SOME HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Dick Cheney, RIP. “Until Trump broke liberal brains, there were generally only two ways the modern left-leaning press thought of Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates: Evil masterminds (Nixon, Agnew, Dole (to an extent)) or dunces (Ford, Reagan, Bush43, Quayle, Palin, Ryan). If Bush43 was the dunce, then Cheney must be the evil mastermind. Cheney didn’t mind being the heavy, and didn’t seem to care what the press thought about him. (Accidentally shooting a guy in the face on a hunting trip didn’t help either.) Republicans liked Cheney for the same reason; he may have been a sonofabitch, but he was our sonofabitch. Having never been elected to the House or Senate, Bush43 delegated a lot of tasks to Cheney, since he knew the ends and outs of how the sausage got made, which gave rise to the leftwing myth of Cheney being the ‘evil puppetmaste’” controlling 43. This was always bunk.”

Cheney bought plenty of goodwill from me more than 30 years ago, when he canceled the Navy’s overpriced and overweight (and, of course, late) A-12 Avenger II attack jet — contractors be damned. But he spent the Trump years pissing away all that goodwill.