On December 16, birthday of artistic greats Ludwig von Beethoven, Jane Austen, and Philip K. Dick, NBC News reported a poll stating that 45 percent of Americans favor the use of torture.  This goes to show that the Senate release of their investigation into CIA torture practices during the George W. Bush Administration has had minimal effect on Americans' post-9/11 bloodthirstiness. 
     The report shows that innocent people were tortured and killed by U.S. military personnel acting under the direct authority of sick fucks like Dick Cheney, but it doesn't matter, because this is still the greatest country in the history of the world, and even when we err, it's all to the good.  It's like when Ronald Reagan died in 2004, worshipful journalists spoke and wrote about his occasional "mistakes," citing in particular the Iran-Contra Affair, when it was discovered Reagan and some of his operators armed Iran with TOW missiles and used some of the profits to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
     Quite often the word mistake is used to describe criminal behavior.  I saw a TV ad for a law firm in which a genuine customer speaks of his "mistake," meaning his DUI, and how the lawyers advertised gave him good representation.  What the genuine non-actor in the ad really means is that one night he got drunk, got into his car, and his impaired and dangerous driving caught a patrol cop's attention.  He made a mistake?  No, he put his own life and the lives of others in danger and fortunately a cop stopped him. 
     This kind of thing is small when compared to matters of war, but even with the big conflicts of the world some will say, for instance, "Vietnam was a mistake."  But tell that to the industrial manufacturers and arms dealers who made tons of money off of it. 
     Dick Cheney sat across from Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday, December 15.  It was the chief propagandist of gloomy patriotic sludge meeting Chuck Todd, a smart enough journalist, but one who didn't have the balls to say to his bosses, "Why do we need to get Dick Cheney's perspective on the rightness or wrongness of torture?  Isn't that like asking Hermann Goering if he would've preferred it if Nazi Germany won the war?"
     Todd asked Cheney a philosophical-type question: "What is torture?"
     Cheney, Giuliani-style, played a familiar card: "Torture is an American having to say goodbye to his children while trapped in a skyscraper that's been hit by a hijacked jetliner." 
     I'll offer my off the top of my head answer to Todd's question: Torture is the intentional inflicting of pain, psychological and physical, on a person or animal who cannot resist except through endurance and will, leaving the victim at the mercy of a release by captors.
     Cheney's definition is similar to mine in that he hits on psychological torment and being trapped.  He does, however, combine the idea of torture with being an innocent American.  He does not point out that the American trapped in the doomed skyscraper is also a murder victim whose torment before death is a side effect of the experience, rather than the object of the experience, as was practiced by the CIA at the behest of officials like Dick Cheney.
     I wonder about anyone responding to the poll mentioned above getting influenced by Cheney's 9/11-enhanced answer to Chuck Todd's question.  The truth is, Cheney's post-Bush Administration career has been largely characterized by defending proven detestable activities of his eight years in the White House.  Torture comes up again, Cheney appears on Fox News and the occasional other network.  Same with lingering weapons of mass destruction controversies.  Cheney pops up in such cases to cheerlead his conviction that Saddam Hussein had WMD, that he was a danger to the U.S., and I wonder sometimes if he really believes the shit that he says.  Frankly, I think he's just a liar who's made a comfortable living for himself feeding off of the sufferings of others, a humongous tick squatting on the breath of the nation and lapping up the blood in conflict zones men like him profit from.

                                                                                   Vic Neptune