Since the run up to the 2016 primaries, when it was obvious that the neoconservative movement was beginning to gradually migrate (back) to the Democratic Party in preparation for what they saw as an inevitable Hillary Clinton presidency, I have been constantly making a joke to describe the process: ‘Dick Cheney, next key note speaker at the DNC!’ Well, with Cheney endorsing Harris in the current presidential race we are ever closer to that eventuality. Bill Kristol, welcome to The Resistance™, John Bolton, welcome to The Resistance™, Perpetually Screaming Two-Headed Alfredo Stroessner Clone with Mouths for Eyes, welcome to The Resistance™.

Cheney’s endorsement could have (should have) been ignored by Harris for purely electoral reasons, but it was met with mutual praise instead. Dick Cheney, one of the primary architects of the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, a global torture program, extraordinary rendition, Haliburton shortchanging and grifting the U.S. military, and fan of the unitary executive theory of governance, is apparently worried about our democracy and civic health. But it was Cheney who did more to harm these things than even the odious Trump which he fears. Worse yet, everything he did he did incompetently. No respectable supervillain, this perpetual master of failing upwards makes everything worse but for little demonstrable gain for anyone who isn’t some kind of government contract speculator.

And the liberals who once quite literally called him a Hitler-like figure now seek his praise. It makes you wonder what they will be saying about Trump in 15 years. “Former President Trump really took a strong stand against President Incel_Sniper1488 today! Sanity and decorum prevails!”

There are many reasons we are in the sad state of decline we currently find ourselves in today. In applying blame, The George W Bush Administration holds the largest single share.

It makes me think of the ‘Hope and Change’ of 2008. A major flaw in the Obama Administration’s philosophy of governance (itself largely cribbed from the ridiculous farce that was Sorkin’s West Wing) was unity and togetherness. That is the mantra of someone who barely squeaked into power, not someone who won a huge blowout election and came with a de facto mandate for change. Obama, of course, went on to serve as effectively Bush’s third and fourth terms. But respectably.

More importantly, that tone of unity, moving forward, and just moving out of the divisive culture war and endless conflict of the Bush years had the opposite effect. All of these things doubled down. They were made worse, I would contend, because we (collectively) never punished anyone from the Bush Administration. We forgave them. And in so doing, we made a cabal of people who left office with a 25% approval rating look like elder statesmen.

There is a lesson here about not listening to any sanctimonious ideology about forgiveness or ‘rising above vengeance’. That is for very specific situations and long term settlements, it is not for enacting a break with failure or an internal housecleaning. The failure of so many to actively punish people like Cheney, to show them and their reputations no mercy, simply means that such people must be continuously inflicted upon us like repeated outbreaks of herpes. Cheney should have been purged, his family driven into exile. His reputation blackened to the extent that he could never return to relevance. Failure to seize that opportunity means that not only is he back, his policies are too.

Forgiveness is bandied about like a virtue, but I feel like just as often it is a vice. A psychological coping mechanism meant to bring closure, which can be understandable, but the act is often selfishness masquerading as the opposite. The assumption that one must forgive those who wrong them is ridiculous moralism. You only do so if they have done something meaningful to undo the wrong. Without reciprocity, forgiveness means nothing but a virtue signal. It fails even as a necessity for ‘self-help’, for if one moves on from something one surely does not need to forgive, but rather merely to move on in silence. To even do this would, of course, require that the threat dissipates. But in the case of the neocons the threat is always there, learning nothing and seeking to drive its host country and who knows how many others into a maelstrom of ruin.

Too much forgiveness, like too much of anything, becomes an idealist Platonic principle onto itself rather than just one tool out of many to navigate the chaos of life. A good balance contains the right combination of all things, proportions adjusted for circumstance. Wrath and vindictiveness, viewed by so many as uniformly negative, is a positive in situations when you need to be ruthless to spare problems later down the line. Like how an effective immune response, it kicks into overdrive now to spare you more problems later.

Wrath, not forgiveness, should have been the order of the day back in 2008. A refusal to forgive the likes of Cheney could have spared us from the rehabilitation of his policies in the minds of his former opponents today. Its why I am glad I never forgave people like him, and why I know I never will. Hate, as Boyd Rice has put it, is inspiring. It forces you to be better than your enemies by giving you a standard to surpass. I would never want to ruin my clarity of mind by watering down such a tool with something so banal as forgiveness.