Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Wrong then, wrong now

Nice to see the Democratic National Committee taking off after Dick Cheney in this ad [:31] (H/t The Plumline.)



Also nice to see the DNC willing to say, even if through the medium of John McCain, that torture doesn't work and perhaps is even just wrong, like the former Vice President himself.

According to The Swamp, the DNC plans to run this on cable TV, in Washington and nationally. Can't hurt; might help.

Meanwhile, the historical account of the 1970s milieu in which Cheney got his start, Nixonland, provides what is probably an exact description of the mentality that lives on in the former Vice President.

"he believed that ... behind the earnest humanitarian face of liberalism lay irredeemable evil ... he realized that ... to fight according to the normal procedures of democratic politics would have been ... a surrender."

Rick Perlstein's description is of the ham-handed Watergate spook E. Howard Hunt. But it suits Cheney perfectly. He's fighting "evil," evil that looks to the rest of us like law and common sense. The attraction of seemingly limitless power not only corrupts, it also makes mad.

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