I worked in international human rights for 11 years, moving on to a more domestic orientation in 2019. The one thing I noticed right away, is that Latin American pro-democracy and human rights organizations equally despise both parties. They understand that the US will always aggressively defend the right of its corporations to exploit valuable resources within the region, that it will always put these short term interests over and above the democratic aspirations of the many millions of Latin Americans. I recall being an election monitor in Honduras during the 2013 general election. The Obama administration was pulling out all stops to support the right wing candidate , Juan Orlando Hernández, over the progressive opposition. One evening I remember hearing a collective gasp in the hotel I was staying in, as the American Ambassador came on the television to urge people to vote for Juan Orlando! This is the same leader, by the way, who is now a convicted drug trafficker, along with his brother. Most Americans are clueless as to the behaviour of their own government in other countries—behaviour that persists whether the government is red or blue.
I'm just waiting for US Lithium, backed by the CIA, to overthrow the government of Bolivia. Hell, they already tried when Evo Morales won a third term...
The drug trafficking started coming out in 2018, with the brother's arrest, right? The Trump administration was still mainly concerned with deterring migrants at the time. Things started changing with Biden, and it was prosecutor and current candidate Harris who wanted to indict Juan Orlando in the US. That didn't happen, but he was blacklisted. The administration changed horses fir the next election, supporting Xiomara Castro.
Great piece. I agree with fellow Dems that Cheney endorsing Kamala is an indictment of how far the Republican Party has fallen under Trump. But it is also an indictment of how far the Democratic Party has fallen in thinking that stopping Trump is the sole and overriding moral struggle of our time. All it takes for someone who has inflicted unspeakable evil on the world to be redeemed in the eyes of Democrats is to say an unkind word about Trump.
The Hitler-Stalin analogy doesn't apply here. No one doubted that having the Soviets pound Hitler on the Eastern Front would be crucial to an Allied victory. Whether Cheney's endorsement will help Kamala is a much more open question. For every former RINO wooed to Kamala's side by Cheney there is an independent voter sick of both parties who would see that endorsement as a sign that Trump is a true anti-establishment rebel ready to finish the job of draining the swamp. I don't understand the moral calculation that goes into seeking the endorsement of a guy who used deception to start a war that killed 400,000 people so you can defeat a guy who incited an insurrection that killed 4. We need to beat Trump but not by bringing evil into our big tent.
I guess it might help her in the sense that she is generally aiming at the centrist voters from both sides of the aisle. She is a deep disappointment to any actual leftists however you slice it and the true MAGA crowd is growing ever more fringe... She's by now straddling that center line pretty clearly, presenting herself as the option for all the 'regular people' types out there who don't care about anything much more than just having some veneer of normalcy in their daily lives.
I get the centrist line of thinking and understand why so many Democrats gloated after the Cheney endorsement. I am concerned because of what I see as a Democratic local elected official in a 50/50 purple Pennsylvania district. The old centrist Republicans I know already shifted to Biden in 2020 and don’t need Cheney to convince them to vote for Kamala. The swing voters she needs to win are often anti-establishment. They hate both parties. They voted for Obama when he called for change, for Trump when he said he would drain the swamp. Cheney endorsing Kamala will only increase their perception that Trump is still the renegade candidate most likely to shake things up and Kamala is a typical politician that the elites want in power to keep the current system intact.
I mean abstract the fact that his 'shaking things up' is in the same way a toddler shakes a hamster. But it's true we never saw the next piece of madness coming. And she is 100% the typical politician the elites want in power to keep the current system intact. I wish more people would deal with that fact head on.
She has creeped me out more and more, but I never wavered. Joe Biden is not “a good man”, but i was all in.
“It’s just that he’s insane and an unpredictable egomaniac and therefore cannot be counted on to fulfill his role on this matter.”
But also, it would be better for the children in SC, GA, AL,MS, LA, TX, on reservations, and all other SLTTs to have better fortunes than not.
