In December 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a stern warning to Senate Republicans opposed to President Bush's proposed bailout of the U.S. auto industry then teetering on collapse. "If we don't do this," Cheney cautioned his GOP colleagues behind closed doors, "we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever." Now in his new revisionist history In My Time, Cheney insists he was against aid to the automakers all along. As his reversals on Iran sanctions and marching on Baghdad, saving Detroit was far from Dick Cheney's only about face.
As the Detroit News explained:

In a new memoir "In My Time" published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, Cheney says he disagreed with President George W. Bush's decision to rescue GM with a $13.4 billion bailout in the final days of his term.
"The president decided that he did not want to pull the plug on General Motors as we were headed out the door," Cheney wrote. "Although I understood the reasoning, I would have preferred that the government not get involved and was disappointed -- but not surprised -- when the Obama administration significantly increased the government intervention in the automobile industry shortly after taking office."

But if he's telling the truth now, then three years ago Dick Cheney was lying to Senate Republicans at best or undermining his boss at worst. Because while Cheney voted against the 1979 Chrysler rescue package, in 2008 he presented the case for President Bush's proposal to extend a $14 billion lifeline to GM and Chrysler to skeptical Senate Republicans. As the Los Angeles Times reported on December 12, 2008:

Bush personally lobbied recalcitrant Senate Republicans after Vice President Dick Cheney failed to round up support Wednesday during a contentious two-hour meeting.
"If we don't do this, we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever," Cheney told them, according to a Senate Republican aide, evoking the president whose inaction is widely blamed for helping trigger the Great Depression in the early 1930s.

Bush and Cheney fell seven votes short. The next week, President Bush announced a $17.4 billion package redirected from the $700 billion TARP bailout for the banks. (Cheney, of course, supported the rescue of Wall Street.) Bush defended his move in his own memoir, Decision Points, arguing, "The immediate bankruptcy of the Big Three could cost more than a million jobs, decrease tax revenues by $150 billion and set back America's GDP by hundreds of billions of dollars." But while President Bush put the auto industry on life support, it was President Obama who resuscitated the patient in 2009. As Chrysler Group LLC CEO Sergio Marchionne explained in May, "it happens rarely in life you're given a second chance."
A second chance, it turns out, is exactly what Dick Cheney was given when it came to sanctions on Iran.
Dick Cheney had a born-again experience on Iranian sanctions when he entered the Bush administration. While Vice President, Cheney in 2002 denounced Iran as "the world's leading exporter of terror." But during his tenure as Halliburton CEO in the 1990's, Cheney strenuously argued against Clinton's sanctions regime and expanded Halliburton's business with Tehran. But in 1998, he complained that U.S. firms were "cut out of the action." And back in 1996, Cheney railed against the Clinton prohibitions on Iranian trade and financial activity for American firms:

"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government. The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."

As Vice President, Cheney continued to have financial ties to his former firm. Despite Cheney's assurances that "I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest," a 2003 report by the Congressional Research Service found that the Vice President retained 433,000 shares of Halliburton. In addition, Cheney received $162,392 and $205,298 in deferred payments in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
In 2004, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes detailed the Iranian business dealings of Cheney's former company. Despite the prohibitions signed into law by President Clinton with his 1995 executive order and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, Halliburton continued to reap the profits of business with Iran through its non-U.S. subsidiaries. While U.S. law bans virtually all commerce with the rogue nations, Halliburton was able to jump through its major loophole: the rules do not apply to any foreign or offshore subsidiary so long as it is run by non-Americans. As CBS documented:

That subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services, Ltd., is wholly owned by the U.S.-based Halliburton and is registered in a building in the capital of the Cayman Islands -- a building owned by the local Calidonian Bank. Halliburton and other companies set up in this Caribbean Island, because of tax and secrecy laws that are corporate friendly.
Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government.

In the wake of the January 2004 60 Minutes piece, the company moved quickly to declare that "Halliburton's business in Iran is clearly permissible under applicable laws and regulations" and cited its October 2003 disclosures to the New York City police and fire pension funds. Despite those assurances, Dick Cheney's old firm was subpoenaed by a U.S grand jury in June 2004. In early 2005, Halliburton announced that it would end its business activities there when it fulfilled its ongoing contracts, including a $35 million gas drilling project it had just won the previous month.
On the Iraq war, too, Dick Cheney seems to have had a "come to Jesus" experience. Or better yet, a "come to Baghdad" experience. Because while former Vice President Cheney told NBC's Matt Lauer this week that the conquest of Iraq was "sound policy," in 1992 Defense Secretary Cheney had a different opinion altogether:

"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney said then in response to a question.
"And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq"...
Going to Baghdad, Cheney said in 1992, would require a much different approach militarily than fighting in the open desert outside the capital, a type of warfare that U.S. troops were not familiar, or comfortable fighting.
"All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques," Cheney said.
"Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq."

Of course, on most matters Dick Cheney has remained unchanged, unmoved and unrepentant. His support of his former chief of staff and convicted Plamegate felon Scooter Libby is unwavering. He continues to defend the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture, challenging the Obama White House to either prosecute him for war crimes or accept America's descent into brutality and lawlessness as a fait accompli. Little has changed from two years ago, when Cheney explained that the "little guys" who architected and carried out waterboarding and other potential war crimes deserved his protection, just like Oliver North and Caspar Weinberger:

"I went through the Iran-contra hearings and watched the way administration officials ran for cover and left the little guys out to dry. And I was bound and determined that wasn't going to happen this time...this time around I'll do my damndest to defend anybody out there-be they in the agency carrying out the orders or the lawyers who wrote the opinions. I don't know whether anybody else will, but I sure as hell will."

Looking back on then-Representative Dick Cheney's hand in the 1987 Congressional Iran-Contra Committee minority report, one could be excused for performing a mental copy and paste. Substitute Bush for Reagan and torture for Iran-Contra, and you'd think you were reading an excerpt of Cheney's new book:

"The bottom line, however, is that the mistakes of the Iran-contra affair were just that - mistakes in judgment, and nothing more. There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for ''the rule of law,'' no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or coverup. In fact, the evidence will not support any of the more hysterical conclusions the committees' report tries to reach."

What Cheney brushed off as the "state of political guerrilla warfare over foreign policy between the legislative and executive branches" quickly morphed into President George H.W. Bush's now infamous talking point about "the criminalization of policy differences." It's been a staple of Republican scandal evasion ever since.
Almost 25 years later, Dick Cheney refuses to alter his views. History, of course, is another matter.