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.

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head 1 Comment

If you woke up Sunday morning like, “What’s with all these two-headed calves and cats walking backwards?” you probably didn’t hear that Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Republican straw poll. Before you switch your breathing strategy from paper bag to plastic, we’d like to remind you that second place went to Ron Paul. Using the Iowa Republican straw poll to guess who’s going win the general election is like using a Star Wars convention to guess who’s going to win the Miss America pageant; it’s alarming that they picked Chewbacca, but it’s not necessarily predictive. The flat, conservative, pig-manure filled region of the country known as Michele Bachmann’s head is perfect for the Iowans who vote in the pre-caucus GOP event that happens 15 months before the general election, because those people are kind of crazy. Bachmann’s win is a testament less to her broad appeal—we still haven’t measured that, because the instruments always get scared and move to Canada—than to her ability to hew to party orthodoxy. As Thursday’s debate showed, that ability is phenomenal. Why she’s so good at it is difficult to say, but it appears to have something to do with her absolute, eerie certainty on virtually every issue. She’s like Sarah Palin only saying one sentence at a time, and frankly I find that frightening. If you don’t believe me, check out her Meet the Press appearance after the jump.

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