One of these is a parody, one is not:
- Dick Cheney Says Forced Rectal Feedings Were for “Medical Reasons”
- Cheney Calls for International Ban on Torture Reports
I’d say it was a case of pumphead but he’s been thinking this way for decades.
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Steeplejack
I went to the Times site this morning to read Krugman’s column and made the mistake of reading a story about the torture report and Cheney’s still full-throated defense of the whole obscene fiasco. Ugh. Now trying to calm my blood pressure and thinking I need to look at some LOLcats.
Bobby Thomson
Well, don’t keep us in suspense. Which one isn’t real?
Elizabelle
Did Cheney get any pushback on “torture helped us get Bin Laden”, implied in the clip the cable channels are using?
Also that “we” got Bin Laden, when “we — meaning Richard Bruce Cheney” did nothing of the sort. Obama succeeded where the Bush administration failed there.
Amir Khalid
The comments on the Gawker story are an unbroken stream of horror and outrage. But no commenter is saying they are surprised at the depraved things Dick Cheney is saying.
Sherparick
No. 2. I took at 1/5th of whiskey and watched Cheney on MTP and saw him repeat Michael Hayden’s lie about the rectal feeding incident. (Probably because he heard it from Hayden on Faux News and figured, “that sounds good to me.”)
By the way, I fully expect the Republican 2016 platform to include a full endorsement of EIH and statement that Intelligence Agencies, the Military, and police to use “any means necessary” to protect America from Them. Because what we do to the “Them” can never be torture, genocide, ethnic cleaning, etc. because we are Real (white) Americans.
wilfred
Who gives a fuck what Cheney thinks or says about anything? The next time we hear his voice should be at his trial. Only that’s not going to happen because no one in this Administration is interested in pursuing prosecutions for torture, even though as a signatory to the Convention Against Torture the country is obligated to do. But who cares?
Every time he opens his mouth, Cheney is taking the piss out of the country, and he will continue to do so until somebody, anybody, exercised both the moral and legal obligation to punish the torturers.
OzarkHillbilly
@Elizabelle: The Bush Admin wasn’t even trying after Tora Bora (?**).
**I don’t remember exactly when they gave up, but I do remember Bush saying it just wasn’t all that important.
MomSense
@OzarkHillbilly:
Also, too can you imagine the outrage if President Obama were friends with members of the bin Laden family as is the case with the Bush family? They already think that President Obama is a secret Muslim/Muslim Brotherhood conspirator because he went to a Catholic school in Indonesia.
RP
I’m glad he’s saying this. Better for him to show his true colors rather than hiding behind the CIA and saying he’s shocked, shocked at what happened.
Suffern ACE
Psst. Hey, North Korea. I hear that Dick Cheney financed the Interview. He actually watched the preview an I heard he even laughed.
beth
@RP: I’m with you on this. Let every politician have to state publicly whether they support torture. I keep hoping something will shock and disgust the American public into action.
cmorenc
@Sherparick:
Yes – Frank Luntz is already at work parsing the above into far more succinct, Orwellian phrasing. He’ll have honed the perfect sound-byte version of it that works well with any focus group not comprised of Balloon-Juice or DKos readers.
MattF
Cheney’s heart really is dead and buried. Somewhere in Hell, I’d guess, in the pit labeled ‘Medical Waste’.
Belafon
@OzarkHillbilly:
The people who hold the cameras obviously, because, otherwise, he wouldn’t end up in front of one.
Big ole hound
@MattF: Plus his body has been donated to science to ensure no other poor sucker gets his organs. I wonder if his donor heart is from the Grinch?
danielx
@MattF:
Doesn’t have a heart, hasn’t had one for years. Every decade or so they replace the lump of plutonium he has in there instead.
Also, too – truly miss the work of The Editors at the late and much lamented site The Poor Man Institute (for Freedom, Democracy and a Pony). In these parlous times, where is Broderella when we need him?
GregB
Luntz must be hammering away at better wording already:
*Reverse nutritional assistance
*Posterior feeding
*Fundamental food program
*The Dick Cheney New Deal
*S.S.N.A.P.-Sphincter Supplemental Assistance Program
dmsilev
I admit to being oddly fascinated by today’s NewsMax headline of “Angry Dick Cheney Defends Interrogations”. Isn’t ‘Angry’ sort of redundant? I mean, isn’t that Cheney’s default state?
TS
@Belafon:
And therein lies a major source of the problem. Continuing to give Cheney a place to defend his actions defines the current media. As @OzarkHillbilly said – the only place he should be talking is in a court of law.
