Good morning. It is November 4th. It is a sunny election day morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Dick Cheney is dead. The former vice president of the United States died yesterday of heart disease and pneumonia, according to his family, having gotten through decades of cardiac trouble to reach the age of 84. Half a million people in Iraq were not so lucky, dying gratuitous deaths in the name of CHeny’s schemes and fantasies about foreign policy and American power. Hundreds of thousands more are dying right now around the world because of the triumph of unchecked executive power that he spent his entire professional life cultivating. He blanched at the end from what his long campaign to undo the downfall of Richard Nixon had wrought in the person of Donald Trump. He preferred lying to the public, suppressing the opposition, and applying legal force to hijack a close election over staging an outright coup attempt, as Trump would do.

If he was appalled by what his political movement ended up being, that stands as one more instance in his lifelong pattern of never being smart enough or never caring enough to assess or anticipate the real results of his chosen actions. Cheney was ultimately a con man, not a flamboyant carnival scam artist like Donald Trump, but a man who knew how to prey on the vanity and stupidity of the people who considered themselves the serious and responsible stewards of American politics and media. 

The Washington Post meets the occasion with a long and ruthless account of Cheney's life, written by Barton Gellman and Mark Fisher, that puts the word torture right in the first sentence summation of his life. Former Vice President Dick Cheney they write, “who recast an understudy's job into an engine of White House power, becoming a chief architect of a post 9-11 war on terrorism that involved bypassing restrictions against torture and domestic espionage, died November 3rd.” Passage after passage gets right at what sort of person Cheney was and how he exploited the culture around him. They recount how he agitated to get the United States to attack Afghanistan immediately after the 9-11 attacks. And then they write, “17 months later, when US forces invaded Iraq in 2003, Mr. Cheney again led the rhetorical push to justify the war, arguing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and, as the vice president put it, long-standing, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations.” They then write, “Saddam Hussein had rebuilt his nuclear weapons program, Mr. Cheney asserted, and Iraqi intelligence services had working ties to al-Qaeda. In these and other statements, the Vice President drew upon U.S. intelligence reports, but went well beyond the knowledge and consensus judgments of government analysts. As war approached, continued, Mr. Cheney professed confidence of an easy victory in Iraq, predicting that U.S. troops will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. Later, after years of bloody insurgency, he said the opposition was in its last throes.” They then write, in what might as well be his epitaph, “time and again, events would prove Mr. Cheney wrong. Iraq had no active programs producing weapons of mass destruction, and post-war analysis found no operational links to al-Qaeda. Saddam Hussein was captured, tried, and executed. But the Iraq War continued until 2011, and U.S. troops remained in the country for another decade, seeking to stabilize the country and push back against Islamic State extremists. Nearly 5,000 Americans were killed in the war.” 

And that was just one chapter in the story of a long and all too influential life of a man for whom, as the writers put it, describing his early career as the youngest ever White House chief of staff under Gerald Ford, “his inscrutable affect and loyalty to a pragmatic boss were mistaken for a moderation of outlook.” He then got elected to the House of Representatives from Wyoming, where they write, “it took him a single term to reach a GOP leadership post. Soft-spoken and collegial, with a disarming habit of listening more than he spoke, Mr. Cheney once again enjoyed his centrist image. His voting record, in fact, was among the most conservative in the House. Mr. Cheney supported tax cuts and defense spending increases, like nearly all Republicans, but he joined the rightmost wing in voting against a federal holiday honoring the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa. He likewise opposed Head Start for preschool children, the Superfund Program for Toxic Waste Cleanup, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The one exception to his otherwise blanket endorsement of hard-right culture war positions was his support, eventually, of gay marriage, apparently brought on strictly because one of his own daughters was a lesbian. As secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush.” the obituary says “Mr. Cheney was among the leading skeptics of accommodation with the reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. They then document that the lessons he took away from the fall of the Soviet Union were not the rather obvious lesson that he, Dick Cheney, had personally entirely misjudged Gorbachev and the events he brought about, but that regime change was desirable and could be easier to achieve than all the experts thought.” Later on, the story recounts how George W. Bush, having secured the presidential nomination, asked Cheney to be in charge of the vice presidential search. Here, the obituary gives a polite version of what happened next. “Mr. Cheney vetted at least 11 possible vice presidential candidates, but did not interview any of them before Bush halted the process and chose Mr. Cheney himself.” Not long after that, though, in describing the large amounts of power that Cheney took on himself from his shallow and callow ostensible boss, they write, “Few major decisions, especially in the first term, lacked a Cheney imprimatur, though his fingerprints were seldom apparent. In keeping with his Secret Service code name, ‘Angler,’ he pursued his objectives obliquely. His own favored metaphor was ‘putting an oar in the water’ on policy choices, steering quietly from astern.” And that seems to be pretty much how George W. Bush came to believe that he had chosen Dick Cheney as vice president in the first place. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, turning from the man who built this moment to the moment itself, the top left-hand news column brings the latest update on the unitary executives' efforts to use hunger as a weapon against the American population. “ADMINISTRATION
WON’T FULLY FUND
FOOD ASSISTANCE
COURTS FORCED ACTION
Many Recipients of Aid
Could Face Delays in
Getting Payments.” 

