I know that house rules dictate everyone gets safe passage across the Styx before the guns come out, but I just can’t. Dick Cheney’s legacy is on exhibit right now at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: a Republican Party divorced from reality and in thrall to a unitary executive who commands lockstep obedience.
In every way that matters, George W Bush was just Donald Trump with a salad and a treadmill. Same fact-light grip on the world. Same loyal coterie of aides ready to wipe their asses with the Constitution. Same party willing to look aside because any notional Democrat would be “worse.” How exactly is left as an exercise for the reader, but in the Republican mind, imagination always trumps [sic] reality.
The truly ironic thing is that after spending a decade tarring Barack Obama as a Muslim socialist, Cheney’s death will almost certainly coincide with the election of an actual factual Muslim socialist as mayor of New York City. And when it happens, it will be because people who have been told for a decade that anything to the left of Ludwig Von Mises is socialism think “well if it means I can pay the rent and afford child care, then bring on socialism.”
Let us redouble our efforts this Election Day as we look to the next one, and the one after that, and remember that nothing will get better until we create a world with consequences for all.