Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Trump is about the only powerful guy out there lifting a finger for the common man at the expense of powerful interests and that's why they hate him

He’s the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!,” Trump wrote on Sept. 6.
https://time.com/7018941/dick-cheney-re ... ald-trump/

You can see what a total joke Dick Cheney was, a total joke except for the fact that he helped architect the destruction of America long before Trump ever entered politics, which set the stage for Trump based politics. Trump's characterization of Cheney is 100% correct

US Disabilities Hit an All-Time High of 37 Million In July: UP 23% Since Feb 2021

The Signal No One Wants to See

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data is out, and the number of Americans ages 16 and over reporting a disability has hit a new all-time high of roughly 37 million. As of July 2026, the Current Population Survey series sits at 37,029,000. That’s not a rounding error or a seasonal blip. It’s the continuation of a trend that broke higher more than five years ago and has refused to mean-revert.

February 2021 marks the clear inflection. The rate of increase shifted to a new, steeper trajectory, a 3-to-4 sigma departure from the prior trend. In the years since, the survey has added seven million people. Growth of that magnitude in a mature population is not normal aging, not “long COVID” in isolation, and not some gradual sociological shift. It was sudden. It has persisted. And it continues to be treated as background noise by the same public health authorities who spent years obsessed with every other metric.

Let this sink in: twenty-three participants receiving mFLUSIVA died without a specified cause, significantly more than in the comparison group. FDA itself identified the absence of autopsies as limiting its ability to determine causation. Yet autopsies were not required in the protocol, when the imbalance appeared, or before licensure. The agency identified the evidence it lacked, knew this was a major weakness in the data, and then approved the vaccine without obtaining any answers.

What made these results particularly important was that they offered a rare opportunity to separate the effects of the mRNA platform from the effects of the COVID spike protein. The COVID shots produce spike, and much of the concern about their side effects centered on that protein. Moderna’s flu candidate produced a different protein entirely, an influenza surface protein called hemagglutinin. Same delivery system, different cargo. If the side effects remained high after swapping out the cargo, then spike could not be the whole story. I attributed the remainder to the modified mRNA itself and to the synthetic fat particle that carries it into cells.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Aug 22, 2026 2:21 pm "They already knew the numbers on the transfer costs."

Paul O'Neill was sacked by Bush circa 2002 because he told the truth while Dick "The Smartest Person in the Room" Cheney said, "The debt doesn't matter."

The history on this has already been rewritten.

President Donald Trump has what one analyst described as a "mysterious obsession" with vaccines that could wreak havoc on the American people long after he leaves office.

Trump, along with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has embarked on one of the most flagrant anti-vaccine campaigns in modern history, culminating with revising the childhood vaccine schedule to reduce the total number of vaccines required. Russ Baker, a Democratic analyst, speculated in a new Substack essay on Sunday that the reason why Trump has embarked on such a crusade is that Trump believes vaccines are responsible for the "atypical" nature of his youngest son.

"I can’t read his mind, of course (nor would I want to), but there’s a curious temporal coincidence that might explain Trump’s fixation on the 'harm' caused by vaccination: On March 20, 2006, his son Barron was born," Baker argued. "By the next year, Trump was fulminating about vaccines causing babies to be born with various problems — including autism."

On a personal level, Cheney was not always a bull-by-the-horns guy. After Cheney graduated from high school, Tom Stroock, a local oilman who was impressed by the young man, arranged his entrance and full scholarship to Yale. After four semesters, Cheney’s grades were so bad, the university asked him to leave. David Nicholas, who has known Cheney since junior high school and who went to Harvard, thinks part of the problem was that the Casper schools had not prepared the boys for Ivy League academics. “We were competing with kids who went to Andover and Exeter, and they knew what it was all about,” Nicholas observes. What’s more, say those who knew Cheney then, he spent more time “in the bend-your-elbow club,” as a former Yalie puts it, than in the library. Cheney hung out with his cohort on the freshman football team, stayed up late playing cards and drinking beer. “Dick wasn’t big on studying,” remembers Jacob Plotkin, one of his roommates.