I would not wish ill on girls or boys in Kandahar, Gaza, Yemen, Haiti, Honduras, etc. , and it’s also not about “starting at home.”
It is about starting, not relenting, patience, yes, but persistence… what is possible, what is desirable, what can be shared, what should be prevented.
Spot on, and anyone who thinks otherwise should ask themselves why the party who champions human rights never offers any soft solutions to the many international issues we face. It's always guns, never butter.
Dude, you are on a roll. Billionaires, cars, the underlying similarities between the reds and blues…thanks so much for your rigorous reporting of actual and real issues.
I agree your analysis of Cheney's reasoning being likely.
But the fact is the either /or is crazed parania that can only lead to total chaos versus people who actually know basics about the function of government and the names of other countries.
His daughter may have played a role in speaking out. I watched part of his daughter's primary debate and it was really eye opening. Her opponent literally never took a position that was not absolutely batshit qanon cracked like a paranoid fever dream. Cheney's positions are also terrible but based in reality. She doesn't think the government is chipping people.
So just like WE are facing limited but shitty options, evil mofos like Cheney also face shitty options--the fever dream or reality-but Democrats in charge--reality at least in the sense you don't suppose the Chinese are literally demons.
On foreign policy Democrats and regular Republicans don't differ enough, as we know. They barely differ on a lot of stuff.
But for the regular Republicans to reject the paranoiac Republicans --I don't think it's necessarily the right framing that they are allembracing the status quo as masters of the universe waving their puppets on a string.
Those people are billionaires like Erik Prince. They want to ride the whirlwind to gigantic government contracts shooting protesters and rounding up immigrants.
Dick Cheney is just a guy who is about to die and probably wants to distinguish his record of evil somehow.
Possibly the results WILL be the same between these various brands of American insanity. But I definitely am stopped short by the FEAR of the total assholes in his own cabinet about Trump, and the fact they thought he would do anything--shoot protesters, bomb cities, start a war with China.
If he remained ineffective, it wouldn't matter --but what if the whole government were made up of people like him? That's the alternative to the status quo. Most Republicans like Cheney--psycho as they are--don't see any reason to go there.
I just finished reading The Jakarta Method, and it will take me a while to write up my thoughts, but put simply, international worker solidarity did not die out naturally because people just didn't care enough. It was brutally stamped out by dictatorial regimes and mass killings. The book The Cold War at Home details how this international effort was implemented in Pennsylvania, in a less-violent, but still very effective removal of left-wing organizers from every conceivable position of influence.
And Dick doesn’t want an ignoble AG indicting his daughter on some bogus tax evasion or like charge. She has consistently given Trump the business. The other day she dropped “mysognistic pigs.” 💜
I understand how obscene military spending costs us a real social safety net and a kinder country. I don’t understand the causal link how maintaining a ridiculously large military translates into global economic superiority. I don’t really doubt it, but I just don’t understand how carrier groups and F-35’s and tanks etc. results in global economic domination or wealth transfer. If anyone has a good book or resource to enlighten I’d like to read it? ☮️
Very expensive job creation. Clearly seen years ago when the Obama Admin wanted to discontinue some weapon systems or equipment that the Pentagon no longer wanted and Republicans insisted on continued funding.
Two points, following on from the piece and Tom Allen’s comments - I agree that Cheney’s motivations are driven by the consolidation or expansion of his / his group’s power and influence. Broad statement, I know, but Cheney always seemed to focus on the long-term play and not on anything personal. Which leads to the second point, from Tom’s comment - those power plays are always designed to influence corporate exploitation across the globe - not at home, generally. The US government’s ex-US influence so often just seems like another tool in the corporate kit for resource extraction. Cheney’s endorsement of Harris is in line with his prior work supporting whatever group was best situated to keep the profits flowing.
I broadly share your foreign policy views, including your searing indictments of Democrats' complicity in overseas atrocities. I like the old joke that the difference between Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton is that Dick Cheney supported gay marriage first.
