Dick Cheney Dead at 84

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney Dies at 84 from Heart Complications Last updated

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Dick Cheney, the influential vice president under George W. Bush and key architect of the post-9/11 war on terror, died on November 3, 2025, at his Virginia home due to complications from pneumonia and cardiac disease, surrounded by family including his wife Lynne and daughters Liz and Mary. His five-decade career featured roles as White House chief of staff under Gerald Ford, Wyoming congressman, defense secretary overseeing the 1991 Gulf War, and vice president pushing the 2003 Iraq invasion and Patriot Act expansions. Cheney's legacy includes praise for bolstering U.S. security amid criticism over the human toll of post-9/11 wars, estimated at over 940,000 direct deaths by Brown University's Costs of War project.

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.

Ed Morrissey sums up Cheney's legacy.

Republicans also transformed, in part because of the failure of Cheney's efforts to change the world through democratic reforms imposed by American arms. Referred to as "neoconservative" both then and now, it required the same kind of global engagement and massive resource expenditures, only to not just fail but also backfire in key ways. Cheney certainly didn't intend the failures, and there were some significant successes too, such as the way in which our forward strategy against terrorists prevented more attacks on the American homeland, at least on the scale of 9/11. Cheney never tired of pointing that out, and with justification.

Still, the impossibility of that overall mission became clear, and with it the costs of failure. Put together with rising resentment over poorly managed "free trade" with China and other countries that got shrugged off as the costs for the net benefits of globalization, populists demanded a party that focused on the working class and their concerns, as well as a return to an America-centric policy set. That opened the door for Donald Trump, who flirted with a presidential run in 2011 only to commit four years later. He blew more than a dozen Republican politicians of the older order out of the water, because Trump spoke to voters who had found themselves marginalized when both parties embraced "globalization" over support for American workers.

Accurate. Cheney embraced an unapologetic, no-hedging, no reaching-across-the-aisle, no compromise "strong form" of neoconservatism, meaning there was no hiding its failure when it failed.

He could not blame-shift or claim that "Real Neoconservatism has never been tried" or that he only got to implement half of the neocon foreign policy, and we'd have to implement the full 100% to determine if it worked or not.

It was tried, we implemented 100% of it, and it failed so spectacularly that former neocons such as myself (and many of you) turned away forcefully, permanently, and in revulsion.

Which did have the salubrious effect of ushering in a new theory of government and foreign policy -- which largely was the refurbishing of an old theory -- personified in the unlikely avatar of a loudmouth real estate tycoon from Queens, NY.

At least in that respect, Cheney provided a service. Political questions are rarely tested in such laboratory-perfect sort of experiment, and Cheney finally put unapologetic neoconservatism to the acid test and delivered us all the results. They were not the results we wanted, but they were the results we needed.

Alas, many Americans died trying to vindicate the now-obviously-absurd political claim that we can or should attempt to politically and culturally transform backwards and barbaric societies, hundreds or even thousands of years away from reaching modernity organically, by sending in a several tens of thousands of American fighters to trade bullets and bodies with savages and terrorists for a decade.

We tried. It may be called a Nobel Failure, or just a failure. It was a costly failure in terms of money and precious Americans' lives (and limbs) lost. It failed, and now we know.

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."

It's election day in America. I hope for the best, but I'm prepared for the worst.

How about you? What are your guesses on:

NYC Mayor?

Va AG?

Va Gov?

NJ Gov?

I think maybe California's gerrymandering proposition, Prop 50, goes to the polls today as well. It's expected to pass by 8-10 points.

My own guesses:

The Communist Hamas terrorist wins.

In VA, Miyares wins the AG slot, which is important because Virginia will not be suing Trump over every little thing, and I think he can keep a lid on more forced transgenderism in school.

I don't have similar hopes for the governor slot. Winsome Earle-Sears has been behind by 5-10 points throughout the whole election season.

In NJ... I'm optimistic. I think Ciatterelli could pull out the win. But I'm not confident. NJ is a corrupt state.

posted by Ace at 12:10 PM

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