Former Vice President Dick Cheney has passed away at the age of 84. Glenn Beck reviews some of the biggest lessons from Cheney’s life that America should have learned, from the Gulf War and 9/11 to the PATRIOT Act and even gain-of-function research.
Transcript
Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: So let me start here with Dick Cheney. You know, there was a time not long ago, where America was not sure of itself.
Like we are now.
The Berlin Wall had fallen. We had gone through the '80s, which was a big boost to our confidence. But we had done so much damage to ourselves in the '60s and the '70s, it took more than one president in eight years. Vietnam still you haunted us. The headlines were all about peace dividends. You remember that?
Berlin wall comes down. Now, we should have peace dividends. Downsizing. Doubt. We didn't know. We were arrogant, and yet doubtful.
The idea of a military, powerful military had been almost embarrassing to say out loud since Vietnam. Reagan had rebuilt us, but it was peace through strength. We never went to war. Thank God, we never went to war. But our perceived strength did all our work for us.
But we didn't know. Because the last time we had tanks rolling anywhere, was Vietnam. And we thought that was a really bad thing.
Well, George H.W. Bush came into office. And he brought with him a man who had five deferments in Vietnam. He had never served in uniform. And he picks that guy. A guy from Wyoming. Not loud. Not flashy. To step into the role of Secretary of Defense. That was pretty controversial.
Wait a minute. What?
Hold it.
The guy didn't look like a warrior. He looked honestly like an accountant that balanced books after the battle. He was quiet, soft-spoken.
But he was firm. He was very clear on what he believed, and he believed perhaps more than -- more deeply than almost anybody else in Washington, that a nation that can't defend itself isn't going to remain free.
And so Reagan had really built the military up.
And Dick Cheney kind of finished that off, with George H.W. Bush.
By restoring the faith in our military.
Faith in America's strength was not the problem. America's strength was the protector of liberty.
I'm old enough to remember the -- the opening night of the Gulf War.
CNN was the only news network at the time.
And on my living room screen. I was living in Baltimore at the time, there was this eerie green grain of night vision footage. Which we really hadn't seen before.
And missile strikes through the darkness. We had never seen war like this before. Not only in night vision, but not live in our living rooms. We had never seen anything like it.
And I remember we all kind of held our breath. And we watched this new kind of war, unfold.
And it was swift, it was surgical. It was divisive.
There was no draft -- or decisive. There was no draft. There was no chaos. There was no quagmire. For the first time in decades, Americans felt pride without apology when it came to our military.
And we still wondered, is it going to be a quagmire?
But it wasn't. It was very clear. The mission was clear. We liberated Kuwait. That was the mission, and then we left. There was, you know, no oil fields. No spoils. No empire building. Just a message to the world, we could be proud of! This is what moral strength looks like. Free a nation, and go home.
Now, when George W. Bush ran for president, I don't think anybody was really comfortable handing the nuclear codes over to this guy who had been the governor of Texas and really kind of, yeah, let me tell you. Yeah. Right.
I mean, I wasn't comfortable. He was the guy we barely knew. He seemed like somebody who was more comfortable in the stands of a baseball stadium, than even, you know, in the main offices of the baseball stadium, that he owned. You know.
And everything changed in 2000, in the election, when he chose Dick Cheney as his running mate. The reaction was instant.
And I think it was the sound of America kind of exhaling a bit. He announced Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. They were the ones who brought us the Gulf War. It was quick, decisive, and over.
And America said, okay. Okay. Okay.
He's got Dick Cheney behind him.
All right. The adults are back. Then came that blue September morning.
And the skies were clear, and the markets were opened.
And in an instant, absolutely everything changed. The world stopped! The New York skyline was filled with smoke, and fear filled the air, all over the world. Not just here in America. No one knew what was going on. And our president was reading stories to children in Florida, and Dick Cheney became the acting president for a while, until we could get the president to safety!
He was the one that was rushed down to the emergency bunker in the White House. He took over for a while!
He was steady. Emotionless. And firm!
He didn't tremble. He didn't panic. And in those hours, those first few hours, America needed that!
But fear, once it's tasted, it's -- it's hard to let go. And so we started a war. And it just stretched on and on and on.
And the mission became blurry. Freedom became a slogan, instead of a strategy. And freedom started to take a different meaning here in America. We passed the Patriot Act. We built the Department of Homeland Security. None of those things had anything to do with freedom. We created the FISA court. And airport lines that never seemed to end. And for a while, we told ourselves, all of this is worth it, it's the price we have to pay in a dangerous, dangerous world.
