The Social World

Tag: Dick Cheney

  • Olivia Nuzzi, teen-pop sensation

    Olivia Nuzzi, teen-pop sensation

    We all know far too much about Olivia Nuzzi. The first excerpts from American Canto, her unwelcome addition to the “spliterature” genre about her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have been unavoidable for the past few days. Cockburn can’t decide what’s worse: the revelations themselves or the windy prose in which Nuzzi’s editors have allowed her to inflict them on us. Her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza’s addition to “the Discourse” last night didn’t help matters.

    Rather than envisioning who sent pictures of what to whom, or getting jealous of a brainworm, Cockburn has found himself nostalgic. He’s casting his mind back to 2009, back when Nuzzi sought attention in a more innocent fashion: as an aspiring teen-pop starlet. Her MySpace page showcasing her singing talents as “Livvy” has unfortunately been deleted, but one enthusiast archived it so fans can at least see what it looked like.

    “Livvy is a sixteen year old singer, songwriter and actress,” the page reads. “A former Wilhelmina model, she has appeared in various commercials, films, television programs and print ads since her start in the business at the age of five.” A child star… she never stood a chance.

    The page begins with Nuzzi’s trademark modesty:

    The day that Madonna released “Erotica”
    The day that Andy Warhol made his first film
    The day that Freddie Mercury sang his last note
    The day that Judy Garland conceived Liza Minnelli
    The day that Britney Spears told you to hit it one more time
    The day that Cher first met a sequin
    The day that Candy Darling took her last breath
    The day that Mick Jagger first strut across a stage
    The day that Pamela Anderson was introduced to silicone
    The day that David Bowie sang “Lady Stardust”
    The day that Michael Jackson first slipped on a white glove
    … was the day that Livvy was born

    Lower down, we are treated to a breathy description of Livvy’s vibe:

    LIVVY is a pop chorus.
    LIVVY is a rock ballad.
    LIVVY is a hip hop beat.
    LIVVY is the past.
    LIVVY is the future.
    LIVVY is now… and she’s about to blow your mind.

    Eat your heart out, brainworm…

    Comments on the page suggest Livvy was beloved. “hi pretty Livvy, you radiate beauty,” writes one rather intense young man. “omg i love your music its there a cd i could buy ??” asks another. Sadly not: we’ll have to make do with the looming American Canto audiobook. (Cockburn’s nieces prefer the stylings of Zara Larsson, for what it’s worth.)

    The book itself is out December 2, in time for Christmas and to ruin Secret Santas across the District.

    Fox News deploys Palantir’s AI in digital operation

    Palantir CEO Alex Karp appears on Fox Business, October 2025 (Getty)

    Palantir is best known for the AI-powered cutting-edge software it provides to the federal government to give the US military and intelligence communities a leg-up over foreign competitors. Now, Palantir is in the news business as well.

    Over the last six months, with the help of Palantir engineers sitting in on high-level meetings and advising everyone from executives to writers, Fox News has scaled up its use of Palantir’s algorithms in simplifying its workflows. Readers of the nation’s most read right-of-center news outlet are therefore now influenced by the nation’s most ascendant defense contractor for which stories they see and how they’re framed.

    “We are building a first-class platform alongside Palantir engineers that will empower our editorial team to do great journalism and tell important stories,” a Fox News insider told Cockburn. “We are re-imagining and re-building every aspect of our workflow that will help our journalists be more effective and impactful in their jobs.”

    Almost every journalist uses AI in some small way – Cockburn couldn’t live without Sonix, the software that transcribes his interviews. And the use of technology in deciding which stories to elevate up the page isn’t new. For years, media companies have utilized apps such as Chartbeat and Parsely that provide real-time info on which stories are under- or over-performing.

    Fox News’s choice to employ Palantir’s Foundry – a data-integration tool employed by the Department of Homeland Security, Morgan Stanley and Merck, among others – is nonetheless a landmark one. Theoretically, use of the software could free up Fox’s journalists to spend more time on reporting and less on the menial tasks that have taken up a lot of digital-journalist time over the past decade or so.

    When asked if the site is already seeing improvements following the Palantir partnership, a Fox News insider said, “Yes, big time.”

