War Is Fun, by Liz and Dick

As their sudden reemergence on our televisions might indicate, Dick Cheney and offspring Liz have co-written a new book. It is, of course, about how awesome the Bush administration was and great things were going and why Obama is bad, and so forth.

At one stage, the Cheneys write that “history will be the ultimate judge of our decision to liberate Iraq.” But just two pages later, as if unable to resist re-engaging the issue, they describe the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as a “grave threat to the United States” before concluding: “We were right to invade and remove him from power.”

They even insist that U.S. troops “were in fact greeted as liberators,” just as Dick Cheney predicted before the invasion—a quote that Bush administration critics have frequently hung around his neck.

The Cheneys also offer a strained rationale for why, even though Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, the terror attacks still were a reason to invade Iraq. “[A]fter 9/11 … we had an obligation to do everything possible to prevent terrorists from gaining access to much worse weapons. Saddam’s Iraq was the most likely place for terrorists to gain access to and knowledge of such weapons.”

So basically, Dick Cheney has spent the years between 2003 and 2015 in a sealed metal box, coming out only for snacks and television interviews, and if you've got a decade's worth of contrary evidence, or regional repercussions, or dead soldiers to show him in an effort to show him why his top-notch foreign policy ideas turned out to be the biggest American foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War you might as well toss it now—Dick Cheney still don't care.

I'm not sure why this book needed to be written—yes, we all know that Dick Cheney is unrepentant for his key role in the biggest American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, he's made that abundantly clear already—or who the target audience might be, other than the free-book-when-you-sign-up-for-our-newsletter racket. I'm not sure why it needed to be co-written with daughter Liz, since Dick Cheney is perfectly capable and willing to say all these horrible things himself, except as ongoing effort to gift daughter Liz with her father's neoconservative credentials, by osmosis if necessary, so that Liz can carry on the pro-torture, pro-preventative-war, pro-America-as-rogue-state family business and make a few bucks on the lecture circuit.

So it's not so much a book as an addendum for Liz's resume and something to take up space on the former vice president's oft-vandalized Wikipedia page. Well, that a chance for Dick to be Dick.

“President Obama has departed from the bipartisan tradition going back 75 years of maintaining America’s global supremacy and leadership,” the Cheneys write, calling the idea that that “America is to blame and her power must be restrained” the “touchstone of [Obama’s] ideology.”

And snacks in hand, back into his cozy metal box he goes. At least until Liz needs a job recommendation.