Exit, stage right.

[Left: Dick Cheney. Biometricians who have analyzed the Vice President note that his tendency to use the right side of his brain and body almost exclusively has led to grossly asymmetrical corporal development, which is responsible for his tilt. Either that or global warming has caused him to begin melting.]

A discussion in the open thread at Marmot's about the merits and demerits of torture, in the context of Obama's executive order to halt the use of torture and close Guantanamo's detention center within a year, has reminded me of a PBS piece I had planned to blog about. 

While I'll give former President George W. Bush a bit of credit for his eight years, I hold no such sentiment for former Vice President Dick Cheney. He strikes me as little more than a cynical opportunist who deliberately misled the nation into a costly war that would serve his own narrow ideological and financial interests. 

This final interview he had with NPR as VP makes for an interesting closing. When I was listening to it on my iPod during my daily three-mile jog, this part stuck out as what was singularly wrong with his administration:

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Vice President, getting from there to here, 4500 Americans have died, at least a hundred thousand Iraqis have died. Has it been worth that?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think so.

At least a hundred thousand dead (many or most of whom are innocent civilians), but it's worth it. Maybe had it been 100,000 dead Americans in our ham-handed response to 9/11 instead 100,000 or more dead Iraqis, he'd feel differently. But it's them, not us, so it's worth it. 

Now I don't mean to cut off Dick Cheney, who does explain later, but that was his answer before Jim Lehrer followed up with "Why?" Still, his answer was just a lame rehash of the highly questionable connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein:

MR. LEHRER: Why?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Because I believed at the time that what Saddam Hussein represented was, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, was a terror-sponsoring state - so designated by the State Department. He was making payments to the families of suicide bombers; he provided a safe haven and sanctuary for Abu Nidal and other terrorist operations. He had produced and used weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological agents.

He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida. Now, we've had this debate, keeps people trying to conflate those arguments.

That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say - as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate - that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years.

So this was a terror-sponsoring state with access to weapons of mass destruction and that's the greatest threat we faced in the aftermath of 9/11: The next time we found terrorists in the middle of one of our cities, it wouldn't be 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters, it would be terrorists armed with a biological agent or maybe even a nuclear device.

So I think, given the track record of Saddam Hussein, I think we did exactly the right thing, I think the country's better off for it today, I think it's been part of the effort alongside Afghanistan to liberate 50 million people and establish a vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. I think those are major, major accomplishments.

One hundred thousand or more Iraqis and 4500 Americans killed... justified in part because Saddam Hussein supposedly "provided a safe haven and sanctuary for Abu Nidal"? Not only had Abu Nidal been killed before our invasion of Iraq (in August 2002, to be precise), but he may in fact have been killed on Saddam Hussein's orders!

The rest of the nonsense—about nuclear programs we had almost entirely dismantled and which we had other ways to monitor—have already been laid out and skewered. But there Cheney goes again with the al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection, the same that he deftly planted in the American psyche to scare them into believing that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11. 

After all, when the Vice President says Iraq "had long-established ties with al Qaeda," wouldn't that lend credibility to such a notion? In 2003, 70% of Americans thought that the Iraqi leader "was personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks. (Here's another story on the 2003 polls; as late as December 2005, over two-fifths of Americans still held similar beliefs.)

POLITICAL FUN FACT: In a recent poll, only 4% of self-described lesbians said they approved of Dick Cheney's performance as Vice President, while 21% gave George W. Bush positive ratings. Simple math will show the obvious: Lesbians prefer Bush over Dick by at least five-to-one. 

In the meantime, companies Cheney has represented have made obscene amounts of money off this trillion-dollar war. Despite all his money supposedly being in a blind trust of some kind, I have no doubt he made some coin as well (but I admit that Cheney's enrichment is purely speculative on my part).

Still, not bad for a person who may have been constitutionally ineligible to have garnered the votes he got for Vice President. I'm not even speaking of the illegal means (e.g., removing legally eligible voters from voter rolls so they couldn't vote, among other things) used to win Florida. I'm talking about the Constitutional requirement in the Twelfth Amendment that the President and the Vice President be residents of different states (which is handled by preventing electors from voting for both a President and a Vice President of their state). After Al Gore's concession, a court ruled Cheney was a legal resident of Wyoming. 

In the end, I just have two things to say. First, I'm so glad that Cheney is no longer in Washington (and, frankly, Bush-43 as well). Second, Obama and Biden had better keep their noses clean (and articulate).