Is Dick Cheney In Hell? A Wonkvestigation!
It's not a hell party without Old Dick.
He is no more, that one-man weapon of mass destruction Dick Cheney! The man who would have liked to have been president himself, but was also self-aware enough to know he had the personal charisma and appeal of a rancid can of clams. Instead, he made a deal with George Dubya Bush, and probably Satan (five heart attacks since 1978, come on), to be the quiet power behind the cheerleader. Bush the younger agreed to run all major decisions by him. And then he worked to make the president as legally unaccountable as possible for everything he did. It worked for them both, and Cheney savored playing the role of the “evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole.”
Dick Cheney crawled out of the Unitary/Plenary Executive Theory slime so that Donald Trump could run! Or at least wander aimlessly while his minions complete a coup and make war on citizens and random fisherman in the Caribbean. And did Donald Trump ever say thank you?
There was a man who knew how to grab power for himself and his friends, and who knew how to hate!
PREVIOUSLY!
Cheney maybe had a moment of redemption there at the end of his life, staying mad about January 6 and even endorsing Kamala Harris. Brave, when you look at so many of his pussy-ass friends in the GOP, and Dubya himself, staying quiet and only expressing his feelings about the current moment through art.
Did Cheney’s heart transplant work beyond keeping him alive after five heart attacks? Or was Cheney’s change of heart only because Donald Trump’s depravity affected someone close to him personally, as is the Republican way? And the Dick Cheney way! He was happy to join up with a group that would have his lesbian daughter Mary treated like a second-class citizen, and for leaving same sex-marriage rights to the states, even while personally being warmly accepting of Mary and her partner Heather’s marriage behind the scenes. (Liz Cheney did not attend the wedding, and publicly opposed gay marriage until 2021.) Dick and the Cheneys were proud of Mary, it seemed, as long as she was never seen, heard or mentioned in public!
But old Dick only seemed to get actually fired up about threats to one of his daughters after Donald J. Trump first tried to murder Congress, which included temporarily Cheney’s daughter Liz, and then started threatening to put her in jail, or worse: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
And the elder Cheney made his very last public appearance to support Liz, and also recorded an ad for his daughter’s doomed 2022 House re-election bid, calling Trump a coward:
A real man wouldn’t lie to their supporters! Yep, he said that, the guy who pushed lies about there being weapons of mass destruction, yellowcake uranium, and biological weapons in Iraq, lied that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al-Qaeda, and pressured his handpicked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, to lie about all that to Congress too, getting us into a seven-year war that killed about 300,000 people, mostly Iraqi civilians. Or killed 4.5 million people, if you count all of the post-9/11 wars.
Would a REAL MAN have pushed for the US to abandon the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, and for the US to get into “enhanced interrogation techniques”? Would a real man ruin the US’s reputation in the world as a human rights beacon, with those CIA black sites, and secret courts, and warrantless surveillance, and setting up Guantanamo Bay to detain and torture people outside of the reach of US laws? We can thank Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo and all of those bloodthirsty, power-hungry soulless husks for the term “enemy combatant.” As in, “if you call a Venezuelan fisherman an ‘enemy combatant,’ the law says you can murder or torture them all you want!”
And Cheney was an innovator when it came to using US government money to help out corporations, too. Some People Say the war in Iraq was all about helping Cheney’s friends in the oil industry get a steady supply from the world’s fifth-largest source. What else would explain the US continuing to occupy for years after no WMDs were found? And his defense-contractor buddies made out with billions as well, contracting to help with the fighting and the rebuilding. War, what a swell way to spin tax dollars and human suffering into corporate welfare, and push the legal bounds of the executive branch, too!
And while the Twin Towers were being bombed, and Dubya Bush was seemingly dumbfounded to hear that the nation was under attack while reading copy of “My Pet Goat” at a photo op, back in DC, Cheney jumped into action.
Dramatization from Christian Bale in a fat suit!
And the Dubya Bush administration appointed John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, also handpicked by Cheney. In so many ways, the Bush/Cheney years were a slow-burning bag of poo left on America’s doorstep. It took decades for the full consolidation of power that conservatives had in mind, but Dick Cheney made this lawless mess Trump is operating in, all of it.
At some point did old Dick Cheney ever look in the mirror and ask himself, did I do the wrong thing? Am I the bad guy?
Probably not. Everybody’s the hero of their own story!
So is Dick Cheney burning below in a simulacrum of a Halliburton oilfield, or whatever hell is like for Methodists? Or did speaking out at the end inch him up into at least purgatory?
Only Satan himself knows for sure.
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Apologies for the OT:
My sweet Blossy has liver cancer and it's spread throughout her body. We started palliative care today and the vet said her quality of life now should hold on for a month or so, but most likely not more. Just found out about a half hour ago.
He might have been proud of Mary, but he was working as The Man both night and day.