War Crimes and Misdemeanors

By Mark Rock

The Democratic Party’s Newfound Love for Dick Cheney is the Perfect Capstone on America’s Political Realignment

Red vs. Blue: A Grand Delusion

Last May, The Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed written by HBO Real Time host Bill Maher. Entitled “Red and Blue America Can’t Just Go Their Separate Ways,” the editorial opines that, “Every state is basically purple, so we have to figure out how to avoid letting politics define us.” Maher seems genuinely distressed by the apparent inability of everyone to just set aside their differences and play nice in today’s more aware, woke world.

For those who watch his show, it’s clear that the once brash liberal seems, as of late, always on the verge of leaping from his rarified position as a darling of the American Left to some kind of more rational middle ground – and is clearly growing frustrated by the increasingly dwindling possibility of such a soft landing.

He hasn’t given up, however.

As he explains, there are over three million Biden voters in Texas and over four million Trump voters in California: Not only are there red and blue voters living in the same neighborhood and sending their kids to the same school, but they may also even share the same household. He concludes by admonishing us to be more polite and understanding in our political discourse.

In the next breath, he characterizes those who support Trump as “a bunch of mouth breathers, knuckle draggers and Bible thumpers.” Is he being deliberately ironic? It’s hard to know, but if he is, it is much less so in terms of the fine border he might draw between satire and hypocrisy than it is for his naiveté about where the lines between Americans are actually drawn. 

Once the veneer is peeled back, it’s pretty clear that ideology has precious little to do with what’s playing out in today’s politics: In place of traditional leftist values, we now have sham progressivism, and in place of traditional conservatism we have the sort of isolated, uncultured imbecility Maher alleges defines tens of millions of Trump voters. Such cartoonish dichotomies were always somewhat uninspired and naive, but today they’re just daft – and anyone still subscribing to them, equally so (sorry, Bill).

The Hated Dick Cheney Becomes Democrat Darling

Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Democrats’ newfound love for Dick Cheney. George W. Bush’s two-term Vice President’s greatest legacy consists of having been the primary architect of interminable, pointless foreign adventures in which ghastly numbers of people were killed. As part of this gruesome quest, Cheney portrayed Saddam Hussein as a self-proclaimed nuclear-armed existential threat to the United States, in order to justify invading Iraq and toppling its government. By conservative estimates, the subsequent Iraq war and occupation resulted in 4,492 American deaths, 200,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, and cost American taxpayers 728 billon dollars (these figures do not include the wider wars in Afghanistan and Syria, the cost of which well exceeds one trillion dollars, and doesn’t include the countless additional American and civilian deaths from these conflicts). 

With warm-hearted enthusiasm, both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have embraced Dick Cheney’s endorsement of their candidacies and have welcomed him into their campaign. “I’m honored”, said Harris on learning of Cheney’s vision for America having found common ground with her own.

It’s awkward enough that sincere, civically minded former Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy are defecting from their Party en masse to support Trump; now Democrats must smile and nod as their hastily installed candidate plays footsies with one of their previously most hated Republicans of all time. 

That Harris – a politician who herself operates on the margins of likability – would be “honored” to be affiliated with a man whose very name is synonymous with war and torture must be a heady development for anyone who still regards the Democrats as the party of peace.

Trump’s Era of Peace and Prosperity

By contrast, Donald Trump, during his first term, was the only president in decades to either not start a new war or expand an existing one. Moreover, Trump’s send up of the Bush Administration during the 2016 Republican debates, during which he called out the Iraq debacle and the fallacies it was founded on, earned him resounding boos from the neocons in the crowd – and accolades from war-weary Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike.

Naturally, the Harris campaign is capitalizing on Cheney’s abdication of Republican loyalty as prima facie evidence that Trump is a danger to our Republic – as Cheney would say, an existential threat – just like Iraq (maybe the Harris-Cheney alliance would like to challenge Maher for first place in championing the perversely discordant).

Cheney does have reason to be nervous: a re-elected Trump’s opposition to the Republican war machine of yesteryear could have Nuremberg-like consequences for those still rolling around in their Halliburton tallow. Entire books have been written about the prosecution of de facto war criminals, after all.

Already against the wall for their unapologetic and transparent bias in favor of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, both of whom had beaten the drums for going to war and had voted accordingly, the media has no idea what to do with any of this dissonance. Having spent the past eight years advancing a ceaseless, propagandistic immolation of Trump, we can count on the likes of MSNBC, CNN, and the Atlantic Monthly to dismiss, with unconvincing, pedestrian excuses, that which can no longer be seen as a benign contradiction (“Dick Cheney voting for Kamala Harris? Trump is just that bad!” offers USA Today).

In so doing, today’s media offers little more than an intractable ride to a place that fewer and fewer people want to go: When was the last time a New York Times reporter didn’t twist a Democratic endorsement from some revolting Republican stalwart into anything other than a sublime awakening?

It’s enough to make any self-respecting, genuine liberal hold his nose and vote for someone who may have listed (perfectly legal) non-disclosure agreements in the wrong column, even if such misdemeanor clerical errors were transformed into felonies via the legal gymnastics of establishment aligned partisan prosecutors. 

Like many ultimately beneficent events in American history, this is painful to go through. Still, it’s for our own good, as we can no longer ignore just how much we’ve been swallowing up until now.

The sand we play in may be purple, but the color feared by Cheney and others with the most to lose is the red on the pill millions of Americans have been treated to in the last eight years. For all his professed disdain for Trump, it’s hard to imagine that Bill Maher would rather share the sandbox with Dick Cheney any more today than he would have twenty years ago simply because Cheney is now adorned in a blue turncoat.