Dick Cheney is Living Like it's 2003

That former VP Dick Cheney goes on the slowly sinking media vessel called Meet the Press to try and air out his recently exposed dirty laundry seems less surprising when one just gives in and accepts that in Cheney's mind, it is always February 2003, and we are in the business of selling the Iraq War. In the Cheneyverse, 9/11 has happened so recently that no one really questions whether the government is meaningfully pursuing the people responsible, and leeway has been ever-so-fraughtfully-given. Because a lot of people trusted the intelligence given out by the Bush/Cheney administration at the time as being meaningful in a post 9/11 context. 

Does former VP Cheney wonder where Tim Russert has gone (RIP)? Does he wonder why he himself isn't trolling down to the West Wing anymore, and why his access to intelligence has dried up? I can't imagine, but mentally, he seems to be living in the first handful of months prior to the invasion of Iraq, because he's still selling that piece hard. And all the tactics that bought that sweet lying trash that made that war plausible. Here's some of that:

In fact, he seemed to suggest that if some innocent people were tortured, it doesn’t matter, because the program still overall has had what he believes to be a successful result. “It worked. It worked now for 15 years,” he explained. “We’ve avoided another mass-casualty attack against the United States. We did capture bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I’d do it again in a minute.”

Todd pointed out that the intelligence reports that the White House was receiving about the effectiveness of the torture techniques were coming from the same intelligence sources that were wrong about the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. But Cheney defended the entire process: “I know what they were asked to do and I know what they did,” he assured. “And I’m perfectly comfortable that they deserve our praise. They deserve to be decorated. They don’t deserve to be harassed.”

"If" innocent people were tortured, like the 20% of the people who were swept up and had no reason to be interrogated or held, let alone tortured. It worked for 15 years--if the program of torture started after 9/11/2001, then that would be 13 years--unless we started fucking up people before 9/11 (you know, the way warrantless wiretapping started before 9/11). When he says "we" captured Bin Laden, I am saddened to think he might believe he was still in office at the time--what does he mean by "we"? The "guys who were responsible" for 9/11 mostly went down with the planes. The masterminds got picked up haphazardly. But we know now that torture, like waterboarding, which Cheney is so proud of, did not stop any "ticking time bombs". The interrogators asked about al-Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein. And that wasn't connected. It was bullshit. And thousands of US servicemembers and contractors died or were maimed, or were so profoundly altered by what they'd seen they suicided because of our war there--and how is Iraq doing today?

It's been eleven years since this idiot administration tried to sell us on a yellowcake fraud, aluminum tubes and a diorama of doom. We've had plenty of time to figure out that so much of this was fake. And here is Cheney, stuck in 2003, telling us it was all real and necessary. Acting as if he believed all of it, then and now. Either he is a brutally stupid incompetent gullible shit for brains, or he is the most brazen fraud that has ever strutted across the Sunday chat-show stage. In either event, I do not see why he pollutes our airwaves. If anyone thinks he'll say one thing new, they are foolish. He's hanging with his lie.

He ought to be hanged by it. (Figuratively--I'd say "figuratively".)