    Not all Fox’s humans are delighted by the new tech, however. Homepage editors have been told that their role is mostly to “just check it [the AI’s suggestions] for factual mistakes,” a source with knowledge told Cockburn. “Everybody has been on edge and stressed as Palantir has essentially taken over Digital, especially the homepage,” another source told Cockburn. “Not only have the AI mandates bogged down writers like myself and others, but it has zapped the creativity out of us and made us lazier and more reliant on this technology.”

    Cockburn has no beef with Palantir pitching their algorithms to willing American buyers. But still – if one of the nation’s most powerful defense contractors is influencing what news you end up seeing, wouldn’t you want to know? And wouldn’t you want that news outlet to disclose it when, say, that company’s CEO pops up on their business channel?

    On our radar

    ARABIAN DAYS President Trump has a full schedule of events with Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman today. It’s the prince’s first visit to Washington since the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. Tuesday’s foreign pooler, Nadia Bilbassy, comes courtesy of Saudi state media; the killing didn’t come up in the briefing that was circulated ahead of time, to the chagrin of several other correspondents…

    TATE WITH DESTINY Disgraced White House official Paul Ingrassia intervened in an official capacity on behalf of his former clients the Tate brothers, to get their cell phones returned when they were seized by Customs and Border Patrol, ProPublica reports.

    VANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME A Michigan man called J.D. Vance has been jailed for two years for making online threats against an Ohio man called J.D. Vance (the Vice President) and his boss.

    Summers lovin’, happened so fast

    Former Harvard president and Clinton-era Treasury secretary Larry Summers is “stepping back from public commitments” and is “ashamed” at having asked Jeffrey Epstein for dating advice as recently as 2019 – the year Epstein didn’t kill himself – according to the New York Times. Summers wrote, while pursuing a “love interest” who was seeing another man, “I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.” Oh no he dint! Epstein replied, “shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy.”

    As the emails are revealing, Jeffrey Epstein was everyone’s daddy. Perhaps Summers would have been better off asking a different New York billionaire for dating tips…

    Evening Wood

    Cockburn sidled into the cocktail hour at the National Building Museum for the American Enterprise Institute gala a touch after 6:30 last night. Hundreds of guests donned black tie and gathered to see 91-year-old historian Gordon G. Wood receive the Irving Kristol Award. The nonagenarian New Englander drew inspiration from the Founding Fathers in his remarks. Beforehand, AEI president Robert Doar offered a brief tribute to former vice president Dick Cheney, an AEI trustee, whose funeral takes place in DC Thursday. Attendees sipped Cabernet Sauvignon and enjoyed small portions of short rib.

    Spotted: Jonah Goldberg; Joshua Katz; Philip Klein; Katherine Mangu-Ward; Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman; Adam and April O’Neal; Chloe Ross; Robby Soave and Byron York.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • Can you be ‘more MAGA’ than Trump?

    Can you be ‘more MAGA’ than Trump?

    The MAGA crack-up has been the talk of the town this week – thanks to a squishy answer from President Trump on H-1B visas in a Fox News interview, the looming release of all the Epstein documents the House has access to, disagreements over what America’s relationship with Israel should be… and the lingering hangover of the Heritage Foundation’s Tucker Carlson quarrel. (Conveniently, the forthcoming US issue of The Spectator tackles this topic – you can read two pieces from the cover package, by Freddy Gray and Ben Domenech, now.)

    These disputes – about whether there’s such a thing as being “more MAGA than Trump” – are trickling out beyond Washington and into the 2026 primary races. A tipster pointed Cockburn toward two fundraising events over the coming days that illustrate the divide, for the US Senate contest in South Carolina.

    First, the glitzy “Trump Graham Majority Fund Luncheon,” which takes place tomorrow in West Palm Beach. President Trump will make remarks in favor of the incumbent Senator Lindsey Graham – with tickets at an eye-watering $50,000 per person. (The contact for the event is Lisa Spies, whose husband Charlie briefly served as RNC chief counsel in 2024 and had a lengthier tenure working for Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign.)