Cheney got a union job laying power lines in the blue-collar town of Rock Springs, Wyo. He stayed in constant touch with Lynne, who was in college in Colorado; he had had to endure teasing from Plotkin for writing her almost daily from Yale. On occasion, he drank too much — a practice that led to two DUI arrests within a year. Cheney told Nicholas years later that the arrests motivated him to get his career on track. In addition, Lynne, according to Stroock, “was firm that she did not want to spend the rest of her life married to a lineman.”

George W. Bush, then a candidate with limited Washington experience, asked Cheney to lead his vice-presidential search. At the end of the process, Cheney selected himself. He gave the campaign the illusion of adult supervision. When Bush won the disputed election, the quiet man from Wyoming was suddenly at the center of the world.

His office, tucked into a corner of the West Wing, became a command post. He filled it with loyalists — lawyers, policy hawks, intelligence veterans — and set about reshaping the executive branch. To most Americans, the new vice president seemed invisible. To those inside government, he was everywhere.

Then came September 11, 2001.

That morning, after two planes struck the World Trade Center, Secret Service agents burst into Cheney’s office and whisked him underground to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. There, in the dim light of screens and static, he assumed command. Bush was in Florida, then on Air Force One. Cheney, with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on the line, made rapid decisions. They quickly ground civilian flights and alerted NATO.

The vice president, not the president, directed the response from Washington. Those hours cemented his role. America was at war, and Cheney believed he knew how to wage it.

In the months that followed, he pushed through a radical expansion of presidential power. Warrantless surveillance. Indefinite detention. “Enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects — a euphemism for torture. He called it defending freedom; critics called it shredding the Constitution.

Inside the administration, Cheney’s influence was unmatched. He sidelined moderates and built the case for invading Iraq. He claimed Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction. “We will be greeted as liberators,” he told Americans in 2003.

They were not.

The war began with “shock and awe”. That was Cheney’s theatrical style. Baghdad fell in weeks. But the aftermath was chaos. No weapons of mass destruction were found. Insurgents rose from the ruins. American soldiers died by the thousands.

At home, criticism mounted. Still, Cheney refused to bend. “If we had to do it over again,” he said in 2009, “we’d do it the same way.”

For him, the logic was simple. Weakness invited attack. Doubt was dangerous. History, he believed, favored the decisive.

But history had its own judgment. By the time Bush left office, Cheney’s approval ratings had collapsed. The world saw Iraq as a catastrophe. The vice president who once seemed to run Washington now looked like a relic of another age. He was haunted by the war he insisted was right.

For all his public ruthlessness, Cheney’s private life was surprisingly ordinary. He married Lynne in 1964 and stayed married for more than sixty years. They raised two daughters, Liz and Mary. When Mary came out as gay, Cheney, who had been vehemently opposed to homosexuality, broke ranks with his party to support same-sex marriage. “Freedom means freedom for everybody,” he said in 2000, a rare glimpse of the man beneath the armor.

His health remained precarious. By 2010, he had survived five heart attacks. In 2012, he received a transplant that extended his life by more than a decade. His doctor described him as “an incredibly compliant patient”, an odd phrase for a man famous for never backing down.

When Donald Trump rose to power, Cheney watched with dismay. The Republican Party he had helped build was changing. His daughter Liz, elected to his old House seat, became one of Trump’s fiercest critics. Cheney stood with her. “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he declared in 2024, announcing he would vote for Kamala Harris instead.

It was a final, unexpected act of defiance. The man who once engineered secret wars now defended democracy against his own party. To some, it was redemption. To others, hypocrisy. But it showed that even in his last years, Cheney’s faith in institutions, however warped his methods, had not entirely died.