That said, I'm more optimistic than you are that Harris' policies will be meaningfully better than Cheney's. She has hired some advisors more skeptical of blob dogma, and the political landscape is more skeptical of that dogma than during the Bush years, which could give her more space to be dovish for purely selfish reasons.
And to the specific question of Cheney's endorsement, it seems likely that foreign policy is only part of the reason. I actually believe him that concern for democracy and the unique threat Trump poses to our domestic institutions motivates him too.
Never Trumpers are a thing, and foreign policy is not the whole reason. As odious as we found their policy positions, there were decent, well-meaning people on the Republican side throughout the Bush and Obama years, who were committed to a more elevated, intellectually serious politics than we have today - and certainly committed to the peaceful, democratic transition of power. Trump's rise forced them to choose between those commitments and the temptation of angry nativist tribalism, and to their credit, some of them chose correctly, sooner or later. They joined the Lincoln Project, or write for The Bulwark, and today they just howl into the void - but that's the same thing I do, and I didn't even have to sacrifice power to get there. I respect that.
So yes, Cheney endorsed Harris in part because both of them support too much barbarity overseas, which we must continue to condemn. But also, Cheney endorsed Harris in part because both of them are better than Trump in important respects, which we should probably applaud.
You would not call the Bush era republicans ‘decent, well-meaning’ people if your family was among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni or Afghan people who were massacred by American ‘policy.’ It really takes a special kind of willful blindness to evil to vote for a candidate who refuses to stop arming a genocide ‘because the other candidate is worse.’ Tolerating intolerance is just as bad as being intolerant, and tolerating genocide and industrial scale murder for any reason, let alone so that the lion’s share of shekels can go to the already uber-rich, is really something.
I think you're wearing the wrong goggles here for an important tipping point in American history. This election is about continuing as an (albeit deeply flawed) democratic country versus the real prospect of losing American democracy to a very ugly mix of fascism/authoritarianism/Christian-ethnic-nationalsim. First you beat fascism, then you keep fighting for your vision of a better democracy. I far prefer your vision to Cheney's, but now is the time for decent people who know better to unite to fight the greater(est?) evil.
We already live in a fascist police state, trump will just be less predictable and rip the mask off fascism more. The demlicans and republicrats are both puppets of the MIC, intelligence community, and corporate billionaire class. The dems cannot be reformed and cheney endorsing them is a clear sign of that. If harris is ‘less evil’ than trump, it is by an insignificant margin.
If the entire US was a fascist police state currently there would be no place like Substack where you could express your opinion and not fear being 'disappeared'.
Tyranny has evolved in the 21st century. It hides behind a false dichotomy of blue v red theater on hot button issues while both parties march in lockstep on forever wars to subjugate the global south and then bring the tools and lessons from those wars home to control ‘domestic terrorists’ and ‘rioters.’ Conservatives drink liberal tears when BLM protestors get kettled on Fox News and liberals cackle with delight when trumpers get held without trial for Jan 6. Divide and conquer. You can say what you want on substack for now, but you’ll likely be shadowbanned if you make the wrong kind of noise. They have layers of suppressive tools. Universities don’t sic riot cops on anti-genocide protestors in a free liberal democracy. By the time the fascist control is obvious to everyone, it’s too late. Have a great night.
What’s here is going deeper than that obvious surface reality about the difference between a monster and a human. That is where most stop and it’s that this gave an even bigger context is why it’s so valuable. As we think so we act and the more clearly we see the more intelligently we can behave.
I worked in international human rights for 11 years, moving on to a more domestic orientation in 2019. The one thing I noticed right away, is that Latin American pro-democracy and human rights organizations equally despise both parties. They understand that the US will always aggressively defend the right of its corporations to exploit valuable resources within the region, that it will always put these short term interests over and above the democratic aspirations of the many millions of Latin Americans. I recall being an election monitor in Honduras during the 2013 general election. The Obama administration was pulling out all stops to support the right wing candidate , Juan Orlando Hernández, over the progressive opposition. One evening I remember hearing a collective gasp in the hotel I was staying in, as the American Ambassador came on the television to urge people to vote for Juan Orlando! This is the same leader, by the way, who is now a convicted drug trafficker, along with his brother. Most Americans are clueless as to the behaviour of their own government in other countries—behaviour that persists whether the government is red or blue.