    Closer to home, there’s a happy hour at Butterworth’s on Monday to raise funds for Paul Dans’s challenge to Graham. Tickets range from a far more modest $50 to $2,500. Dans, readers may recall, served as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 director, leading the initiative from 2022 until 2024. He took the fall after the Trump campaign distanced itself from Project 2025, as its hardline social conservatism offered Team Biden-Harris a convenient foil.

    Speaking of Heritage, rumors are once again swirling about a looming trustee meeting next week to resolve the think tank’s recent woes. But a spokesman assures Cockburn: “There is no board meeting scheduled for next week.”

    You don’t know Dick

    Today marks the tenth day since former vice president Dick Cheney’s passing. Flags around the country are flying at half-staff (in accordance with an Eisenhower-era executive order) – but aside from that, reactions to Cheney’s death have been quite muted in Trump’s Washington.

    The President has not issued a statement about Cheney – or a Truth Social post, for that matter. Compare that to when President Jimmy Carter died 11 months ago, when Trump made two tributes on Truth Social. Cheney’s funeral will take place at the Washington National Cathedral next Thursday – but it is not clear whether President Trump plans to attend, let alone speak. He is not on the Cathedral’s announced list of speakers. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

    On our radar

    DINESH IS SERVED Dinesh D’Souza, author of The End of Racism, has come under fire for his post speculating that Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy could “fix education” for white kids, while “all the professional whiteys on X continue their idle boasting.”

    SWAL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL? Representative Eric Swalwell has been referred to the Department of Justice by the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency following allegations of mortgage and tax fraud.

    GAETZ RATES A troubling report in the New York Times details how the 17-year-old girl who was the subject of a Justice Department sex-trafficking probe and House Ethics Committee investigation into former congressman Matt Gaetz was homeless and had joined a sugar-baby website, while underage, to get money for braces. Gaetz said, “I never had sex with this person.”

    Rock robot rock

    Last August, a group of Silicon Valley power-players, including unofficial Trump advisors Marc Andreessen and Joe Lonsdale, the cofounder of Palantir, launched a super PAC called “Leading the Future” to back AI friendly candidates. The White House is “irked” about this, according to NBC News, because one of the PAC leaders is a former staffer for Chuck Schumer. The White House is usually irked about something, but a staffer, speaking on the record, finds this unusually irksome.

    “Any group run by Schumer acolytes will not have the blessing of the President or his team,” said the official. “Any donors or supporters of this group should think twice about getting on the wrong side of Trumpworld.”

    But perhaps a nonpartisan approach makes sense. The computers that are about to run society care not whether you’re blue or red, donkey or elephant. Such petty mammalian concerns are beneath them. Our Silicon Valley betters established Leading the Future to grease the skids for AI’s arrival, not to play puerile partisan games. Sitting around talking about a “slap in the face” because some foolish person once worked for a political rival is pointless. AI is here to lead the future, not to be borne back ceaselessly into the past. Cockburn, for one, welcomes our new robot overlords.

    Weigh-in at the border

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a “cable” last week instructing US diplomats to consider obesity as a reason to reject foreign visa applications. The cable is an unholy fusion of MAGA nationalism and MAHA weight concerns.

    Obesity, the cable correctly states, leads to all sorts of terrible health problems, which can be a drain on America’s national resources. These would better spent, apparently, on rounding up obese people and sending them back to their country of origin. “Self-sufficiency has been a longstanding principle of U.S. immigration policy,” the cable says, “and the public charge ground of inadmissibility has been a part of our immigration law for more than 100 years.”

    It’s unlikely that immigration officials were turning away obese people at Ellis Island. People used to arrive in this country lean, hungry and ready to push a pickle cart on the Lower East Side. Cockburn nonetheless observes that obesity tends to be more of a problem for people after they arrive in the United States, not before, as they discover the magical qualities of the Sonic value menu. But it’s clear that the State Department has now adopted an immigration policy based on signs that have hung in American frat houses for decades: no fat chicks.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • How Dick Cheney made Donald Trump

    How Dick Cheney made Donald Trump

    Former vice president Dick Cheney, who died on Monday at age 84, loathed Donald Trump. In a 2022 election campaign ad for his daughter, Liz, a congresswoman from Wyoming, he declared: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” Yet Cheney was more responsible for Trump’s rise than almost anyone else in the Republican establishment. He helped to mastermind the calamitous Iraq War and preached the unitary executive theory of the presidency. Instead of vilifying Cheney, MAGA-world should offer him a bouquet of appreciation.

