Politics & Power Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney reaches for a boxer’s metaphor because it flatters the audience while lowering the bar for accountability. “Severe body blows” concedes pain without naming who threw the punches, who absorbed them, or who walked away with the winnings. It’s a neat rhetorical dodge: the economy is cast as a tough, almost masculine organism that can take hits and “bounce back,” so whatever damage is happening now gets reframed as temporary, even character-building.

The intent is reassurance, but not the tender kind. It’s a hard-nosed pep talk aimed at markets, donors, and voters who want to believe the system is self-correcting. By praising “resilience,” Cheney shifts attention from policy choices to a national trait, as if recovery is less a product of regulation, labor, or safety nets than a kind of American metabolism. That framing also naturalizes inequality: if the economy “bounces back,” the people who don’t are rendered collateral, exceptions to the heroic rule.

The subtext is especially telling given Cheney’s era: post-9/11 security-state expansion, war spending, and an aggressively pro-business governing style that treated volatility as manageable and dissent as impatience. “Over the years, over the decades” is doing quiet work, laundering recent shocks into a long historical arc where failures dissolve into a montage of comebacks. It’s optimism with a strategic edge: if the machine always recovers, then warnings about structural risk can be dismissed as panic, and the political demand becomes endurance, not reform.