I'm just waiting for US Lithium, backed by the CIA, to overthrow the government of Bolivia. Hell, they already tried when Evo Morales won a third term...
The drug trafficking started coming out in 2018, with the brother's arrest, right? The Trump administration was still mainly concerned with deterring migrants at the time. Things started changing with Biden, and it was prosecutor and current candidate Harris who wanted to indict Juan Orlando in the US. That didn't happen, but he was blacklisted. The administration changed horses fir the next election, supporting Xiomara Castro.
Great piece. I agree with fellow Dems that Cheney endorsing Kamala is an indictment of how far the Republican Party has fallen under Trump. But it is also an indictment of how far the Democratic Party has fallen in thinking that stopping Trump is the sole and overriding moral struggle of our time. All it takes for someone who has inflicted unspeakable evil on the world to be redeemed in the eyes of Democrats is to say an unkind word about Trump.
Cheney is not redeemed, just accepted as an ally in the - yes - overriding moral struggle of the time. Like the Soviets in WW2, if you like.
The Hitler-Stalin analogy doesn't apply here. No one doubted that having the Soviets pound Hitler on the Eastern Front would be crucial to an Allied victory. Whether Cheney's endorsement will help Kamala is a much more open question. For every former RINO wooed to Kamala's side by Cheney there is an independent voter sick of both parties who would see that endorsement as a sign that Trump is a true anti-establishment rebel ready to finish the job of draining the swamp. I don't understand the moral calculation that goes into seeking the endorsement of a guy who used deception to start a war that killed 400,000 people so you can defeat a guy who incited an insurrection that killed 4. We need to beat Trump but not by bringing evil into our big tent.
I guess it might help her in the sense that she is generally aiming at the centrist voters from both sides of the aisle. She is a deep disappointment to any actual leftists however you slice it and the true MAGA crowd is growing ever more fringe... She's by now straddling that center line pretty clearly, presenting herself as the option for all the 'regular people' types out there who don't care about anything much more than just having some veneer of normalcy in their daily lives.
I get the centrist line of thinking and understand why so many Democrats gloated after the Cheney endorsement. I am concerned because of what I see as a Democratic local elected official in a 50/50 purple Pennsylvania district. The old centrist Republicans I know already shifted to Biden in 2020 and don’t need Cheney to convince them to vote for Kamala. The swing voters she needs to win are often anti-establishment. They hate both parties. They voted for Obama when he called for change, for Trump when he said he would drain the swamp. Cheney endorsing Kamala will only increase their perception that Trump is still the renegade candidate most likely to shake things up and Kamala is a typical politician that the elites want in power to keep the current system intact.
But, like...... he is. And she is. So.... fair?
I mean abstract the fact that his 'shaking things up' is in the same way a toddler shakes a hamster. But it's true we never saw the next piece of madness coming. And she is 100% the typical politician the elites want in power to keep the current system intact. I wish more people would deal with that fact head on.
We must remember that Dick Cheney has had--quite literally--a change of heart since his days as our evil vice president: https://www.acc.org/Latest-in-Cardiology/Articles/2012/03/25/09/30/Cheney-Heart-Transplant
The legendary David Nolan humor lives....
Did that happen before or after the, ah face off?
🤣🤣🤣
So accurate. I needed to read this. Alas.
I didn’t even need to.
She has creeped me out more and more, but I never wavered. Joe Biden is not “a good man”, but i was all in.
“It’s just that he’s insane and an unpredictable egomaniac and therefore cannot be counted on to fulfill his role on this matter.”
But also, it would be better for the children in SC, GA, AL,MS, LA, TX, on reservations, and all other SLTTs to have better fortunes than not.
I would not wish ill on girls or boys in Kandahar, Gaza, Yemen, Haiti, Honduras, etc. , and it’s also not about “starting at home.”
