"Journalist" Dan Calabrese writes:
Before Dick Cheney passes from this life to the next, he ought to receive another Presidential Medal of Freedom for boldly protecting this country while interminably catching holy hell for doing so. (He already got it once, for his exceptional service as Secretary of Defense.)But you know he won’t. It is a measure of Cheney’s selfless devotion to the United States that he obviously does not care.
Gag me. Calabrese believes Cheney should get a medal for personally approving the torture of suspected terrorists, which has, according to Calabrese, prevented further attacks on the U.S. Forget laws, traditions, and the Constitution--you know, the things conservatives supposedly hold in high esteem. Don't you know 9/11 changed everything, and only "people on the outer fringes of the political left" object to "the torture of terrorists"? (Notice how he subtly elides from "terrorism suspects" in an earlier paragraph to just plain "terrorists" here.)
This is the kind of twisted thinking with which we are faced, and it well explains why Ron Paul was rejected by so much of the GOP base while John "Hundred Years' War" McCain is accepted, if not always enthusiastically so. War, the police state, and the imperial presidency are the sum total of mainstream conservatism today.
