Dick Cheney

For Every Cheney Gained, A Million Voters Lost

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

Look, I know there is a deluge of unthought pieces all jumping on the post-election fallout train. So out of respect for your time and mine I will keep this extremely short and to the point. There will be no flowery exhortations or attempts to make some greater point about existentialism or transformative moments or whatever.

First point, per the NYT of all places:

German style fascism or 19th Century American eugenics this is not. I have my concerns with another Trump administration and will vocalize them when they become relevant, but racial and identity politics is over for the left and liberals alike. They are hemorrhaging everyone demographically. No one likes to be constantly lectured by an upper class of HR managers. Trump is making gains across the board with minorities, Democrats lose everyone without a college education. The PMC doubles down while everyone else jumps ship.

Stemming from that point: Harris didn’t lose because she was a racially diverse female. She lost because she was a terrible candidate untested by a primary in this cycle, who had badly lost an amazingly well funded primary last cycle. She, along with being unable to to see American interests as distinct from Israeli ones, will go down as Biden’s biggest mistake. Harris could have differentiated herself from Biden’s ever more unpopular administration once she had it in the bag too, and refused to do so. A primary would have likely removed her and had someone more capable of running at the national election.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib won their reelections by a comfortable margin. The largest concertation of Arab Americans in Dearborn Michigan voted for Trump and heavily for Stein. While I am not going to say most elections are foreign policy elections, it plays a much larger role than the chattering classes think. It may have been the geographically decisive element of the 2016 election when considering that counties in swing states with high War on Terror casualty rates broke for Trump even when they had been for Obama before, and absolutely underlined the 2008 blowout. Candidates perceived as more hawkish have lost continuously since 2008 onwards.

Before the 2016 election Chuck Schumer said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The party has never moved on from this mindset. Which is insane considering how much it has already cost them. When Bill Clinton killed the party of FDR in 1992 he replaced it with a party of Patrick Batemans and the cast of The View. This meant no one was looking out for working class interests. Are the Republicans going to? Of course not. But they can signal that they are and embrace some trade protectionism to help domestic industry, and this tiny rhetorical concession comes across as preferable to many than Democratic waffle and outright disdain for everyone who doesn’t live in a media-saturated metro area. Meanwhile, many popular poverty-alleviating policies were phased out recently, leading to a massive increase in child poverty. All while defense budgets continued to balloon and Harris not only received the endorsement of Dick and Liz Cheney but actively touted and campaigned with it. This was a promise of more stupid wars of choice, funded possibly by austerity at home. We might still get that with Trump, but he didn’t promise it on the campaign trail.

The American elite desperately needs a foreign policy reality check. Elections and parties pale in comparison to diminishing industrial and economic capacity compared to so many proportionally growing states around the world. The age of liberal hegemony is over. Its legacy is ruined lives at home and abroad, a massive privacy breaching surveillance state, offshoring of industry, global instability, and a Pentagon that can not even be audited. The more one runs to defend this rotting system, the more one will be punished for it electorally. Voters may not know what to do about the problems, but they know they are there. This puts them ahead of most of the media and financial elite. The more centrist candidate has lost every Presidential election in the 21rst Century with the possible exception of 2020 (and that one had Biden tied in with unions at least in a break from typical Clintonian trends).

Who even was the President the last few years? In actuality? It was obvious to everyone outside the lib-media bubble that Biden’s brain was not functioning as early as the last election. The rapidity of the decline only grew. Up until it became undeniable in the most impactful Presidential debate in history the media denied this was the case before suddenly about facing and saying it was obvious there was a problem. Has Jake Sullivan been ruling us the entire time? Or has the system just been chugging along on auto pilot?

All of these points save the last one were made in the aftermath of 2016, including by myself. Libs refused to listen. Their media echo chambers cast all contradictory information as either false or simply deny it exists. And they have the gall to still pretend they are the most informed and best educated people in society. They are in fact as indoctrinated as any megachurch parishioner. The American people and the world at large may deserve better than Republican chauvinism, but the Democratic coalition is not better overall and significantly more out of touch with people outside of their immediate social circle. They have shown, time and time again, an utter inability to learn and adapt. I am already expecting a doubling down of everything they did before. Blaming voters, blaming minorities, blaming foreign countries. Everyone but themselves. But they have only themselves to blame.

And you know what? It works for a lot of them. NGOs fundraise more when Trump is on office. The media secretly loves him as more people watch dying legacy networks and consume legacy print when he is their bogeyman. They profit directly from ‘resisting’ him. Every bit the reality show actors that Trump is, the loyal opposition has an opportunity to fundraise like never before. I’m sure there are some of them who even like losing, it being so lucrative and without the dangers of having to take responsibility for policy failures.

Just remember that politics is local before its national, and systemic before it is partisan. You can work with your neighbors to make life better near you more effectively than voting at the national level will ever deliver something. And in international politics America’s fading protagonist syndrome should not blind us that systemic trends continue onwards independently of what voters think. In my own small way I remain working towards envisioning a foreign policy of realism and restraint which can benefit the average citizen and reign in an out of control establishment. I have and will work towards that goal regardless of the figurehead party in power.

My somewhat controversial take in realism and restraint circles was that Harris would be better for us, as her inevitable failures would drag both the Democratic establishment and the neoconservative Republicans down with her, whereas a Trump Administration causes opposition to further rally around neoconservatism, and while it might adopt our rhetoric but escalate in the Middle East, making us look like fools. I trust none of these people and you shouldn’t either. So this is not ideal for me. I can only hope Vance influences Trump to keep Lina Khan in the government. She is the one genuinely good thing in American administrative governance in the past decade. If she ran for high office I would support her.

Anyway, I never had a strong read on this election or how it would go. Under duress I made a prediction: Harris wins electoral, Trump wins popular. If my prediction was wrong I had to post some 2016-2020 lib cringe. So here, my penance:

P.S.

Deep down inside you know Hillary is secretly happy, and Meatball Ron is utterly devastated. If politicians can be cynically calculating, why can’t voters? Play the long game everyone, opportunities always abound. Look for them wherever they may arise in the chaos of events

When Forgiveness is Weakness

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

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.