Sunday, May 17, 2009

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.

2 comments:

Grace Nearing said...

I disagree with MoDo's assumption that the CIA did not -- what's a good term here -- bureaucratically finesse Pelosi regarding the actual use of torture. At this point, I prefer to think of Pelosi as the always kidnap-able Nell Fenwick, at least until proven otherwise.

And I am gobsmacked that MoDo, as Sweet Polly Purebred, ends her column by calling for a thorough investigation of all things torturous. MoDo actually takes a stand on a substantive issue!! But who shall be our Dudley Do-Right?

Mo MoDo said...

Dudley would have to be Obama. Far more comical would be figuring out the various members of the Anthill Mob.