If you can’t say anything nice … well, let’s get started!
Dick Cheney was smart, mean, and a brass-balled traitor to the spirit of America who thought the Constitution a motley collection of outdated recommendations and never missed a chance to pants Lady Justice whenever she had her back turned.
He made his bones in Richard Nixon’s White House, hitching a ride there on Donald Rumsfeld’s coattails, and then hung around DeeCee in various capacities, improving the nation’s governance in the same way an untended and freshly dead raccoon under a porch improves a home’s resale value.
A five-deferment draft dodger turned back-office warmonger, Cheney helped leave a trail of bodies, ours and theirs, in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He shot one of his own friends in the face during a quail hunt and the friend apologized for all the fuss. But Cheney never copped to fucking up, in that instance or any of the other bloody debacles in which he played a role.
Cheney was a big fan of the sort of fascist cosplay we’ve come to see from the present occupant of the Oval Office — the USA Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, indefinite detentions sans hearings or charges, brutal interrogations, etc. — but only when he had the president’s ear. Thus he was not a fan of his fellow draft dodger, the serial bankrupt and convicted felon presently turning the White House into a Gilded Palace of Sin (h/t Gram Parsons and Charles P. Pierce).
So, when he finally got the “strong, robust executive authority” of his dreams, Cheney decided he didn’t care for it. It wouldn’t take his calls.
Now he’s off to join his old mentor Rumsfeld in the afterlife, where — according to some religious traditions, anyway — another strong, robust executive authority awaits him.
I don’t know whether that head of state will require his advice, either. He seems to be doing just fine without it. Shucks, Hell isn’t half full.
Mad Blog Media 
There’s going to be a big party of like-minded friends down there in a few more years I think.
That particular herd needs thinning, for sure. The Grim Reaper has been leaning on his scythe.
His hell is that few folks will remember him long term. No friends lifting a glass to him years from now. When your name is forgotten, you truly die.
One lefty I read regularly noted, coldly and (perhaps) accurately: “His family will miss him.”
My only regret here is that Hunter S. Thompson isn’t alive to write a scathing obituary.
His ode to Nixon was brutal. And he was very much not a fan of the Bush-Cheney crowd, writing thusly in 2004:
Does Cheney get any points from you all for consistency? I mean….he came into the world a Dick and left 84 years later still a Dick. He could have changed after receiving someone else’s heart but no…he kept on being a Dick.
Even his enemies said it: “God, was he ever a Dick.”
Doom and gloom has been disposed of by good news. My new Martin 00-28 doesn’t need warranty work at the factory. Just a setup by the luthiers at Rainbow guitars in
Tucson. Jerry is working his magic on it today, and I may get it back tomorrow, next week at the latest. I have two big jam sessions this weekend, and I might have to make that 3 hour round trip to Tucson tomorrow if it’s ready.