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The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend…If Only Out of Necessity

From Palmer Report:

That Sound You Hear is Hell Freezing Over

When Liz Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris earlier this week, it was a big deal, but not unexpected. It did, however, raise an interesting question. When I heard the news, I thought “What’s Dick going to do?” I’m sure others had the same thought. Sure enough, now we have our answer, and it’s historically significant. But will it be electorally significant?

If you’d told me that Dick Cheney and I would someday be voting for the same presidential candidate, I’d have assumed it meant that one of us was someday going to end up having a psychotic break. But here we are, with Dick Cheney endorsing my candidate, Kamala Harris. It’s not that the famously neoconservative Dick Cheney has somehow become more moderate. Rather it’s that his Republican Party has indeed had a psychotic break.

So where does this get us? When the news broke yesterday, I wanted to take a day before forming an opinion about its electoral significance. Sometimes unexpected political news can initially feel like it’s going to have a different impact than it’s really going to have, if only because of the initial shock value. As I often like to say, a lot of times in politics, the “biggest” stories end up adding up to nothing.

But I think this is different. It’s one thing for Dick Cheney’s daughter to endorse the Democratic Party candidate for President. Liz Cheney is a conservative, but she’s spent years showing herself to be pragmatic and bipartisan. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, is the uncompromising conservative extremist who was to the right of George W. Bush. As far as we all know, Dick Cheney is every bit as much of a conservative extremist as ever. And yet he’s endorsing the Democratic candidate.

Dick Cheney is also from a different generation. He’s the last remaining major voice from the pre-Trump Republican era (except for George W. Bush, who refuses to say anything partisan these days). There are Trump-haters in the Republican Party who voted for a ticket with Cheney on it the last time they voted. And now Dick Cheney himself is telling those Republicans to vote for the Democratic candidate.

Let’s keep in mind that when Donald Trump still had Republican primary challengers in 2024, he was still barely getting of the Republican vote in each primary state. Even once he was running unopposed, 15% of Republican primary voters were still finding a way to cast votes against him. Anti-Trump Republican voters are a bigger group than the media on either side likes to acknowledge. And now Dick Cheney, one of their patron saints, just told them to play for the other team in 2024.

We’ll see what happens with this. But it feels like it’s an impactful story. Even if it only moves the needle by let’s say 1%, that would be enough to change the outcome in any swing state where Kamala Harris is currently on track to lose by less than 1%. So let’s take it as a win and keep on building. You’re still welcome to despise Dick Cheney as much as ever, if you like. But we’ll take his help nonetheless.

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For Anyone Who Still Cares

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before, but let’s recap.

I loved Alien. I saw it on opening night in 1979 (for those of you who might be new here, yes I’m old) and drove home constantly looking in my rear view mirror for anything that might be lurking in bed of my truck.

I loved Aliens even more. I got home and turned on every light in my apartment. Probably one of my favorite films of all time. Everything about it was exceptional.

I was disappointed with Alien3 only because they’d killed off Newt and Hicks. And to be honest, the whole setting gave me the “icks.”

By the time Alien Resurrection came around, I was pretty much done with the franchise, but went to see it on opening night nonetheless. At this point I don’t even remember the storyline; that’s how much of an impression it left on me.

Nevertheless, fifteen years after Resurrection, I confess to quite a bit of excitement when Prometheus was announced—especially since Ridley Scott was directing. Initially I gave it an almost-glowing review, but in the intervening years and upon several subsequent viewings, my opinion of the film has soured considerably—mostly because of the outright stupidity exhibited by the majority of the characters.

And then three years later, along came Alien: Covenant. I was expecting so much from that film, and I should’ve known better. I wanted answers. What happened to Shaw and David? Did they find Paradise? No. We got yet another murderously psychotic android, a mention of Shaw’s grusome death in passing, and a whole lot more stupid exhibited by the characters in the story. I walked out of the theater swearing off the franchise completely.

So now we have Alien: Romulus (with apologies to Star Trek for stealing the planet’s name, apparently) yet another prequel to the original 1979 film. My ears perked up when I first head of this being in the works a couple years ago, but I quickly reminded myself how awful the latest crop of films had been and let the whole thing slide by the wayside.

Well, the film finally came out and while the reviews have generally been positive (minus the too-obvious callbacks—to the point of actual dialog being lifted—to the first two films, not surprisingly I have no desire whatsoever to waste money seeing it in a theater. I’ll wait until it’s streaming—and free—before I put any effort into seeing it.

To be honest, I’ve generally lost interest in going to movies. Ben and I used to go a lot, and prior to meeting Ben, I had a movie buddy who I’d see almost every new release with. But even prior to COVID, Ben and I were going less simply because it was becoming more and more difficult finding films we both wanted to see. The last two films I saw in a theater were Dune and Dune II, and neither one was a particularly enjoyable experience. With Dune it was because we were still in the throes of the COVID lockdown with all that entailed and Ben didn’t really want to go. With Dune II, I was so disappointed disgusted with how Villeneuve butchered the remainder of the novel I left the theater shaking my head, vowing never to return.

I understand there’s an Alien series coming out (aka Alien: Earth) on Netflix or one of the other streaming services. Will I bother? Hard to say. At this point I’m suffering from Alien burnout from too many poorly-executed installments of the story and honesly—how many more times can a chest-burster produce any sort of surprise or excitement?

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