Architect of war Dick Cheney endorses Kamala for president

Dick Cheney, former Republican vice president under George Bush, has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. His daughter, who has also made her career in the Republican Party, endorsed Harris as well. Liz Cheney made the announcement for her father at the Texas Tribune Festival on Friday in Austin. When Cheney left office after the Bush era, his approval rating was at 13 percent. “Few political figures in history have been so reviled,” The Atlantic wrote in 2011.

“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said, per the New York Post. “If you think about the moment we’re in, and you think about how serious this moment is, my dad believes—and he said publicly—there has never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to democracy as Donald Trump is.” 

Liz Cheney was one of the two Republicans sat by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the J6 Committee in the US House to investigate Trump’s alleged involvement in the riot on January 6, 2021. That riot at the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, came as Trump delivered remarks at a rally nearby in the famed Ellipse. It was called a “deadly” riot as one unarmed Trump-supporting female veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed by Capitol Police Officers.

Dick Cheney said in a statement “In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. 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.”

Prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by US Armed Forces, Cheney was said to be advocating for war within the Pentagon. The Iraq war was launched under the guise that then-President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was stockpiling chemical weapons. A Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency report said there was no evidence of this. A National Intelligence Estimate found that there was “low confidence” that Hussein would either attack the US or share weapons with terror group Al-Qaeda.

There were public statements made at the time by Cheney and others in the Bush administration, such as Defense Secretary Colin Powell, that the nation had been seeking yellowcake uranium in Africa. This was used as a pretense for war, and Powell later had to tell the UN that the assertion was made in error.

Cheney, aware of these reports “proceeded to misrepresent the facts in his public statements, claiming that there was no doubt about the existence of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and that a full-scale nuclear program was known to exist,” Wil Hylton wrote in 2007.

Leftist group Code Pink has referred to Cheney as a “war architect, profiteer, and criminal.” They further said that “Dick Cheney can be considered the main architect of the War on Terror, driving home the need for war in the Middle East when he served as George W. Bush’s VP.” 

Joe Biden called Cheney the “most dangerous vice president we’ve had, probably, in American history” when he challenged then-presidential candidate John McCain’s VP pick Sarah Palin on the debate stage in 2008.