Cheney’s angry Elvis imitation

Well, this isn’t exactly news, but to say that Dick Cheney lacks empathy is to say Christopher Walken isn’t warm and fuzzy or that no one is likely to confuse Michelle Obama with Ann Coulter. Sunday on Meet the Press, Cheney couldn’t even bring himself to express remorse over the well-documented torturing of innocents when he was in charge post 9/11. I’ll hand the metaphoric mike over to Andrew Sullivan:

He was then asked about the 26 people whom the CIA admits were tortured by mistake. One of them was even frozen to death. A sane and rational and decent human being, who presided over the program that did this, might say: “The decision to torture was an extremely agonizing one, but I still believe defensible. But of course the torture of innocent people is horrifying. I deeply regret the chaos and amateurism of the program in its early phases.”

So what did Cheney actually say? When confronted with the instance of Rahman Gul, the individual tortured to death, Todd asked what the US owed these torture victims. Cheney actually said this:

The problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield … I have no problem [with torturing innocent people] as long as we achieved our objective.

Cheney makes Orwell’s Big Brother seem like a straight-shooter by comparison. He calls “water boarding” and “rectal hydration” “enhanced interrogation.”

Warren Zevon and Hunter S Thompson

On Meet the Press, reeking of hubris, he exhibited the same stiff-bodied surety he displayed when assuring the American people that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that we’d be greeted as liberators. As my main man Hamlet is wont to say round about Act 3, Scene 4, line 82: “O shame where is thy blush?”

Well, obviously, Dick Cheney has no shame, and my fantasy of his being prosecuted is about as likely to happen as the Carolina Panthers winning this year’s Super Bowl or Hunter S Thompson and Warren Zevon rising from the dead to perform some rectal hydration enhanced interrogation on Cheney himself.

What’s that word W liked so much?  Oh yeah, evildoer.