By any objective measure, Dick Cheney was a bad, bad human being.
His life’s work was the conversion of blood into money.
He oversaw invasions built on lies, profited through Halliburton and its affiliates, and left entire nations in ruins while calling it “defense.”
He did not serve his country, he served the system that owns it.
When news outlets strongest language about his is “divisive” or “controversial,” they are not reporting facts, they are performing damage control for the empire.
When voices only mention his devotion to his country, I feel queasy.
Sanitization is not an accident of style, it is the operational mode of a system whose function is to protect power from accountability.
This is the first red flag for any critical observer: when mass violence is reduced to “policy disagreements,” you are not reading journalism, you are reading public relations for the ruling class.
Such coverage tells you that the outlet cannot be trusted to describe reality.
The purpose of this language is twofold.
First, it depoliticizes crime by converting it into personality: “divisive,” “polarizing,” “complex.”
Second, it preserves the illusion of national innocence.
If Cheney is only “divisive,” then America itself remains virtuous, forever cleansing its sins with adjectives.
But here’s the structural irony: this very dishonesty is also the weak point of the propaganda system.
If enough people recognize the insult to their intelligence, if they simply tune out, the machine loses its audience, its clicks, its advertising revenue, and its ideological reach.
Propaganda requires attention to function.
Starve it of legitimacy and it starves of profit.
For them, truth is bad for business.
That is why those who tell it are marginalized, and those who conceal it are promoted.
But the moment audiences reclaim their critical faculties, the empire’s story begins to collapse under its own absurdity.
The antidote to propaganda is not cynicism, it is conscious withdrawal from lies.
And when you turn it off, you have already taken the first revolutionary act.
Then, find another source that is telling you the truth.
Because the struggle against empire begins with the struggle over perception.
Who controls information controls consent. And gets to write history in real time.
Seek out those who do not flinch from reality.
Seek out the ones who show you the blood behind the budget.
That’s where democracy begins, in the refusal to be fooled and in the courage to look at what power wants you to forget.