According to FBI records, the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history was a Georgia man named Samuel Little. After his arrest in 2012, Little confessed to murdering 93 people over a 35-year time period—nearly all of them women, most of them by strangulation. His crimes were truly gruesome, and they’re difficult to read about. But compared to the violence Dick Cheney has unleashed on the world, Little was strictly an amateur.
Cheney resurfaced into the public eye last Friday when he announced—shortly after his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney—that he’ll be voting for Kamala Harris in November. Explaining his decision, he said that “In our nation’s 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” who “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence” and “can never be trusted with power again.” Of course, it’s a little rich for Cheney to say he cares about the legitimacy of U.S. democracy, since he and George W. Bush lost in 2000, but still got into office after the Supreme Court prevented a recount. But nevertheless, Cheney says everyone has a “duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution” now, encouraging his fellow Republicans to join him in voting for Harris to keep Trump out of power. This isn’t a complete surprise. Two years ago, Cheney used the same line about Trump being a “threat to our republic” in a campaign ad for his daughter, who had presided over the January 6 hearings and was running for reelection to the House of Representatives. (She lost.) But for Cheney to actually endorse the Democratic candidate in a presidential race is a step further. For those of us who grew up when he was Vice President in the 2000s, it’s slightly surreal.
Cheney is right about one thing: Donald Trump really is a menace. Among other things, he wants to deport 15 million people—a move which journalist Radley Balko has concluded would most likely bankrupt the country, apart from the obvious suffering it would inflict on immigrants themselves. His tariff plan is disastrous, his rhetoric about transgender people is vile, and he’s a full-on climate change denier. In Democratic circles especially, the idea of a second Trump presidency as an apocalyptic threat has become widespread—and thus, principles have evaporated, and several prominent Democrats have welcomed Dick Cheney’s support. Kamala Harris herself said on September 7 that she’s “honored” to receive his endorsement. Bernie Sanders, who ought to know better, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that “I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy,” even though he insists that “[Dick] Cheney and I agree on nothing.” The idea appears to be that, although Cheney is a committed conservative, he’s ultimately an honorable American statesman (unlike the “threatening” Trump), and that all other differences are just “partisanship” that should be set aside.
But the old adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” isn’t always true, and Dick Cheney is guilty of crimes that can never be set aside. Since he left office with his co-conspirator George W. Bush in January 2009, it seems there’s been a degree of historical amnesia about Cheney and his record. Some of our younger readers, in fact, might not have been alive during the U.S. invasion of Iraq—the act that Noam Chomsky calls “the worst crime of the 21st century,” and which Cheney played a crucial role in committing. It was Cheney, along with Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who deliberately lied to the American public in order to secure support for that invasion. It was Cheney who said in 2002 that there was “no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” despite there being no actual evidence for the claim (which we now know to be false.) It was Cheney who insisted there was “overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government,” an outright lie. There was no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, and no WMDs. But that didn’t stop the bombs from falling.
One of the signature protest slogans of the 2000s was “Bush Lied, People Died,” but we might say “Cheney Lied” and be just as accurate. Every Iraqi who lost a loved one or a home during the war can lay their loss directly at Cheney’s feet, and the victims number in the hundreds of thousands. In the initial 2003 invasion alone, the U.S. and Britain dropped an estimated 29,199 bombs on Iraq, causing what Human Rights Watch describes as “significant civilian casualties.” That’s an understatement. Altogether, a 2006 study by U.S. and Iraqi researchers placed the civilian death toll from the war at more than 600,000—and the war wouldn’t end until December of 2011, five years after that figure was calculated. Other estimates vary, with a more conservative count from the University of Washington finding “with 95 percent certainty, that there were some 461,000 more deaths during the study period [from 2003 to 2011] than would have occurred naturally.” In either case, the result is the same: wave upon wave of death. Rubble and graves as far as the eye can see. There’s also the devastating environmental legacy, which lingers even today: “burn pits” that belched toxic fumes, potentially cancer-causing depleted uranium munitions, and a dozen other horrors.
