"Your Honor! Mr. Cheney's Testimony Is Irrelevent and Immaterial"

AND: "Idiocy Of The First Order!"

If anyone deserves (today) to be in a witness box being grilled by Perry Mason, it's Dick Cheney. Mason's calm, cool demeanor could disarm anyone and his booming voice could cause an instantaneous breakdown (or pacemaker malfunction). Maybe it could lead to something no one has ever been privy to: a Cheney tear.

Yesterday's stint of former White House Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, on Rachel Maddow's show demonstrated just how blustery and foolhardy Dick Cheney's appearances on every media in the country (except Rachel's show, of course) have been. He alternately described Cheney as "Like Joker with a straight face" and "destroying what's left of the Republican Party."

In addition:
(As guest blogger in The Washington Note)

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)

When asked about Cheney's preference of Colin Powell to Rush Limbaugh:

"Two tours of Vietnam 35 + years of service to his country, 5 deferments for Dick Cheney, never served a day in the military, said he had other priorities. No comparison."

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