Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume offered a measured remembrance of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Special Report as the news of Cheney’s passing reverberated across the country. Cheney died this week at age 84, leaving behind a complicated but unmistakably consequential record of service to the nation.
History will record Cheney as the vice president who refused to be a figurehead — he was the heavy-lifter in an administration that kept America safe after the worst attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor. Whether you agreed with every policy, there is no denying he strengthened the presidency’s ability to defend the country and made national security the priority it needed to be in perilous times.
Those of us who watched the steady, sometimes stern hand of government know that leadership is not always popular in the moment — it is about doing what must be done. Brit Hume’s reflections captured that sober truth: Cheney’s was a life spent choosing the hard responsibilities over easy applause, a lesson the media too often forgets when it prefers spectacle to substance.
To be sure, Cheney’s legacy is a target for the left’s outrage machinery, which loves to reduce complex choices into slogans and moral certainties. The Iraq war, surveillance measures, and interrogation policies will be debated for generations, but a free country should allow debate without erasing the underlying reality that those policies grew from a desire to protect American lives.
Beyond policy, Cheney’s personal story was one of resilience — decades of health battles, a heart transplant, and a private devotion to family that his daughters and wife have rightly memorialized. He was surrounded by family when he died, and whatever one thinks of his politics, the man who taught his children about love of country leaves a family and a nation that will spend years arguing over the shape of his legacy.
Conservative patriots should remember Cheney as a warrior for the Republic who put the safety of American citizens above the applause of the coastal elites. As Brit Hume and others reflected on cable and across the talk pages, let us honor service and courage while arguing the finer points in the open air of civic life, not with the shrill cancel-culture verdicts that prefer to bury hard choices rather than reckon with them.