“The Trump administration,” the Times writes, “will send partial payments this month to the roughly 42 million Americans who receive food stamps, offering only a temporary and limited reprieve to low income families as the federal shutdown approaches its sixth week. The government revealed its plans in a set of court filings on Monday just days after two judges found fault in the administration's initial refusal to fund those benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, starting this month. But the roughly one in eight families that receive SNAP may still be at risk of imminent hunger and financial hardship. The Trump administration opted against using its full stable of available funds, totaling into the billions of dollars, to sustain the nation's largest anti-hunger program. As a result, eligible households may receive only half as much in benefits compared with their usual amounts, officials said.” 

The other five columns across the top of the page, including the lead news slot, are devoted to the election. “Election Day Offers Test
Of Vigor for Democrats
In the City and Beyond.” 

Underneath that is a pair of headlines. “New York’s Hopefuls Make Final Pitches, Chance for Foothold vs. Trump in 2026.”

The art department really outdid itself with a stack of three photos illustrating the mayor's race. Representing the Zohran Mamdani campaign at the top, there's a picture of a warmly lit theater packed with supporters attending a concert for the candidate. Curtis Sliwa is represented below that by a little knot of people around the candidate on the sidewalk in the background, behind what looks like a white on white 1972 or 1973 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with campaign posters taped to its side. And down at the bottom, mostly below the fold, there's a shot of some Andrew Cuomo supporters out in the open air in Washington Heights with maybe one and a half smiling faces among them. The local story says, “After a frenetic and bitterly contested mayoral race that has consumed New York City for months, voters were heading to the polls on Tuesday to decide who would run the nation's largest city. The three leading candidates, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Curtis Sliwa, crisscrossed the city on Monday in an 11th hour bid to turn out their voting bases, convert the undecideds, and fiercely attack their rivals.” Those two paragraphs, which could have been really written at any time, after Mayor Eric Adams dropped out. Some news shows up. “A new wrinkle was added on Monday to one central debate. Which candidate was best equipped to fend off growing threats from President Trump when Mr. Trump gave a last-minute endorsement to Mr. Cuomo, A move that could help the candidate with Republican voters, but alienate Democrats. ‘Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice,’ Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘You must vote for him and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it. Mamdani is not.’” And then comes the part that's really news. “The president vowed to withhold as much federal funding as he could if Mr. Mamdani were elected, saying the city had ‘zero chance of success’ under him. ‘If Mamdani wins, is highly unlikely that I will be contributing federal funds other than the very minimum as required,’ he wrote.” In addition to trying to starve the public, that is, the president is now openly threatening a stronghold of the opposition to demand the people there choose a leader he approves of. 

The story next to that is just some vamping about how the Democrats will or won't make a show of strength against Trump today in elections around the country. Of course, the Times writes, “it helps Democrats that the biggest contests are being held in states that Mr. Trump lost. The flip side is that any defeats in those states could be especially deflating.” You got it. It's definitely going to be one of those things or the other, unless it's something in between. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. If you haven't voted yet, now is the time. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.