“Wherever They’s A Fight to Defend the Preposterous Arguments of People Responsible for Arbitrary Detention And Torture, I’ll Be There”
By Shorter Ann Althouse: “That Dick Cheney was so tough and steadfast and dreamy when he defended his administration’s policy of torturing people, including the innocent. And you betcha the sexual assault rectal dehydration and feeding probably had a legitimate medical purpose, just as Jose Padilla may well have been tortured to stop him from blinking signals to the many people watching him being taken to the denitist at Gitmo.”
As a desperately needed chaser, Chait has a good summary of the various ways Cheney has defended torture now that it’s even harder to pretend that it didn’t happen. My guess is that #1 — by definition, it’s not torture if the right Americans do it to the wrong paper — will be the dominant theme. It’s sad and outrageous that apologias for gross violations of human rights that really should be confined to eighth-rate webcomics will persuade many people, but we are living in a polity in which Dick Cheney could be part of a winning presidential ticket twice.