A No-Brainer

On Thursday, I wrote about an interview in which Vice President Cheney confirmed/celebrated the administration's use of waterboarding as part of their torture program. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said. Well, the problem was that Cheney has a habit of saying things the White House wishes he didn't (insurgency is in its last throes, continuing much-debunked lies about Mohammed Atta in Prague or a Zarqawi/Saddam relationship), so the White House went into full spin mode, trying to assure reporters that the Vice President was not talking about waterboarding when he was talking about waterboarding. As usual, the media took the bait and is (again) burying the lead. Talking Points Memo contributor DK elaborates-

We're darn near six years into this nonsense, but still the White House can beat the press corps like a drum. I'm referring to Cheney's comment that waterboarding detainees was a "no brainer," which the White House has managed to turn into a story about what Cheney really said or what he really meant by what he said.

There's no legitimate doubt about what Cheney said and what he meant. Cheney knows it. The President knows it. So do Tony Snow and the whole White House press corps. Yet we have this spectacularly silly dance--clever people being too clever by half: Snow and Cheney's staff cleverly parsing the interview, and the press cleverly trying to trip up the parsers.

The whole episode has been converted from a story about torture to another in the endless series of stories about the strange relationship between the press and this White House....

...No thinking person believes Cheney was referring to anything other than waterboarding. The White House is unable to explain what else Cheney could have been referring to. Yet the leading papers are unable to cut through the malarkey.

I suppose the only thing we work harder at being in denial about than Cheney's comments is the fact that we have used waterboarding and other forms of torture. Every thinking person knows that to be true, too, and it shouldn't take Cheney's slip of the tongue to convince us.

What he said.

The same thing is still happening with the Limbaugh/Fox faux-debate. What should have been a discussion of what a vile, useless man Rush Limbaugh is or more importantly the actual issue Fox was campaigning about (the benefits of stem cell research), has now actually turned into a 'debate' over whether Michael J. Fox faked the symptoms of a disease he is dying from for a relatively low-key ad. These were the same reporters who pretended the country was 'split' on the Schiavo intervention when in fact almost everyone was reaching for the barfbags. Now these same lazy, mindless idiots are pretending that there is a 'debate' over whether Vice President Cheney endorsed waterboarding when he... endorsed and celebrated waterboarding. This is your 'liberal media' at work. This is why most people are so ill-informed. It is amazing, in fact, that people are as informed as they are.

Our government has a program of legalized torture. Instead of debating the White House's half-assed semantics, let's start debating whether that is the type of nation we wish to be... Oh, and if we have time, let's also discuss the Bill of Rights at large, habeas corpus, the principle of innocent until proven guilty, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, warrantless spying, government corruption, the state of American journalism, the economic crunch, and some other boring things too.

[Related reading:
-AP: UN official: U.S. terror law may violate international treaties
-Balkinization: Yes, It's a No-Brainer: Waterboarding Is Torture
-The Nation: The Torture Election

PS- Some of these topics were discussed on this week's 'Real Time w/ Bill Maher'. His guests were Harry Belafonte, Christine Todd Whitman, and Andrew Sullivan. It was a good panel and an interesting discussion.]