MattF
@GregB: ‘Fundamental food program’ is good. Reminds me– when I was an undergraduate I had a roommate who was on his way to being a lapsed Catholic, and he wrote an angry little essay about the ‘fundament of the Church’. I had to break the news to him that the word didn’t mean what he thought it did.
cmorenc
Speaking of Luntz, as repulsive as the ends are to which he applies his talents, you have to admit he’s an evil genius whose work is effective because he is really good at researching where people’s hot buttons are, and what what sorts of messages push those buttons. I cannot help but wonder how vastly different the political landscape might have been if we’d somehow bribed Luntz to help sell the ACA to the public instead of working with the ReThugs to tear it down. OK, so I need some brain bleach to deal with that last thought, but it’s unfortunately true.
Yatsuno
I cheated, so I know which one is real and which one isn’t. But both are completely plausible. And yes if we want to regain any sort of standing as a nation we need to try folks for this.
Suffern ACE
@dmsilev: normally he’s just colicky.
GregB
@cmorenc:
I have written about this before. During the 2008 run-up during the primary I ran into Luntz on a street corner in Manchester and yelled at him for using his skills to destroy the English language and sell them poison.
I told him to get out of politics and help people instead of selling them shit.
SatanicPanic
Cheney is a known liar I don’t get why the press is still trying to rehabilitate him. every time he appears they should ask him if he still thinks Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11
Snarki, child of Loki
@GregB: Slacker.
If you had the courage of your conviction, Luntz’s head would be on a stick, and the world would be a better place.
GregB
@Snarki, child of Loki:
In hindsight I would at least like to have thrown a drink in his face or given him the Al Pieda treatment.
danielx
Come to think of it, and, naturally, in view of recent events, I believe a revival of the Golden Winger Awards is in order.
There can only be one.
Edit: I’m starting to think David Brooks has a permanent lock on The Purple Teardrop with Clutched Pearls Cluster.
MattF
@SatanicPanic: I don’t think the press is trying to rehabilitate Cheney. It’s more that he’s ready and willing to defend torture– so including him in the debate preserves the ‘fairness requires hearing both sides’ imperative.
MattF
@danielx: It’s the patent leather underwear. Painful.
Iowa Old Lady
Cheney’s interview on MTP was one of the most chilling things I’ve ever heard. If you want to meet a monster face to face, there’s your chance,
danielx
@MattF:
Would that there were icepicks I could plunge into my mental eyes to remove that particular image from memory.
scav
@Big ole hound:
Unlikely as we’ve documented evidence that the Grinch’s is only two or three times too small and Cheney’s at least an order of magnitude below that.
Tripod
His heart issues go back decades, so don’t discount cognitive issues. He’s also another GOP tough guy who completely flipped his shit after 9/11. I don’t know how much taxpayer largess was pounded into that bunker under the Naval Observatory, but Diamond Joe seems to think it was a pointless expenditure.
The thing about Cheney…. he is, was, and always will be a toadie to the Bushies. That loser couldn’t even set up a senate seat in his “home” state for his dull witted daughter.
Citizen_X
@beth: I agree. I hear Cheney saying this, I think, “Keep talking, asshole.”
Citizen_X
@Tripod:
I say we get Old Handsome Joe to turn it into a nightclub & open it to the public four times a year or so. He’d be down for it!
Lee
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve mentioned this story a couple times in the past.
I have a Marine buddy who was in Afghanistan for Tora Bora. They were getting ready to head out for the fight (like loaded up and about to leave the base ready) and were called off.
Shortly thereafter the Administration ramped up the calls for attacking Iraq. To this day he believes they were called off because if they had killed OBL it would have made the selling of the Iraq War 2.0 much more difficult.
Mike in NC
The entire point of the “Global War on Terrorism” was to create a blank check for companies like KBR, Blackwater, and above all Halliburton (Cheney’s outfit) to collect billions of dollars in no-bid, poorly managed sweetheart contracts. We’ll probably never know how much GWOT money ended up in Cheney’s personal bank account, but it has to be in the millions.
Roger Moore
@Tripod:
I don’t think that’s true. Cheney didn’t flip his shit; he just saw the attacks as the perfect excuse to accelerate his long-term program of reviving the massive, unaccountable executive. A lot of the apparently pointless or counter-productive actions of the Bush administration were basically Cheney trying to establish the vital principle that the administration can do WTFTW with no consequences. That’s his major goal, and he’s not going to stop until he gets there.
Mnemosyne
I was kind of assuming that they were going to claim that, since rectal feeding is sometimes indicated for medical reasons, it was A-OK for them to do it for giggles.
Here’s my metaphor: if someone gets gangrene in their foot, it’s medically indicated to amputate that foot. That doesn’t mean it’s A-OK to amputate a prisoner’s foot because it’s sometimes medically indicated under completely different circumstances, asswipe.