It’s not merely that Cheney helped to start this hideous war. Beyond that, he made sure it was fought with surpassing cruelty. As his biographer Barton Gellman writes, the Vice President was the driving force behind the Bush administration’s worst excesses:
Cheney freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that the government had to shake off old habits of self-restraint. […] With Bush's consent, Cheney unleashed foreign intelligence agencies to spy at home. He gave them legal cover to conduct what he called 'robust interrogation' of captured enemies, using calculated cruelty to break their will. At Cheney's initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established rights under domestic and international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House ownership.
“Robust interrogation” is a polite term for torture, and Cheney was an enthusiastic supporter of it. In the case of Gul Rahman, a prisoner from Afghanistan who was taken to a CIA “black site” and chained to the floor until he froze to death, Cheney is on record saying that “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.” (CIA records also say that Rahman was innocent, a case of mistaken identity.) Even today, Cheney is completely unrepentant about his role in creating the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program, saying in 2014 that “it worked” and that “I’d do it again in a minute.” He broke the most basic laws of war, violated the most fundamental human rights, and caused the nightmare of Abu Ghraib to take place—and he’s proud of it. As I say, Samuel Little and his 93 victims pale in comparison.
What’s more, it isn’t even possible to say that Cheney is a “decent” person, the adjective that’s constantly trotted out for Joe Biden. By all accounts, he seems to be just as personally loathsome as his wartime actions would indicate. When he received a life-saving heart transplant in 2013, he quickly moved on, dismissing any idea that he should care about the donor or their life:
For the family of the donor, they'd just been [through] some terrible tragedy, they'd lost a family member. Can't tell why, obviously, when you don't know the details, but the way I think of it from a psychological standpoint is that it’s my new heart, not someone else’s old heart. And I always thank the donor, generically thank donors for the gift that I’ve been given, but I don’t spend time wondering who had it, what they’d done, what kind of person [they were].
The transplant forms one of the most chilling scenes in Adam McKay’s 2018 film Vice, about Cheney’s life, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a moment of stunning callousness: another human being dies, Cheney’s life is saved as a result, and his response is to say he doesn’t “spend time wondering” about it. To insist that the heart is his, not anyone else’s. What kind of person could say something like that? Probably the kind who could decimate Iraq and not blink twice. Probably the kind you don’t want within ten miles of you, no matter the reason.
Candidates for office can’t control who endorses them. But they can control how they respond. Back in 2020, the white supremacist Richard Spencer endorsed Joe Biden for president, likely in an attempt to troll the campaign—and Biden’s team immediately rejected his support, with spokesperson Andrew Bates calling Spencer “absolutely repugnant” and “10,000% unwelcome here.” That would have been the proper response to Cheney, who is a far more insidious figure than Spencer ever dreamed of being. Instead, Kamala Harris and her advisors have chosen to welcome Cheney into the Democratic Party’s “big tent,” which seems to have endless room for right-wing monsters, but precious little for leftists. Now, the question becomes: if you accept Dick Cheney’s help to win an election, whose support won’t you accept? Where is the moral floor?
The theory, as one political strategist recently put it, seems to be that Cheney’s endorsement will create a “permission structure for Republicans and independents who may have stayed home to come out and vote for [Harris.]” That may be true. It may also be a huge miscalculation, because having Cheney on the Democratic team could allow Trump to paint himself as an anti-establishment and anti-war figure more effectively. (Remember, criticizing the war in Iraq was a significant part of his 2016 run.) Either way, it says something disturbing about Harris’s campaign, and about the Democratic Party’s current platform, that Cheney would be willing to back them in the first place. That he didn’t find any policy or principle that clashed too heavily with his own. But then, Harris hasn’t shown too many moral qualms about the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, and she’s been going around promising to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Maybe she and Dick aren’t so far apart after all.
