Why I Won’t Be Mourning Dick Cheney

When someone we think is bad dies, we usually don’t seem happy about it.  As the old adage says, de mortuis non nisi bounum. But as an eminent classical scholar reminds us, the Latin adage is a mistranslation of a Greek adage which means “do not malign the dead.” It would be difficult indeed to malign Cheney, because the truth is bad enough: he was a monster of evil. He was a power-mad warmonger.

As Paul Dragu reminds us, Cheney was the architect of both Iraq wars, not only the war to oust Sadam...