It's like he never left, because he didn't.
When House Republicans invited Dick Cheney to come dispense wisdom to their members, it was clear what they were going to get.
They got it.
Former vice-president Dick Cheney met behind closed doors with Republican members of Congress on Tuesday to urge them to adopt a more muscular military posture in the Middle East. [...]
Cheney did not address the specifics of any military involvement in the Middle East, according to several people present at the meeting, which took place in the Capitol Hill Club and was open to all House Republicans.
But he decried what Republicans perceive to be president Barack Obama’s “weakness”, said legislators should boost military spending and provided a neo-conservative analysis of the conflict embroiling the Middle East.
So he doesn't have any particular ideas other how that Obama is "weak" and that we need to be doing something more bomb-ish or invasion-ish. This is the man who, along with a select set of other Wrongest People in America, is most directly responsible for setting forces in motion that created ISIS, but for some reason he gets a pass on that one.
Why is that?
Asked if he saw any irony in Cheney coming to talk to Republicans about next steps in Iraq, [Rep. Peter King] said firmly, "No, because most of us think we did the right thing in Iraq."
If you're wondering just how badly conservative foreign policy can screw up before the people involved will fess up to having been super-ultra-mega-wrong, don't bother. Dick Cheney could have launched a nuclear strike wiping out our entire Atlantic coast and Rep. Peter King would still be praising him from inside a tattered radiation suit.
It sounds like the Cheney visit was also intended to shore up the notion that whoever is next running for president on the Republican side needs to share the Cheney wisdom of who to invade and how much to invade them.
“If there was a single takeaway, it was that we’ve got to stop this decline of the American military,” [Rep. Tom Cole] said. [...]
“I see this as much about the upcoming presidential debate which begins in earnest in 2015 as I do any particular message directed toward the president,” Cole said. Cheney “wants to play an important role and should play an important role in shaping what the foreign policy and security concerns of the Republican Party are going forward.”
I can see why the networks still want to have Dick Cheney saying things on teevee—if it bleeds it leads, etc—but it's still a bit surprising that House Republicans are so eager to tie themselves to the most visibly incompetent foreign policy since the Vietnam era. Usually what happens after each major conservative failure is that the same notions get repackaged as a different "brand," presented by different actors. This time we're not doing that, we're just jumping right back in with the exact same people who flat out lied about war, who bungled the operations of that war, and whose assurances of the cheap and speedy and flower-petal-dispensing outcome of that war were so staggeringly wrong. What do you think we should do
this time, Mr. Cheney? The same thing? Oh, golf claps for you. Golf claps all around.