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Evil, and the Liberal Vocabulary

(This was the very first diary I ever posted on the internet, way back in June 2007, and some of it is dated, but since Dick Cheney has been all over TV recently urging President Obama to stop "dithering" and "do what it takes to win" in Afghanistan, I decided it was worth reposting.)

If you're a liberal, you can say that George Bush isn't very smart, and Dick Cheney isn't very nice, and that's about the end of it. A million liberal blogs and columns grind away at synonyms for "not nice" and "not smart" year after year, but the Republicans still control 49 seats in the Senate, and Fox News still has a license to broadcast.

Bush-Cheney chained up a 78 year-old Afghan man in a fetal position at Guantanamo for more than 24 hours, while he pissed and shat all over himself.  The New York Times and the Washington Post are still a little fuzzy about what to call this procedure, and the rest of the media is even more obtuse. When John McCain sponsored a very weak bill to restrict this method of "interrogation," Dick Cheney ran through every office in the Capitol trying to defeat it, and he succeeded. The same sort of thing is happening at this very moment in a secret CIA prison somewhere, and if you don't know what to call it, I can tell you.

It's torture, Stupid!  

Sometimes the CIA asks agents in training to undergo water-boarding for as long as they can possibly stand it, in order to familiarize themselves with this standard tool of the Agency.  

They don't last a minute.  

If you don't know what to call water-boarding someone for hour after hour, and then water-boarding him again the next day, and the next, and chaining him up in "stress positions" in the intermissions... if you don't know what to call it, I can tell you, Stupid!

It's torture.

Fox popularizes torture on its program "24," and this thing won the Emmy for best drama last year.  The bomb is always ticking, and nothing can prevent the end of the world except torturing a prisoner.  

In a recent debate, all the Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination in 2008 except John McCain endorsed torture under the pretext of this ridiculous scenario. Has such a thing ever occurred in the history of the world?  When?  Where?  Nobody seems to know, or care.  

Somehow the United States managed to destroy the Nazi juggernaut and outlast the Soviet Empire wit