Cheap Shots and Big Times

Scott Shane went full Driftglass this morning, writing a report on the Big Dick's pro-torture appearance on Meet the Press (which the real Driftglass couldn't make himself watch, like me, and had to report out of the written-language coverage). He wasn't trying to be funny or anything, at least most of the time, but a few items really stood out for me as pretty grand in the guignol department.

Via TransmissionAtelier.

Language, language

“Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said in his latest interview defending the C.I.A. program. “There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.”

No, that's not torture. It's bad, it's morally wrong, it's illegal in most states (not sure about Texas), it's premeditated murder, aggravated by being a hate crime. It's just that torture is something different. Like I'm really against burying people alive but I don't call it child rape. As Merriam-Webster put it, simplifying down a bit from the legal definitions,

Heck of a job, capitalism!

Capitalists of the world, unite! Viktor Deni, 1920. Via.

Gail Collins writes:

One of the most unnerving parts involves the fact that the waterboarding, ice baths and wall-slamming were conducted under the direction of an outside contractor. It isn’t the first time the government turned to private enterprise and wound up with a human rights disaster — think Abu Ghraib. Or Blackwater.

Actually Abu Ghraib is a part of it (torturers there were trained by torturers from Guantánamo from the private enterprise torture-training program)—it represents, perhaps, the very beginning of the Bush administration drive to privatize everything they could from State Department security (that's where Blackwater came in) to Social Security (sorry, not privatization but the proposed "introduction of private accounts" which is totally not privatization except to the extent that it is that did not actually get done anyhow, though the former president persists in regarding it as his top achievement in domestic policy).

Ex-VP Nabbed in Flagrant Truthfulness

Image credit to UrantianSojourn.com via TPK at Kos.

Out of his own mouth:

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.” (New York Times)

Yes, I think at the very least Cheney himself and his office, and the Office of Legal Council, and various people in the Department of Justice, must have known exactly what kind of violence the CIA was perpetrating in our name, right from the Memorandum of Understanding of September 17 2001, as Emptywheel was explaining a couple of years ago:

Players: The Borgia Bunch

Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess, 1555, National Museum in Poznań. Images from a 2006 show at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, "At Home in Renaissance Italy".

Here's a story about a man named Borgia...

Sunday troll-baiting: Weapons of Mass Disjunction

From boarmasters.com.

The genial Barracks O'Bama had spotted the quarry first; she was an extremely frisky specimen, and by the time I ran across them Barracks was feeling some fatigue:

.@PennyDreadful81 As long as you've admitted that Cheney lied about WMDs so he could profit off our soldiers' deaths, my work here is done.
— Barracks O'Bama (@P0TUS) May 18, 2014

Thus gloriously and unwounded did Barracks retire from the field. But a deep fog of derp still hung about the meadow, the birds sang, and my blood was up. Dr. Google and I dumped some tempting evidence in front of the opening to the troll's cave:

Monday morning cheap shot

Shit Gets Real >> Dick Cheney: It's 'Not True' Mike Enzi And I Are Fishing Buddies http://t.co/IezrqTyGNH
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 28, 2013

Just hooked him in the cheek that one time. Bad cast.

Dressed for defensive bass fishing with Dick "Largemouth" Cheney. Note the symbolic representation of emergent Liz. Via.