Historians will argue about Dick Cheney for generations. Was he the necessary hard man in a dangerous world, or the bureaucratic warrior who mistook fear for strategy? The Iraq War cost more than 4,400 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi ones. It destabilized a region and set in motion crises that still shape the Middle East.

Yet Cheney never apologized. “I did what I thought needed to be done,” he once said. “History will decide.”

He liked the Darth Vader comparisons, even played the villain’s theme when he walked on stage at speeches. It was a joke that wasn’t quite a joke. He understood the appeal of power cloaked in mystery.

When he died, America was still fighting some of the wars he started. His policies on surveillance and detention had been softened but never fully reversed. His shadow lingered in the machinery of government, in the surveillance agencies and the legal memos that defined an era of permanent emergency.

In the end, Dick Cheney lived as he governed: without apology. He once said he preferred to work from the shadows, because that was where real power lived.

Now the shadows have claimed him back. But his America — the one Diveroli toasted in War Dogs, built on contracts and secrecy, and which Donald Trump now threatens on Nigeria and Radical Islamists inside it — still exists, humming quietly beneath the surface, efficient and unseen.

Dick Cheney Reveals His Reason for Endorsing Kamala Harris Over Donald Trump
Published: Sep 7, 2024

Former Vice President and influential Republican Dick Cheney released a statement announcing his endorsement of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Speaking out against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, Cheney said that he can “never be trusted with power again.”

“In our nation’s 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney, 83, said in the statement shared on Sept. 6. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” he continued, referencing the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Cheney, who served as Vice President under President George W. Bush between 2001 and 2009 went on to say that American citizens have a “duty” to prioritize the nation over partisan politics.

Trump reacted to Cheney’s statement via a post shared on his own social media platform, Truth Social. He called the former Vice President an “irrelevant RINO”— which stands for Republican in Name Only and is a term used by some to describe Republicans who are viewed as being disloyal to the party.

“He’s the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!,” Trump wrote on Sept. 6.

Promised Benefits in U.S. Are $20 Trillion in the Hole
By David Wessel
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 21, 2002

A top U.S. Treasury official last week likened the U.S. government to a profligate insurance company that can't afford to make good on promises it has made. The cost of benefits the government vows to pay in the future exceeds projected tax revenues by roughly $20 trillion, he said. And that's no typo.

Jan. 9, 2004

O’Neill gained a reputation during his two years in the Cabinet for frequently making incendiary comments that shook up financial markets and antagonized Wall Street. O’Neill said he was just trying to discuss complicated public policy issues in greater depth than the television sound bites so often used by the typical Washington politicians.

O’Neill was fired in December 2002 when Bush shook up his economic team in search of better salesmen for a new round of tax cuts the president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy.

O’Neill had publicly questioned the need for another round of tax cuts in light of the growing budget deficits. He was replaced by John Snow, former head of CSX Corp., who became a staunch advocate for new tax cuts, which Bush signed into law in May.

What Dick Cheney Really Thinks About Deficits
Now he tells us.

By Conor Clarke
May 28, 2009

It's good of Dick Cheney to tell the world (via Larry Kudlow) what he really thinks about deficits:

Well, I think the budgets he (Obama) submitted are way out of whack. I think what it does not only to the short-term deficit but long-term debt situation is very objectionable. [...] We're at a point now where to look at the levels of spending that are being contemplated, six hundred and some billion dollars, for example, in unfunded planning with respect to their medical reforms, somebody's got to pay for that in some fashion.

Which is a perfectly fine sentiment. But it's really just fish in a barrel to point out that this is the exact opposite of what Cheney was saying in 2002 (with similarities right down to the budget figure):

Shortly before he was fired, [Treasury Secretary Paul O'neill] confronted Cheney about the Administration's latest proposal to cut taxes by another six hundred and seventy-four billion dollars over ten years, pointing out that the country was "moving toward a fiscal crisis." The Vice-President stopped him. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. "We won the midterms. This is our due."

That's from John Cassidy's retelling of the famous scene from Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty.