Time & Perspective Quote by Sarah Brady

There is something bracingly unsentimental in Sarah Brady calling Dick Cheney "scary". It refuses the polite language of policy dispute and goes straight for the gut: fear as a civic diagnosis. Coming from Brady, a gun-control activist shaped by the attempted assassination of her husband, James Brady, the line lands as more than partisan sniping. It reads like a survivor's antenna picking up a familiar frequency: the calm, bureaucratic face of decisions that can get people hurt.

The first sentence is almost casual, even domestic in its phrasing: "I've thought...for a long time". It's the cadence of an intuition you don't brag about because you hope you're wrong. The second sentence snaps that intuition into confirmation: "Now I know". The movement is the point. Brady is talking about the moment when vague unease becomes evidence-backed dread. In the early-2000s context - post-9/11 secrecy, the expansion of executive power, torture debates, war planning conducted behind closed doors - Cheney functioned culturally as a kind of shadow executive, the anti-celebrity statesman whose influence was felt most in what the public wasn't allowed to see.

Subtextually, Brady's "nervous" is doing double duty. It's personal: her life was reordered by political violence and its aftermath. It's also strategic: nervousness is a warning signal, a prompt to vigilance, not paralysis. The intent isn't to psychoanalyze Cheney; it's to legitimize alarm in a culture that often mocks it as hysteria until the receipts arrive. Brady is staking out a moral claim: if the powerful insist on operating in the dark, fear may be the most rational form of public light.