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: It’s not rocket science. We should be able to get someone to do what he does.
All he does is come up with different wordings & focus groups the shit out of it, etc. etc.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne: I think what Darth Cheney was saying here was that they weren’t going to let any of them die via hunger strike & this was the way of feeding them that was guaranteed to make them think long & hard about continuing.
Torture, IMO.
Mnemosyne
@Paul in KY:
Right, but that’s not the same thing as “medically indicated.” Your doctor doesn’t get to force a treatment on you that you don’t want just because he thinks it’s the best one for you. So it’s bullshit all the way through.
EconWatcher
I have to think Cheney’s aggressive, angry denials aren’t helping him with anyone who might be persuadable. This does seem to be getting to him. The combination of cruely and amateurishness is pretty damning. And those 26 people who were apparently innocent and tortured–that is one tough sell to talk past that. I hope he keeps talking.
VOR
I first saw this on Crooks and Liars, but the source is http://www.ibtimes.com/what-are-rectal-feeding-rectal-hydration-doctors-call-cia-tactics-torture-1751952
“This is a variation on a medieval form of torture in which the intestines were swollen up with fluid in order to cause pain,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and board member of the Center for Victims of Torture, both of which are in Minneapolis. “You can’t feed somebody this way. And so, for the U.S. government to claim that this is some sort of feeding technique, that’s just totally bizarre,” he said. “Because there is no physiological way for any nutrients to be absorbed in the colon, any medical participation in this rectal feeding procedure is medical participation in torture.”
balconesfault
@beth: If you remember the 2008 GOP Primaries, this was pretty much done.
And except for Grandpaw Johnnie, they all were happy to come out in favor of torture.
Shame? Ha – 60 million Americans voted for Romney in 2012, and he’s on record as supporting waterboarding.
balconesfault
Any interviewer who is going to face up with Cheney needs to spend a solid week ahead of time prepping with some serious research support, and have his notes ready. Because as Cheney showed in his 2008 debate with Edwards, and has shown ever since, he is absolutely willing to lie unashamedly on points of fact – and to then attack you for not embracing the logical conclusions that stem from his lies.
sempronia
@Big ole hound:
No, his new heart is from some extremely generous, kind person with a family that was able to salvage some consolation from a devastating loss. The Grinchiness is all Cheney.
I would be deeply unhappy to find out that my loved one’s heart went to Cheney.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne: I was just saying what I thought the ‘real’ reason was. Of course, they would gin up a POS doctor who would say what they wanted. Just like their ‘find 1 lawyer out of 500,000 who will agree with our views’ and thus it was ‘legally vetted’.
Paul in KY
@VOR: Basically a forced food enema. I read about this being a torture in 15th century England.
Villago Delenda Est
Chuckles the Kraphammer chimed in on this today, asserting that torturing some random Muslims kept us safe in the wake of 9/11.
My god, the man would be tossed bodily out of a freshman Logic 101 class for uttering such utter shit.
Villago Delenda Est
@sempronia:
I’d sue to get it back.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
Nine figures, I’d guess.
cmorenc
@Paul in KY:
An essential skill in any art is making the final product look effortless, efficient, and easy – the hard part is the work of selecting, parsing, massaging, arranging, etc. that makes it look so deceptively doable in retrospect. IF in fact what Luntz does is such a pedestrian skill, why are there so few folks in the political advertising/messaging business anywhere remotely near as effective as he is? Team Obama in 2008 rivaled or exceeded Luntz, and arguably did so in 2012, but OTOH look how flawed the material is that Luntz often has to work with, and succeeds despite working for such slimy dipshits.
Sherparick
Cheney’s little Danse Macabre on MTP yesterday cause much of the right-wing media to ejaculate at the thrill (particularly the denouncement of the U.N. Human Rights official – Bill Kristol had a virtual orgasm over it).
Cheney and Todd discussed water boarding prisoners and Todd just raised it as a hypothetical to Cheney and apparently neither Todd or Cheney have google, because, if so, they would realize that ISIS does water board its prisoners, putting the U. S. at the same moral level.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/captives-held-by-islamic-state-were-waterboarded/2014/08/28/2b4e1962-2ec9-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html
john fremont
@balconesfault: Remember, that 60 million included pro lifers who will tell you that legalized abortion has lead to a disrespect for the dignity of human life.Yet, many casted a ballot for Romney, Mr Double Guantanamo.
Quaker in a Basement
If I understand correctly, “rectal feeding” essentially means packing the dude’s butt with baby food.
That is wrong in so many ways.