The Truth About Dick Cheney — The Cost and the Choice

This episode closes the circle.

For six episodes, we’ve traced how Dick Cheney built a doctrine, assembled a machine, and helped normalize undeclared war. In this final chapter, we stop talking about power in the abstract and confront what it actually did to real people.

This is the human toll of Cheney’s worldview.

Not in statistics.
Not in talking points.
In lives.

National Guard units pulled away from their communities.
Service members sent into wars Congress never voted on.
Veterans who came home carrying wounds they were never given the truth about.
Families left with folded flags and unanswered questions.

This episode connects the dots between unchecked executive war powers and the damage done at home. How the National Guard was quietly transformed from a force meant to defend the states into a permanent overseas deployment pool. How Congress stepped aside. How war became routine. And how the cost was shifted onto citizens who never had a say.

But this is not just a postmortem.

This episode is also about the choice still in front of us.

Defend the Guard is not a slogan or a protest. It is a constitutional pressure point. A state-level law that forces Congress to do its job before the National Guard can be sent into foreign combat zones. No blank checks. No executive shortcuts. No pretending the Constitution doesn’t apply when it’s inconvenient.

This is the practical path forward. The last off-ramp before the next generation is asked to fight another war no one voted for.

If you’ve stayed with this series, this episode explains why it mattered. Not to relitigate the past, but to reclaim the future.

This podcast is produced by Bring Our Troops Home, a veteran-led organization committed to ending endless war and restoring Congress’s constitutional authority over war. Our work focuses on passing Defend the Guard across the country, state by state, before the next crisis is used to justify another generation of conflict.

Learn more or support the mission:
BringOurTroopsHome.us
DefendTheGuard.us

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If this episode hits you, share it. The truth only matters if people hear it. And the Constitution only works if we’re willing to enforce it.

Welcome to the final chapter of The Truth About Dick Cheney.