But when you give more to one God, the other gods will demand payment later. And something in those days, a seed that was far more darker was planted. The anthrax attacks, most people don't even remember them now. They rattled the nation.
Cheney, who was always the realist and the adult in the room. Always the sentinel told the nation's stop scientists, we can't wait for the next attack. We have to study it. We have to anticipate it.
And so it was Dick Cheney that urged Dr. Anthony Fauci. To push research further, faster. Into what we now call gain of function. And I'm sure it was born out of good intent to protect us. As history often teaches us, good intent can be dangerous as a companion to unchecked power. Or as my grandmother always used to say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And so bee beneath all of that calculation and control, there was a the different side to Dick Cheney. He was quiet. When his daughter Mary came out as gay, he didn't blink. Long before Clinton evolved, before Obama changed his mind, Cheney, the hawk, Darth Vader, the architect of war, said plainly, "My daughter deserves the same rights as everybody else." It was personal, it was brave, it was human, and as a politician, he stood almost entirely alone. Nobody gives him credit for that.
And he -- he belonged to a different time. A Cold War man in a post modern world. A deep believer in the chain of command. In America's dominance. In doing what has to be done, even if the world didn't approve!
He died last night. He had five heart attacks in his life. I think it was 2012, he had a heart transplant, doctor said it would give him another decade of life.
13 years later. Dick Cheney's life offers both a chance to give medals and lessons. The virtue of strength and the peril of excess. And he should have learned from the first Gulf War. He was the iron for many years in America's spine. After decades of doubt. But he was also a reminder that iron rusts, if it is left unexamined.
We needed his resolve when the towers fell. And raps, in the years that follow, we needed more in his -- more of his restraint from 1991, in the years that followed that. But we didn't get that.
So he leaves behind a really complicated legacy. Which I think is appropriate today, as I try to talk to you today about, what does it mean to be a conservative?
On all fronts. What does it mean?
Dick Cheney was a conservative for a man of his time. But he lost one of the main principles, and that is conservatives believe in the rule of law and the Constitution. He's a patriot, yes. But he's also a warning to us. He helped America find its courage. But he also taught us how easily courage can drift into control.
And he left us some lessons that we should learn. The Patriot Act. That has given our government tools to spy on its own citizens. On Capitol Hill, nobody is talking about this. But this is the biggest scandal probably in American intelligence and American corruption of all time.
The Patriot Act made all of it possible. The government -- government-wide scandal of a president spying on its opponent party, including senators and congressmen. And donors. And average citizens.
That's still being revealed. Nobody is talking about it. But that came from the patriot ability. That came him the power to do it. The FISA court as we know in a completely other scandal. The FISA courts were lied to. The FBI physically changed documents to falsify testimony to secure wire taps that they said they needed, that we now know were unwarranted and illegal. What else should we learn today? We paid a heavy price for never-ending wars in blood, in treasure, and faith.
We failed to learn the right lessons from the Gulf War. Define the mission narrowly. Execute it efficiently. And then get the hell out of there, and come home!
Enhanced interrogation. That's Dick Cheney. We called torture "enhanced interrogation." And we still refuse as a people, to have this debate. We either torture or we do not. And it's the people that should make the decision.
No one in the world looks to a nation who says one thing, but then farms out the torture to another dictator or authoritarian someplace else.
They don't look at that and go, you know what. There's a great nation.
We should also learn the lesson.
I mean, think of what we just learned. Enhanced interrogation. It's torture.
You believe so change the name. You can't change the meaning of words. Okay?
Enhanced interrogation is still torture. No matter what you do to a man surgically.
He's still a man. You can't just say, oh, no. That's a woman. Changing the words, does not change reality.
And the heaviest lesson, we have not learned a bit from is gain of function. It may be illegal, but it is still happening. Because there are those in the government, on both sides of the aisle, that think it's important.
It is not.
It has killed hills. And it's changed our world.
In that crisis, we saw blue states give new dictatorial powers that still haven't been corrected.
So Dick Cheney, believe it or not, I actually liked Dick Cheney, but I've changed. The times have changed, and I would like to salute his service to a nation for what he did, and he actually believed he was doing the right thing. And he did do the right thing, in his day. But things have changed. And his passing marks not just the end of his life, but close of that age.
An age of secrecy and steel and certainty. Honor Dick Cheney's service today. But can we learn from the mistakes? And can we remember one thing?
The strength of a nation is not measured just by its power to strike. But its wisdom to stop!
