Freakshows are cruel, though.

I'm not sure why former Vice-President Dick Cheney is invited places to say stuff. I guess there are people who are completely comfortable with his disregard for truth, compassion, humanity, his tendency to lie about things we know are lies, his regular defense of what should not be defensible. I don't get it.

I'm not dogmatic about much. I don't stand for torture, though. Not being associated with that sort of thing was one of the ways the US could consider itself exceptional. We were better than that.

Until the Bush Administration. Then, I'm afraid, there was a real question: What, exactly, were we better than?

Yellow-gutted chickenhawk war-profiteer Dick Cheney still does not feel that torture was ever beneath us, and despite good reasons to believe it does not work, talks as if he thinks it did. Maybe he thinks it did. People can persuade themselves of many untrue things when they are, in their guts, very afraid, and may even say them aloud.

What is anyone else's excuse, though?  It's easy to cast him as a freak--harder to understand why he gets such a regular and thorough hearing. I'm not sure the spectacle of watching him slowly grind another bloody bit of raw poultry between his teeth is worth the two bits.