It is about starting, not relenting, patience, yes, but persistence… what is possible, what is desirable, what can be shared, what should be prevented.
Spot on, and anyone who thinks otherwise should ask themselves why the party who champions human rights never offers any soft solutions to the many international issues we face. It's always guns, never butter.
Dude, you are on a roll. Billionaires, cars, the underlying similarities between the reds and blues…thanks so much for your rigorous reporting of actual and real issues.
I agree your analysis of Cheney's reasoning being likely.
But the fact is the either /or is crazed parania that can only lead to total chaos versus people who actually know basics about the function of government and the names of other countries.
His daughter may have played a role in speaking out. I watched part of his daughter's primary debate and it was really eye opening. Her opponent literally never took a position that was not absolutely batshit qanon cracked like a paranoid fever dream. Cheney's positions are also terrible but based in reality. She doesn't think the government is chipping people.
So just like WE are facing limited but shitty options, evil mofos like Cheney also face shitty options--the fever dream or reality-but Democrats in charge--reality at least in the sense you don't suppose the Chinese are literally demons.
On foreign policy Democrats and regular Republicans don't differ enough, as we know. They barely differ on a lot of stuff.
But for the regular Republicans to reject the paranoiac Republicans --I don't think it's necessarily the right framing that they are allembracing the status quo as masters of the universe waving their puppets on a string.
Those people are billionaires like Erik Prince. They want to ride the whirlwind to gigantic government contracts shooting protesters and rounding up immigrants.
Dick Cheney is just a guy who is about to die and probably wants to distinguish his record of evil somehow.
Possibly the results WILL be the same between these various brands of American insanity. But I definitely am stopped short by the FEAR of the total assholes in his own cabinet about Trump, and the fact they thought he would do anything--shoot protesters, bomb cities, start a war with China.
If he remained ineffective, it wouldn't matter --but what if the whole government were made up of people like him? That's the alternative to the status quo. Most Republicans like Cheney--psycho as they are--don't see any reason to go there.
Spot on. Disgusting and true.
I think it may have been from your Substack that I saw this, but the story of the UAW supporting Mexican labor organizing seems to me to be a step in the right direction. https://jacobin.com/2024/04/uaw-mexican-autoworker-union-organizing/
I just finished reading The Jakarta Method, and it will take me a while to write up my thoughts, but put simply, international worker solidarity did not die out naturally because people just didn't care enough. It was brutally stamped out by dictatorial regimes and mass killings. The book The Cold War at Home details how this international effort was implemented in Pennsylvania, in a less-violent, but still very effective removal of left-wing organizers from every conceivable position of influence.
And Dick doesn’t want an ignoble AG indicting his daughter on some bogus tax evasion or like charge. She has consistently given Trump the business. The other day she dropped “mysognistic pigs.” 💜
I understand how obscene military spending costs us a real social safety net and a kinder country. I don’t understand the causal link how maintaining a ridiculously large military translates into global economic superiority. I don’t really doubt it, but I just don’t understand how carrier groups and F-35’s and tanks etc. results in global economic domination or wealth transfer. If anyone has a good book or resource to enlighten I’d like to read it? ☮️
Just for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Some other factors: weapons of war are US manufacturing jobs, and paychecks. Military aid is US jobs and paychecks.
Very expensive job creation. Clearly seen years ago when the Obama Admin wanted to discontinue some weapon systems or equipment that the Pentagon no longer wanted and Republicans insisted on continued funding.
Great column. Underlines that voting is just rhe start, not an accomplishment. Vote as you must then pursue change.
Bingo. Thank you for this.
Two points, following on from the piece and Tom Allen’s comments - I agree that Cheney’s motivations are driven by the consolidation or expansion of his / his group’s power and influence. Broad statement, I know, but Cheney always seemed to focus on the long-term play and not on anything personal. Which leads to the second point, from Tom’s comment - those power plays are always designed to influence corporate exploitation across the globe - not at home, generally. The US government’s ex-US influence so often just seems like another tool in the corporate kit for resource extraction. Cheney’s endorsement of Harris is in line with his prior work supporting whatever group was best situated to keep the profits flowing.
