Dick Cheney tried to repent, but make no mistake: He’s still the villain in your history

Liberals and progressives might be struggling with how to process the death of former vice president Dick Cheney, 84, the architect of the disastrous U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early ’aughts, who appeared to have come around in his final years, following the lead of his daughter, Liz, as a vocal critic of Donald Trump.

You might be inclined to forgive Dick Cheney for Afghanistan, Iraq, the never-ending War on Terror, the groundwork he helped lay down toward dismantling our constitutional system of checks of balances that the Trumpers are using to try to rewire our democratic republic into a cult of personality, because at the end, bless his heart, he repented.

It sure took him awhile – Cheney supported Trump in 2016, praised the disastrous move by Trump to get out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, and only began drifting away from the MAGAs when he decided that he didn’t like Trump’s approach to foreign policy, famously dissing Trump as having “more in common with Obama’s foreign policy than traditional Republican foreign policy.”

Seems Dick Cheney only came to see the light when the Trumpers turned their sights on Liz Cheney – Donald Trump endorsed her opponent in a 2022 Republican congressional primary, which Liz Cheney went on to lose, badly.

Some of us want to view Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president last year as Darth Vader joining the Rebel Alliance, but, no, no, no.

With apologies to Hamilton, Dick Cheney is the villain in your history here.

There is no Donald Trump without two people doing what they did to further their own narrow self-interests – Dick Cheney, scheming with Karl Rove to use 9/11 to create a “permanent Republican majority,” and John McCain, trailing Barack Obama badly in the summertime polls in 2008, making the head-scratching move to select as his running mate one Sarah Palin, and in the process, elevating the Know-Nothing wing of the Republican Party, which formed the backbone of the MAGA movement that was to come.

I feel the same way about McCain that I do about Cheney – that we give McCain too much credit for styling himself a “maverick” and the thumbs-down he gave to the vote that would have killed the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

Both of those guys sold us out in pursuit of personal ambition.

Their too-little, too-late attempts to make amends ring hollow now, considering the damage done by their selfishness, that can’t be undone.