The madness of Dick Cheney: “How I learned to stop worrying about legal niceties and come to love torture”

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I never bought into the idea of Dick Cheney as Darth Vader. It is an insult to Darth Vader who redeemed himself in the end. Apparently, there will be no redemption for Dick Cheney.

No, Dick Cheney's image was forever fixed in my mind as a modern-day Dr. Strangelove with his wheelchair exit from power on Inauguration Day. (Right. h/t to David Safier for the photo shop touch-ups)

This Thursday, Dr. Strangelove, er, Dick Cheney, is scheduled to address the right-wing zealots of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), his home away from home where it is rumored his "secret undisclosed location" is located in the basement.

Cheney's topic, of course, wil be making the case for the Bush administration's use of torture and indefinite detainment of suspected terrorists as core parts of its War on Terror. h/t Cheney's Big Speech | TPM

Here's AEI's description of the event …

In April 2009, almost eight years after the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, the Obama administration released four memos from the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel. These memos, which justified the use of harsh interrogation techniques against high-level al Qaeda detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, have reignited a fierce debate about the United States' counterterrorism strategy.

Amid claims that the interrogation methods amount to torture and that those who approved them should be prosecuted or censured, it is clear that we know surprisingly little about the scope and efficacy of the Bush administration's national security policy. Many questions linger: What type of information did enhanced interrogation methods yield? Were lives saved as a result? Could that intelligence have been effectively collected by other means? How effective was the terrorist surveillance program in detecting the threat of al Qaeda and its operatives in the post-9/11 period? Will inhibiting these procedures cost more American lives?

On May 21, former vice president Dick Cheney will speak at AEI to address these critical issues and provide a blueprint for keeping America safe in the future.

Dick Cheney has long been a proponent of totalitarianism – he just calls it by another name, his "unitary executive theory." Cheney is also America's leading proponent of torture – despite the fact that several laws and treaties make torture illegal, not to mention America's time-honored national value and tradition that "Americans do not torture."

Dick Cheney is asking the American people to abandon our time-honored national values and traditions and our principles of a democratic republican form of government, and to join him in a descent into the darkness of evil and tyranny. We had enough of that during eight years of Bush-Cheney. Never again. Damn you to hell, Dick Cheney! And take your evil spawn Liz Cheney with you!

The "Cheney family values" are entirely alien to American history and everything that Americans hold dear – their "values" (sic) are entirely un-American. How dare the Cheney's slander patriotic Americans who fight to defend our time-honored national values and traditons and our principles of government as "un-American," simply because these patriotic Americans refuse to join Dick Cheney in his descent into the darkness of evil and tyranny.

The madness of Dick Cheney in his address to AEI is almost certain to surpass the madness of Dr. Strangelove in describing his nuclear survival plan.