Machiavelli Cheney Thinks The Ends Justify The Torturiffic Means

By Megan Carpentier | April 21, 2009 | 2:00pm

Dick Cheney, the king of classifying every action he ever took while in office, wants President Obama to release the memos that supposedly show torture occasionally provided operational intelligence. [Politico]
He wants this because he fails to understand that there are consequences of torturing prisoners above and beyond the occasional piece of intelligence we might obtained elsewhere, and because he thinks most Americans will agree that the ends justify the means, at least insofar as it comes to brown people who practice Islam. [The Times]
Let us not kid ourselves that Dick Cheney is incorrect about that last part.
Until then, though, Americans feel that we should punish the people who did the torturing. [NY Times]
But Obama CIA chief Leon Panetta publicly papered over his differences on the release of the memos, not that Panetta would be prosecuted because he didn’t work there at the time anyway. [Reuters]
Playboy reporter Mike Guy, to whom I’m strangely attracted, had himself waterboarded in an effort to prove that Christopher Hitchens is a pussy. He failed, but I am more than happy to comfort him. [Huffington Post]
Hillary Clinton‘s pissed that NATO forces let some pirates go, since apparently she does believe pirates when they promise to, like, totally never do it again. I think maybe NATO forces need to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. [NY Times]
A bunch of European diplomats walked out of a UN forum on racism that the US is boycotting because Iranian President Ahmadenijad predictably called Israel a racist state and accused it of genocide. Then Israeli President Shimon Peres used the term “Ahmadenijad the Persian” and compared him to “Hitler the Nazi, Stalin the Bolshevik ” with no acknowledgment of the irony behind referring to a racist by his ethnicity instead of his politics. [CNN]
Norm Coleman is appealing his electoral loss to yet another court because it’s more important that he be Minnesota’s Senator than that they have one at all. [Politico]
Then the party of small government derided the Administration for its budget cuts. [Politico]
And another Republican was forced to felch stale jizz out of Rush Limbaugh‘s fetid, shit-stained asshole for daring to suggest that Rush Limbaugh is something less than a towering intellectual stalwart of the GOP. [ThinkProgress]