Dick Dastardly and His Amazing Torture Machine

Cheney, Master of Pain
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 16, 2009

Dick Cheney is so comprehensively evil that Maureen Dowd has run out of villains to compare him to and has resorted to Hannah-Barbara cartoons of the 1970s.

Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.

And like the Snidlely Whiplash knock-off, Dick Dastardly Cheney has picked Nancy Pelosi to be his Penelope Pitstop. And like the lip-stick obsessed ingenue, Nancy engages in stereotypical female hopelessness.

Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time.

And we get a truly dastardly Alliteration Alert™ out of it.

That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.

And in a deeply veiled allusion we get our Movies With Maureen® Moment from the Harry Potter villains that doubles as a Dowdversion®.

The Bushies plied their dark arts in broad daylight.

And while Maureen is often slighted as being the dimmest bulb on the Times's Op-Ed Murderer's Row, she has clearly and unequivocally cut to the quick on what all this torture was about.

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Torture was never about saving American lives. It was about justifying Cheney's delusional paranoia. And that is truly dastardly.