If you’re going to compare him to trump, well, gee whiz, what a nice guy!
Fuck that dead hearted bastard. He should have died in a supermax (or Gitmo) for war crimes. Being better than trump doesn’t excuse what Darth Cheney did to this country. If anything, he paved the road for trump.
Flags should be flown at double-high staff.
Burn his corpse, piss on the ashes, and burn them again.
Yeah, someone being “better than Trump” is a low, low, low bar to clear. You can a vile, disgusting human being and still be better than Trump.
The humor is tempered only by the truthfulness of that statement.
He’s been “more machine than man”, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, for a long time now; “Twisted and evil”.
Not so odd; he was a fierce neoconservative in the unapologetic post-Reaganism mold, determined to bring peace and (US-friendly pseudo democracy) to every oil-rich nation on the planet even if it meant killing large swaths of the population to do it. The destruction of infrastructure was regrettable but Halliburton is standing by to bring emergency resources to the rescue…for a price. While he shared a certain sense of venality with Trump, pretty much everything else about his worldview and the place of the United States is orthogonal to “MAGA” and I’m sure he reviled in the utter incompetence of Trump’s nominees as even more bumbling than Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks.
As for “talking smack” about Cheney, the above observations aside, I think I said everything about him I needed to say while we was alive (or at least in a state of “not quite dead”) and I can only imagine needing to say more in the case that someone nominates him for a Nobel Peace Prize or sings his praises as a facilitator of international harmony and cooperation. I’m saving up my Cheney-themed invective for daughter Liz when she tries to return to the public sphere in a post-Trump push to shape this burgeoning autocracy in her own inimicable style based upon the family legacy.
Stranger
So I once did a research paper on private military contractors, which included this bit of trivia.
after the end of the first gulf war, Halliburton approached the government about privatizing much of our military logistics. Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense, paid them something like $12 million to conduct a feasibility study, after which Halliburton determined that, yes, privatizing military contracts was a really good idea, but they were the only ones who could provide those services.
Sec Def Cheney then facilities them getting an exclusive contract, where they are guaranteed to earn a profit above their costs. Cheney then leaves office and becomes CEO of Halliburton.
During his time as CEO Halliburton loses its contracts because of price gouging.
Cheney then becomes Vice President. Halliburton gets back its deals with the government, which were substantial, what with the invading Iraq and all.
Graft and corruption at its finest.
Obi Wan said this in the company and in the hearing of R2D2 and C3PO. If I were them, I’d be grossly insulted.
It’s not as if anyone in the Star Wars films seems to give a flip about the ‘inalienable rights’ of clearly sentient and machine intelligences. At best, they get kind of attached to a useful and devoted chirpy little droid but are otherwise indifferent to how androids and robots are treated, putting them in harms way and even using them as purpose-built robot forces fighting enslaved clone armies fighting a war between softskins who believe in mystical powers and ghosts. The Star Wars movies, if you think too hard about them, are a kind of horrorshow of fascist, racist, genocidal forces who conduct warfare which results in the destruction of entire planets or ecological devastation of flourishing forest-moons with native populations of sapient species, and the Rebellion comes of just slightly better than the Empire, especially in the full context of the prequels.
Stranger
Guy was a rebel to the system, privatizing post-apocalyptic development schemes. Still just as big of a piece of shit, wannabe modern Isabella.
I appreciate this thread. I’d seen the headline and not thought too much about it, but thanks to this I paused and took a moment of quiet reflection to gloat about outliving the motherfucker. We must seek joy where we find it. I only wish he could have lived to see Mamdani elected.