    Recall that it was during the 2016 South Carolina primary that Trump first showed his real independence from the folderol surrounding the Iraq War. Trump created shock and awe by denouncing it. “The war in Iraq,” he said, “was a big, fat mistake.” Until then, Republicans had marched in lockstep beneath the George W. Bush banner.

    After Trump’s abortive attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Liz Cheney headed a commission to expose his machinations. But it blew up in her face. The Cheney brood now became heroes to Democrats. During the 2024 election Kamala Harris was endorsed by Dick Cheney. Harris said that she was “honored” to have the backing of the “well-respected” Cheney. Well-respected? Harris was in essence effacing the true legacy of Cheney and the Iraq War. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole acutely notes that Trump had recognized that Americans had “soured on the extended occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan… It is quite extraordinary that the Democrats allowed Trump a virtual monopoly on the exploitation of this profound disillusionment, and that Harris never stopped to ask who, exactly, Dick Cheney remains “well-respected” by.

    Who indeed? The Cheney era has become synonymous with imperial overreach and disdain for constitutional safeguards. Cheney’s hubris had its sources in Watergate, when he served as a young aide in the Nixon administration. He rose seamlessly in Republican ranks, entering Congress in the 1978 election as a representative from Wyoming. His highpoint was serving as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War when America repelled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

    But Cheney and his aides, including Paul Wolfowitz, became obsessed with the idea of toppling Saddam himself from power. This idee fixe led Cheney to empower the neocons after 9/11, when America failed to capture Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora and instead focused its effort on concocting a fictitious case for war in Iraq. Cheney and his cohort succumbed to paranoia, seeking to tie Saddam by whatever means necessary to the attack on the Twin Towers. This was fantasy. But it issued in a war that turned into a debacle. At the summit of their power and influence the neocons were discredited by a bungled crusade to implant democracy in the arid soil of the Middle East.

    It wasn’t until the 2006 midterm elections, when the GOP suffered a brutal buffeting, that George W. Bush began to follow a more pragmatic approach, ousting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney’s influence had passed its high-water mark. Bush started to realize that he had been conned by the neocons. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” Cheney once remarked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” It was indeed. But the consequences of Cheney’s decisions continue to reverberate in insalubrious ways.

  • Dick Cheney dies at 84

    Dick Cheney dies at 84

    Former vice president Dick Cheney died last night aged 84. He arrived in Washington as a congressman for Wyoming, then became secretary for defense under George H.W. Bush and served for eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president. He was considered by many to have pulled the strings behind the Bush administration.

    What is perhaps his most lasting legacy is the “Cheney Doctrine,” which influenced America’s decision to engage in wars in the Middle East. He campaigned for a military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which drove his conviction that any country, organization or individual that posed a threat to the US, or that might in the future, needed to be taken out. 

    Cheney had something of an imperial mind, a belief that presidential power had to be restored after it had been curbed following the executive crises of the 20th century, like the Vietnam war and Watergate. His will to power earned him comparisons with the Star Wars villain Darth Vader – critically by the left, and admiringly by Steve Bannon: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.”

    Cheney was critical of Donald Trump, especially after the 2021 election. He called Trump a “threat to the republic” and a “coward” who tried to steal the election using “lies and violence.” Yet it could also be said that the Cheney years paved the way for a powerful executive like Trump. Where one president acted in the shadows, the other craves the limelight.

    I grew up in the Bush-Cheney years, with a father who was frequently away from our family on deployments fighting in Middle Eastern conflicts. If circumstances had been slightly different, if my father had not come back, I might easily see Cheney as one of the great villains of American history. I would not be alone in thinking so. Cheney is one of the most unpopular figures in US politics of the 21st century, and the America First movement has arisen largely in reaction to his foreign wars.

    My instinct is still to be highly critical of entanglements abroad, but it is impossible to judge what the world would be like if America had not fought the war on terror. Throughout his life, Cheney held that what he had done was necessary. He believed at the time, and continued to believe, that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.