ACE OF SPADES: Dick Cheney Dead at 84. “Although obituaries identify Cheney as a rock-ribbed Republican, of course he became a progressive Democrat in the last ten years of his life.”

Cheney suffered from heart disease for decades and fell out of favor among many Republicans in the Trump era, even famously casting a vote in the 2024 election for Democrat Kamala Harris after a long feud with America’s 47th president.

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As I’ve never stopped regretting: We elected George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the theory that the military exists for war-fighting and destroying the enemy, not to serve as armed Social Engineers and Progressive Reformers to advance primitive societies. We elected them to make sure that Bill Clinton’s folly in Haiti — which involved 25,000 “peace keepers” — would never be repeated. The US military would henceforth be deployed only to destroy an enemy and secure an advantage for the US, not to “nation build” failed or backwards states barely removed from the Dark Ages.

Instead, we wound up being signed up for a decade-plus of nation-building on a scale that Bill Clinton would have blanched at.

Bill Clinton played around with using the US armed forces as an evangelizing force for progressivism. Dick Cheney took Bill Clinton’s early experiments and made them into the central animating theory of US foreign policy.

Dick Cheney tested the limits of overwhelming American military might and to our great regret, he found those limits, at enormous loss of American life.

RIP to Dick Cheney and more importantly, RIP to neoconservatism, nation-building, and chasing our tails around the world in pursuit of absurd utopian goals like “bringing freedom to Islam” and bringing reform and democracy to those who “hate our values.”