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Semafor Nov 5, 2025

Trump silent on Carlson's Fuentes interview amid blowback

Common Dreams Nov 5, 2025

To the Long Hopeful Query, Is He Dead Yet? Yes.

Variously dubbed Darth Vader, the Prince of Darkness and "one of the most evil people to exist in modern history," Dick Cheney, the lying, blood-stained architect of America's calamitous War on Terror, brutal torture program and an Imperial Presidency that today still afflicts us has died "after a lifetime of people wishing he had died sooner" - and in a prison cell. The consensus on a war criminal who faced no punishment and expressed no remorse: "No hell is hot enough or eternal enough."The long-awaited death of Cheney, at 84, resists all but the most groveling and dissonant of the hagiographies that often greet the demise of contentious figures; in Cheney's case, much like Kissinger's, schadenfreude rules the day. After years of harsh mock headlines - "Cheney Is Still Undead" - and a website that daily asked, and answered, "Is Cheney Dead Yet?", the actual death of an American supervillain instrumental in creating an iniquitous, ineffective, indefensible, deeply sadistic torture and rendition regime that "destroyed any shred of humanity the U.S. could ever lay claim to" was met with caustic dispatches like, "Dick Cheney No Longer Still Undead" and, from The Nation, "His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies."They note today's MAGA, and alas the rest of us, "walk a path paved by the most powerful vice president in US history," a reminder Cheney's crimes belong not in the past but in the hateful, largely untethered presidential here and now. In light of his "long, putrescent career," notes one account, "let us remember who Richard Bruce Cheney really was." Born in 1941, growing up in Wyoming, Cheney had an inauspicious youth - flunked out of Yale twice, racked up two drunk-driving arrests - so "who knew he'd one day turn his life around to grow up to be a war criminal?" Despite his zeal for enabling the killing of brown people around the world from an office in D.C., he got five deferments in the Vietnam War; he later vaguely said, “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service."Parlaying connections among the neo-cons, he was elected to the House in 1978; he served five terms, during which he voted against a Department of Education, a Martin Luther King holiday, Head Start, and freeing Nelson Mandela while supporting apartheid. After years of rising through the GOP ranks as "one of the most belligerent politicians of our lifetime," he became the insipid George Bush's right-hand man, savoring playing the “evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole" while working to make Bush as legally untouchable as possible. Espousing the Unitary Executive Theory - an unencumbered presidency controlling all aspects of the executive branch - he helped shape the 2000-2008 Bush-Cheney administration, one of the worst in American history.Sept. 11 "happened on his watch," notes one account. "Everything that came afterward - Afghanistan, Iraq, torture, surveillance, toxic patriotism - was overcompensation for his own initial failure." It was also a chance to achieve his longtime goal of amassing in the White House the might of U.S. war-making - which he thought showcased American power, not "weakness, avarice, futility and manic resource extraction." Thus did he forge, with the help of Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, oil-greedy corporate powers, a complicit CIA, the invasion and occupation of Iraq - concocting ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda, inventing weapons of mass destruction, attacking critics for their "pernicious falsehoods" - that ranks as "one of the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history."And, of course, one of the most brutal. Official estimates say the so-called War on Terror killed between 897,000 and 929,000 people, mostly civilians; those numbers are widely recognized as far too low, with totals likely reaching beyond a million. Among the victims were myriad thousands of "ghost detainees" disappeared to other countries in extra-judicial renderings - in handcuffs, blindfolds, diapers - to be tortured. They were beaten, cut, raped, waterboarded, set upon by dogs, burned, electrocuted, restrained in excruciating positions, put into coffins, threatened with execution, power drills, "rectal rehydration," the killing of their families. Later, confronted in a Senate hearing with a 6,000-page report documenting the horrors, Cheney dismissed it as "a crock" and "hooey."All the shameless lies, the endless hubris, the crimes, screams, bodies, blood, the millions he made at Halliburton in exchange - for all that, Cheney never faced any legal or even political accountability. He never expressed even a sliver of doubt or regret. In a 2008 interview, asked about the fact that two-thirds of Americans said the war wasn't worth fighting, he responded, "So?" "So? You don't care American people think?" he's asked. "No," he said. "You cannot be blown off course by fluctuations in the public opinion polls.” At other times, he insisted, "I'd do it again in a minute," "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective," and on a torture program that repeatedly proved to generate no documented, actionable information, "It worked. It absolutely did work."Cheney had five heart attacks and underwent at least 7 heart procedures before finally dying of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, "killed by a coalition of the diseases willing to invade him." In 2012, he got a heart transplant, becoming "the only human capable of using another person's heart without caring who it previously belonged to." In an interview about the gift, he proved "an even bigger monster" than previously thought by declaring, "It's my new heart, it's not someone else's old heart." He conceded many people "generically thank donors...but I don't spend time wondering who had it, what they’d done, what kind of person." When Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old lawyer friend in the face in a 2006 hunting accident, the victim felt obliged to apologize for blocking his shot.In the end, ironies abound in his life and death. He reportedly voted in the last election for Kamala Harris, arguing, "In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump," even though he was long deemed that threat and Trump committed the same crimes as Bush - lying to steal an election. He died on a day he helped facilitate that 25 years ago, and lived to see another president turn the same bloated executive powers against his own daughter. "Cheney never expected to be displaced by what he empowered," notes The Nation of the Bush/Cheney history of violence and deceit. "He surely did not expect to die on a day when New Yorkers are poised to elect a Muslim socialist mayor in a repudiation of his legacy."All in all, "History's verdict has been merciless on the 'father' of the Iraq invasion and the excesses of the war on terror." The jokes are bitter. It's time for the The Onion's Cheney Library in "a vast, dark, sulfurous cave" with its millions of legal documents justifying torture, noxious fumes, endless surveillance, Hall of Obfuscation, Pit of Yellowcake Uranium, Quagmire Wing, interactive waterboarding for kids, sprawling security state and exhibits representing "the huge part he played in destabilizing the Middle East for generations to come." Some report the Cheney family hasn't decided how to handle his remains, but may award Halliburton "a no-bid contract" for clean-up; his daughters, struggling with their loss, have taken to calling it "enhanced death."Others are outright celebrating. "I woke up today feeling kinda shitty, knowing I needed to go to the gym but not wanting to," wrote one. "Then I saw the headline that Dick Cheney was dead, and suddenly everything was great. All my aches and pains disappeared. I was so happy! I wanted to run up to strangers at the gym and see if they'd celebrate Cheney's death with me! I didn't know I had this much schadenfreude in me." One announced, "The man who if Kubrick had a time machine could have been the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove has harvested his last organ." One vowed, "AND NOW WE DANCE." But Islamic scholar Omar Suleiman, summoning all those lost and grieving and ravaged, spoke to the dark heart of the deceased: “May the 1 million murdered souls of Iraq haunt you for eternity.”