Wow, Steve!!

Awesome, I will need to digest this, it's bookmarked. You've really outdone yourself, and that's really saying something!

Murray must be so proud.

Only Cheney can really answer your question (What's Cheney up to?). However, it appears to me that Cheney is trying his best to make the debate about torture and what the Bush administration did (and especially what Cheney did) a political issue. By making it a political issue, he makes it much more difficult for it to be treated as a criminal issue. And, in the unlikely event that there is a prosecution, he is laying the groundwork for getting at least one juror to refuse to convict him.

Steve, this is a great post. And I'd like to add two links to blogs from a couple weeks back that I just came across. Everyone should read them. They're not long. But they both demonstrate how torture and democracy are incompatible. That to save our democracy we must repudiate and punish torture, or torture will destroy our democracy. Torture involves a total lack of empathy. But democracy involves valuing the worth and sacredness of each individual. Torture destroys personality/individuality. So on a personal or a communal level, you can't have both and be a normal person or a normal society.

Please take time to read each of these blogs. Do me that favor:

Torture, Empathy, and Democracy

http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/26/torture-empathy-and-democracy/

Torture and the United States of Alyssa Peterson

http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/26/torture-and-the-united-states-of-alyssa-peterson/

You'll be glad you did!

Great post Steve. Thank you. I too am wondering what this bird is up to. My first reaction is he is trying to prepare public opinion for a torture trial where he may play a part. But I am reading on other sites that the guy is a known wacko and this is wacko behavior. And his daughter Liz saying waterboarding is not torture because we do it to our own soldiers in training to show them how to withstand torture is just waiting for a cartoon. How did the reporter let her get away with that?

Suppose an attractive young woman with long blonde hair goes on TV, arguing that murder is ok too. Will it become just another debate topic? Instead of an outrage?

These shenanigans are outrageous!

Cheney leaves office but he won't leave our TV screens. That's good for Obama. What I think is truly pathetic is that his daughter is out then selling her father's righteousness, the father who could barely acknowledge her when he was campaigning.

What a pathetic excuse for a grown-up.

Excellent post.

However, Cheney is consistent in his actions!

'Dick Cheney is attempting to conceal, manipulate, and obfuscate what he knows to be the truth...'

His daughter unfortunately has suffered from both the nature and nurture of her existence. Too sad.

Thanks. Rec'd.

I think it's great that "Dick" is out there in the public eye. It keeps the torture issue in the news. These dumesses would have been better served to just ignore the issue, and when asked about it, try to portray it as a Democratic vendetta. By joining the debate, they make it a viable news story.

What does Cheney want? He wants the release of all salient documents...

What salient documents? We all know that Feith and his Office of Special Plans (OSP) stovepiped raw, unvetted "intelligence" to Scooter Libby in Cheney's office. In fact, it was in the OSP that the Iraq/al Qaeda 'connection' was first 'discovered'. From that 'discovery', the torture techniques were authorized.

...for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

So how in the hell is Cheney going to show us that the torture worked when there was never a connection from beginning to end?

What's Cheney up to? A couple of things I think.

First, he is a political moron and always has been. His strength has always been adminstrative, never political. Remember, this caveman stubbornly refused to ever vote for a Martin Luther King Holiday while a member of the House and he also strenuously opposed any sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. He never changed his position no matter how out of the mainstream they were and how far they kept drifing from the mainstream.

Thus, in the present case he continues to cleave to his position without shame or conscience because he has none. He's just plain stupid.

Prior to leaving office there were plenty of others who carried the water on this issue, but now there's nobody but Dick and his pathetic daughter to defend his tyrannical crimes. A control freak like Cheney cannot abide people disagreeing with him. But again, when he had all the trappings of government at his disposal he could direct others to do this stuff. At this point I would guess most people treat him like a political pariah for obvious reasons and so in his frustration to fight back he has decided to do it himself.

And the third factor is that like many Repubicans in DC he has spent a career bullying compliant Democrats who clearly do not have the courage of their convictions. And as we are all sadly aware, it usually works.

Republicans have often bluffed and bullied their way out of very sticky political circumstances by essentially daring the Democrats to "do something about it" very much in the same fashion as one might recall having heard any bully say on any elementary school playground in America. There are dim echoes of this coming out of Congress wioth threats of investigating Holder's role in the Clinton years or the Democratic Leadership's role in the torture program but Cheney is clearly the leader setting the pace and the course.

You don't get any guiltier than Dick Cheney and those who engaged in the US torture program. Anybody with any common sense can see this. But, as we can also see, the Democrats have never had any real moral resolve on this issue when push comes to shove (or any other issue come to think of it). If anything, they are more fearful of the torture issue than the primary guilty parties!

Cheney can smell their fear and so that's why he's daring them to "do something about it" repeatedly. Thus far, despite all the public derision he personally is receiving (and which he cares about not one whit), it seems to be working pretty well. Look at how Reid and Pelosi and even Obama and Holder hem and haw and try to avoid dealing with the issue in the manner required by law. What needs to happen in light of the clear revelation that a program of torture was conceived of and directed from the very top is clear as far as the law is concerned. There simply is no ambiguity whatsoever in the law concerning torture. They are, thusly, playing right into old Dick's hands.

The moral cowardice of the DC Democrats is truly appalling. The battle hasn't been lost yet, but if there's a way for them to wiggle out of their responsibility to investigate and prosecute where warranted, you can bet the DC Dems will. That's exactly what Dick's counting on and why all of us have to refuse to let it happen.

So, in my view we really have three factors at play:

1. He really is an idiot with no political horse sense at all and so he continues to indict himself and the administration with new admissions of guilt almost daily.

2. Since no one else will defend his crimes any longer he has chosen to do it himself because of #1. And because of #1 he doesn't have the intelligence to know he should shut up instead of continuing to make things worse for himself and his criminal collaborators.

3. In tired and tested Republican fashion, he is daring the Democrats to "do something about it" in hopes of taking advantage of their cowardly proclivities and thus getting them to back down.