Ding-Dong, Dick Cheney is Dead

“The claw rises, trembling under the weight of so much sin.”

— Father Death

Father Death has been rattling the claw machine for Dick Cheney since the 1970s. He’s had his pale bony eye on that wrinkled war criminal for decades, just waiting for the old heart to finally sputter out. When Death thinks about Dick, he doesn’t see one man, he sees a screaming collage of souls: the tortured, the disappeared, the collateral damage. The million ghosts of the “War on Terror” drifting like burnt paper through eternity. So when the moment came, Death didn’t hesitate. He maneuvered the claw with perfect aim and snatched his prize straight into the 9th Circle of Hell.

Cheney joins an illustrious lineup down there, Saddam Hussein, Henry Kissinger, Charles Manson, Bernie Madoff. A regular reunion of bastards. History’s scum bucket. Dick, of course, earned his place honestly: architect of torture as “interrogation,” the man who flung human beings into Guantánamo’s legal void, who believed “due process” was a quaint relic. And let’s not forget that he literally shot his own friend in the face. You can’t make this shit up.

But Cheney’s corruption didn’t start in the desert sands. No, his rot took root in the Nixon years. Back then, he was a bureaucratic hitman on the “Cost of Living Council,” side-eyeing democracy and learning all the wrong lessons from Watergate. He and his twisted mentor Donald Rumsfeld decided Nixon wasn’t the villain, Congress was. The presidency, they thought, needed more teeth. And boy, did Dick sharpen them. Decades later, under George W. Bush, he would unleash that doctrine like a demon, the divine right of the executive branch to rule unchecked.

That seed grew into a monstrous tree, its branches reaching all the way into the orange-stained Oval Office of Donald Trump. Cheney’s dream of the omnipotent presidency metastasized into full-blown authoritarianism. The brain worm ate straight through the collective Republican cortex and left behind a party of glassy-eyed zealots babbling about freedom while strangling it in the crib.

During the War on Terror, Cheney’s America legalized the unthinkable. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” a bureaucratic euphemism for sadism. Secret prisons. Indefinite detention. A surveillance state that stripped us naked in the name of security. Those same shadows now slither through ICE and DHS, haunting us still. The Constitution, shredded and blood-stained, was left twitching on the floor.

Then came his literal change of heart, a shiny new transplant in 2012. Maybe it was guilt pumping through those fresh veins, or maybe it was just post-op confusion, but in his twilight years, Cheney started calling Trump the “greatest threat to our Republic” and a “coward” who “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence.” Imagine that, the devil himself calling out the Antichrist. He even voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Cute.

But repentance is a luxury the dead can’t afford. Whatever clarity came at the end doesn’t wash the blood from his hands. His fascist fever dream to strengthen the presidency, crush dissent, and weaponize fear, outlived him. It’s still gnawing at the foundations of this country.

So Father Death, patient as ever, jiggles the joystick of the claw machine one last time. The metal arm trembles, finds its target, and rises. Dick Cheney, prize of prizes, dangles in the air, still scowling.

Death grins, whispers darkly through his teeth, “Got him.”

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