“Strange bedfellows” is a political phrase meaning two usually opposing forces joining to back a common goal. There never have been stranger bedfellows than former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney endorsing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president, who replied she was “honored.” Cheney’s daughter, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, also endorsed Harris.
Dick Cheney had been a fixture of Republican governance since the 1970s as President Gerald Ford’s chief-of-staff, a congressman from Wyoming, President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense during the 1990-91 Gulf War and CEO of Halliburton, the giant defense contractor.
But Cheney is best remembered for his time as vice president under George W. Bush from 2001-2009. He was one of the prime architects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both now considered strategic disasters.
Democrats of the day blasted him heartily.
House Minority Leader (later Speaker) Nancy Pelosi, D-California, rightly condemned his claims the Iraq war was justified because Saddam Hussein wielded “weapons of mass destruction,” which never were found. She told CNN in 2005, “There are pages [and] pages of statements that he has made that have been factually incorrect.”
The same year wrote Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, “It defies belief that the vice president can continue to say with a straight face that Congress had the same intelligence as the president and vice president had as we went to war.”
Despite the differences the Cheneys have with Democrats on domestic issues, they have joined the Biden administration and the Democrats Congress, including Pelosi, in backing the Ukraine war. That’s why former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, also a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq, now is supporting Trump. He has promised to end that war if elected.
In a Sept. 7 interview with Tucker Carlson, Gabbard said, “A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, the architect of everything that has gone wrong in the Middle East for the last two decades…. We have people who we care very much about who were killed in those wars because of Dick Cheney. Kamala Harris has told us all we need to know about what kind of commander-in-chief she would be. And I don’t know about you, but I would not trust her for a minute with the lives of my brothers and sisters in uniform.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of the most famous Democratic family, is a strong war opponent. He suspended his independent campaign for president to join Trump and the Republicans, despite opposing most of Trump’s domestic agenda.
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But there’s more at stake here than policy. When campaigning in 2016, Trump said of the Iraq War, “What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and no legs? Not to mention, in all fairness, the other side – all those Iraqi kids who have been blown to pieces.”
Truth hurts.
It’s no wonder that Liz Cheney retaliated against Trump by using her position in Congress and the Jan. 6 committee to rail against him. Trump returned the favor by “primarying” Liz out of Congress in the 2022 election by supporting her opponent, current Rep. Harriet Hageman. Now it’s payback again against Trump with both Cheneys backing Harris.
Yet beyond the personal feuds are tectonic policy shifts. It’s more evidence of what I wrote about in my recent column, “Trading places on war and peace is nothing new for Democrats and Republicans.”
The process continues of the parties sorting on war and peace. But whatever the outcome of the election, backing Harris is the last, gnarled hurrah of Dick Cheney.
John Seiler is on the SCNG Editorial Board and blogs at johnseiler.substack.com