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smart, mean, and a brass-balled traitor to the spirit of America who thought the Constitution a motley collection of outdated recommendations and never missed a chance to pants Lady Justice whenever she had her back turned.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.