Close Reading: Cheney defends “enhanced interrogation”

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 0 Comment
Yeah, see?

Yeah, see?

This weekend, former Vice President and possible war criminal Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press to discuss his reaction to the CIA torture report. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t like it. Cheney insisted that waterboarding and other practices were not torture, and said of the events described in the report that he’d “do it again in a minute.” He meant he’d order someone he’d never met to do it again in a minute, but whatever. The important thing is that what Bush and Cheney told the CIA to do, which we’re just finding out about now in an alarming declassified report, was great for America and definitely not torture. I quote:

Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.

And that, dear friends, is the subject of today’s Close Reading.

Continue reading

Dick Cheney’s implanted defibrillator explains US terrorism policy

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 6 Comments
Wear a hat!

Wear a hat!

In 2011, terrorist attacks killed zero people in the United States. By comparison, tornados killed 553, and automobile accidents killed 32,367. Yet we have no department of tornado security, and no one is suggesting that we must sacrifice certain constitutional liberties to be safer on the road. Actually, they are: we submit to speed limits, cell phone bans and other infringements as a necessary cost of reducing traffic fatalities to a manageable level. But it’s a question of degree; if we reduced the speed limit to 15mph, fatal accidents would almost disappear. So why are 32,367 traffic fatalities in a year okay, but 16 deaths from terrorism in the last decade a cause for multibillion-dollar, society-restructuring alarm?

Continue reading

Quoting Palin verbatim

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 3 Comments

Sarah Palin fires up her word emitter.

Since we were talking about old-timey principles of journalism, I thought we’d take a moment to remember that it used to be rude to quote someone verbatim. People talk bad. Even the most eloquent speaker salts his remarks with likes and ums, and a small-town mayor or GAO clerk cannot be expected to spit out paper-ready sentences on command. As a courtesy to their sources, reporters clean up quotes. Sometimes, though, a particular person will abuse this practice. Maybe this person has made no secret of her distaste for reporters, and maybe she mistreats the language in ways that a professional writer would find galling. That person is likely to wind up in print exactly as she speaks, for example like this:

Seeing as how Dick – excuse me, Vice President Cheney – never misfires, then evidently he’s quite convinced that what he had evidently read about me by the lamestream media, having been written, what I believe is a false narrative over the last four years, evidently Dick Cheney believed that stuff and that’s a shame.

That’s Sarah Palin defending herself, sort of, against Dick Cheney. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link.

Continue reading

Friday links! How can I miss you when you won’t go away edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 6 Comments

Goddammit, no.

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to look back on that which is about to become the week that was. Peculiarly, it’s been a week of nostalgia for the man pictured above. You might remember him from such bold leadership initiatives as turning a budget surplus into a multitrillion-dollar debt, deregulating the financial industry, awarding no-bid contracts to corporate cronies in two wars whose duration currently exceeds that of World War II, and arguing passionately in favor of torture. Or you might just remember that he talked like you and wasn’t black. It all depends on your perspective, and for a president who left office with a 38% approval rating, George W. Bush has enjoyed a surprising resurgence lately. It’s almost as if the good people of America articulated their political thoughts entirely in terms of being against things, and/or had no recollection of events beyond the past year. Of course, it’s also possible that the whole thing is made up; you probably also remember the national media that told us the war in Iraq was going to be quick and easy, then told us that no one could have predicted the problems in Iraq, then pilloried the Bush administration for messing up Iraq before alleging that Obama’s presidency is foundering on his inadequate commitment to same. It’s all a rich tapestry, which has fallen from the wall into a pile of rat feces, and we serfs can only peer upward and try to deduce the movements of the heavens using our astrolabes or whatever. It’s throwback time. Won’t you shudder in ignorant terror with me?

Continue reading