Vice, the 2018 biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney starring Christian Bale, is a pretty good overview of how much the Democratic Party and the activist Left loathed this one man and painted him as an almost cartoonish villain.
Like most depictions of Republicans that come out of Hollywood and the legacy media, this movie portrayed Cheney, who was vice president under George W. Bush from 2001-2009, as an almost cartoonish puppet master who carefully pulls the strings of government and cunningly navigates the political arena to enact his nefarious authoritarian plan while profiting off of the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens.
Since the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003, Cheney has consistently been cast as the chief villain of what has proved to be one of the largest foreign policy blunders in U.S. history, and nearly 10 years after he left office, Vice only served to bolster his image as a mastermind of evil. He was so universally despised that when he left office in 2009, he had an approval rating of 13%, a mark so low that no major-party figure has even come close to it in recent memory.
I don't seek to re-adjudicate the Cheney legacy, which included mistaken claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, warrantless surveillance of patterns of phone traffic of ordinary citizens, and torturing war detainees. Rather, I want to illustrate the degree to which this person was so universally reviled, that is, until he was absolved of all previous wrongdoing because he was willing to do one thing: oppose former President Donald Trump.
Last week, Cheney followed the lead of his daughter Liz, a former member of Congress, and released a statement about the 2024 election in which he pledged to support Vice President Kamala Harris.
"In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump," Cheney said. "He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again. As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris."
Harris, for her part, welcomed the endorsement of Cheney and his daughter.
"What they both, as leaders who are well respected, are making an important statement that it's OK and if not important to put country above party,” Harris said.
For a Democrat to call Cheney "well respected" is akin to hell freezing over. The party that once called for his prosecution as a war criminal has embraced him wholeheartedly in one of the most remarkable about-faces of all time and one that reeks of political opportunism.
The Democratic Party and the media establishment have always made a habit of trying to depict Republican politicians as evil psychopaths. Practically every Republican nominee for president in the 21st century has been smeared as a new Hitler.
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In Cheney's case, he decided that once he was forgotten by the media cycle and the Democratic establishment, he could rehabilitate his image by opposing the newly anointed worst Republican ever in Trump. And since the Democratic Party has no scruples about its coalition, it eagerly embraced a man it once claimed was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
President Joe Biden likes to say that the Republican Party of Trump is nothing like the old Republican Party. He's certainly not wrong about that. But a Democratic Party that embraces warmongers like Cheney it once accused of war crimes is not the Democratic Party of old, either.