seems to enjoy fanning the flames of war. She’s like Dick Cheney—she enjoys war. It must make her happy. (If it didn’t, why doesn’t she try to end these conflicts?)
Dick Cheney was a vice president under George W. Bush and enjoyed the reputation of being that rarest of rare figures—the powerful vice president. Harris, for her part, might better be characterized as the weakest vice president to have ever lived. She practically disappeared into the wallpaper during most of her term as vice president, rarely doing anything. In fact, she became famous for doing nothing when she failed after being put in charge of the Southern border, getting high-speed internet to rural communities, our space program, artificial intelligence, and no doubt many other things. Kamala had and maintains a perfect record of doing nothing. In fact, Kamala does not even fire people. She has had nearly 100% turnover in her staff while she was vice president, but she does not fire people. She just makes life so unbearable that they quit, likely running out of the room screaming. Talk about being lazy! Even now, running for office, she refuses to give interviews. Why? That’s what candidates are supposed to do and Kamala never does what the job requires. Whatever the job requires, that is specifically and exactly what Kamala will not do.
Imagine how Dick Cheney could have ruled the world and driven it into catastrophe with a president like Harris! No wonder he likes her! To Cheney, a committed do-nothing President would have been his ideal. Maybe he’s angling for a job behind-the-scenes with Kamala. He knows she’s always had a weakness for older men.
Kamala was a do-nothing vice president who is campaigning on the promise of doing even less as president. That is why Cheney endorsed her—he likes weak presidents and he probably hopes to be one of the guys who manipulates her. He probably figures that Kamala can sit back in the White House and day-drink herself into a stupor every day while more powerful men behind the scenes wage war and make profits.
I suspect that Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris was supposed to be a slap in the face to Donald Trump. I don’t know what Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris was supposed to be—maybe a cry for help. But somebody forgot to tell Dick Cheney that Trump no longer works for the neocon party, he represents MAGA and MAGA is no more neocon than they are Democrat or Whigs or Gays for Gaza. In fact, if you were to lay out all the political ideologies right now, MAGA stands alone. The neocons are now more closely aligned with the Democrats and the Democrats are smooching the neocons. (In case you don’t know, neocons are interventionist elitists. They are elite oligarchs who want to make war anywhere and everywhere to get rich.)
Shocking to me that Kamala Harris is boasting about getting a big fat thumbs-up from Dick Cheney, but it also doesn’t make sense to me how she’s the nominee when she never even got one vote while screaming that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. The Democrats have become an enigma clothed in a mystery wrapped in bacon.
Neocon bacon.