I broadly share your foreign policy views, including your searing indictments of Democrats' complicity in overseas atrocities. I like the old joke that the difference between Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton is that Dick Cheney supported gay marriage first.
That said, I'm more optimistic than you are that Harris' policies will be meaningfully better than Cheney's. She has hired some advisors more skeptical of blob dogma, and the political landscape is more skeptical of that dogma than during the Bush years, which could give her more space to be dovish for purely selfish reasons.
And to the specific question of Cheney's endorsement, it seems likely that foreign policy is only part of the reason. I actually believe him that concern for democracy and the unique threat Trump poses to our domestic institutions motivates him too.
Never Trumpers are a thing, and foreign policy is not the whole reason. As odious as we found their policy positions, there were decent, well-meaning people on the Republican side throughout the Bush and Obama years, who were committed to a more elevated, intellectually serious politics than we have today - and certainly committed to the peaceful, democratic transition of power. Trump's rise forced them to choose between those commitments and the temptation of angry nativist tribalism, and to their credit, some of them chose correctly, sooner or later. They joined the Lincoln Project, or write for The Bulwark, and today they just howl into the void - but that's the same thing I do, and I didn't even have to sacrifice power to get there. I respect that.
So yes, Cheney endorsed Harris in part because both of them support too much barbarity overseas, which we must continue to condemn. But also, Cheney endorsed Harris in part because both of them are better than Trump in important respects, which we should probably applaud.
You would not call the Bush era republicans ‘decent, well-meaning’ people if your family was among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni or Afghan people who were massacred by American ‘policy.’ It really takes a special kind of willful blindness to evil to vote for a candidate who refuses to stop arming a genocide ‘because the other candidate is worse.’ Tolerating intolerance is just as bad as being intolerant, and tolerating genocide and industrial scale murder for any reason, let alone so that the lion’s share of shekels can go to the already uber-rich, is really something.
I think you're wearing the wrong goggles here for an important tipping point in American history. This election is about continuing as an (albeit deeply flawed) democratic country versus the real prospect of losing American democracy to a very ugly mix of fascism/authoritarianism/Christian-ethnic-nationalsim. First you beat fascism, then you keep fighting for your vision of a better democracy. I far prefer your vision to Cheney's, but now is the time for decent people who know better to unite to fight the greater(est?) evil.
I think you overestimate Dick Cheney's(!) ideological commitment to democracy.
We already live in a fascist police state, trump will just be less predictable and rip the mask off fascism more. The demlicans and republicrats are both puppets of the MIC, intelligence community, and corporate billionaire class. The dems cannot be reformed and cheney endorsing them is a clear sign of that. If harris is ‘less evil’ than trump, it is by an insignificant margin.
If the entire US was a fascist police state currently there would be no place like Substack where you could express your opinion and not fear being 'disappeared'.
Tyranny has evolved in the 21st century. It hides behind a false dichotomy of blue v red theater on hot button issues while both parties march in lockstep on forever wars to subjugate the global south and then bring the tools and lessons from those wars home to control ‘domestic terrorists’ and ‘rioters.’ Conservatives drink liberal tears when BLM protestors get kettled on Fox News and liberals cackle with delight when trumpers get held without trial for Jan 6. Divide and conquer. You can say what you want on substack for now, but you’ll likely be shadowbanned if you make the wrong kind of noise. They have layers of suppressive tools. Universities don’t sic riot cops on anti-genocide protestors in a free liberal democracy. By the time the fascist control is obvious to everyone, it’s too late. Have a great night.
What’s here is going deeper than that obvious surface reality about the difference between a monster and a human. That is where most stop and it’s that this gave an even bigger context is why it’s so valuable. As we think so we act and the more clearly we see the more intelligently we can behave.
Don't go hunting wth Dick!