Dick Cheney, America’s Torquemada, came out from the shadows this Valentine’s Day to defend his use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”:

Mr. Cheney said interrogators should have had the option to use the “enhanced interrogation techniques” his administration approved—including the use of simulated drowning, or “water-boarding.” He called himself “a big supporter of water-boarding,” which critics say amounts to torture.

“Now, President Obama has taken [those techniques] off the table,” Mr. Cheney said. “He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake.”

Cheney forgets that the Army itself considers waterboarding torture and banned the practice under his own administration in September 2006:

The service issued a “strategic communication hot topic” alert to its senior leaders two days before the Senate confirmed Mukasey, asking them to make sure every soldier, family member and Army civilian employee understands the ban on waterboarding. Mukasey was sworn in Nov. 9.

“The U.S. Army strictly prohibits the use of waterboarding during intelligence investigations by any of its members. It is specifically prohibited by Field Manual 2-22.3 and is not a sanctioned interrogation technique in any training manual or any instructions to soldiers in the field,” the statement says.

We knew this was coming, we just did not know when and how hard.

Everyone in the country, regardless of political persuasion, feels an accounting of the George W. Bush years is unavoidable.  For Republicans to gain back  respectability for the conservative cause from the general electorate, they have no recourse but to reject the policies of run-away deficits for wars that were built on lies.  Everyone should agree:  the Iraq policy was not worth the money and lives.

Any Republican candidate to be taken as a serious conservative must explain to their voters how they are different than the Bush conservatives.  There is just no avoiding it.

If conservatives want to be taken seriously, they have to start weeding out the congressional partisans who led the party so astray under Bush and essentially find an entire new slate of leaders.  Nobody in the party seems willing, or able, to do this.

For Democrats and their liberal base, they want the sins of the administration exposed for everyone to see how it went against every notion of what it means to be “American” that this country teaches its children to believe.

And the games begin

Now, amidst the cacophony of Teabaggers, Birthers, Screamers and Deathers, Dick Cheney adds to the hysterics that remind America’s short attention span how far off the mainstream path the Republican party has driven itself.

Eight months into the Obama administration, and the gloves are off in ways many liberals had hoped: in-fighting and tell-alls by the progenitors of one of the most failed and divisive Presidencies in U.S. history.

The kicker is the Dick Cheney tell-all, just as George W. Bush is writing his own memoir.  Cheney’s promises not to be kind to Bush. Barton Gellman at the Washington Post broke the Cheney book story:

Cheney’s imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for “regime change.”

Some of the disputes between the president and his Number Two were more personal. Shortly after Bush fired Donald H. Rumsfeld, Cheney called his old mentor history’s “finest secretary of defense” and invited direct comparison to Bush by saying he had “never learned more” from a boss than he had as Rumsfeld’s deputy in the Ford administration.

The depths of Cheney’s distress about another close friend, his former chief of staff and alter ego I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, have only recently become clear. Bush refused a pardon after Libby’s felony convictions in 2007 for perjury and obstruction of an investigation of the leak of a clandestine CIA officer’s identity. Cheney tried mightily to prevent Libby’s fall, scrawling in a note made public at trial that he would not let anyone “sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder.” Cheney never explained the allusion, but grand jury transcripts — and independent counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald — suggested that Libby’s false statements aimed above all to protect the vice president.

Here is a collection of comments from around the web that give you what you need to know about the reaction to the Cheney Bites Back bit in WaPo:

“Yesterday brought news that Karl Rove was more involved in the firing of a New Mexico federal prosecutor than he has previously let on. This morning brings tidings that Dick Cheney believes the “statute of limitations” for secrets from the Bush White House is over and that he can begin to vent his frustrations with his former boss. In Obamaland, you can hear the champagne corks popping because the best way to portray yourself as centrist and reasonable is to have Rove and Cheney as your political opponents.”  – Michael Sean Winters, America Magazine

“Bush has notably become more quiet and reflective, not speaking out to defend himself. By contrast, Cheney’s guns-blazing approach to protecting his own reputation makes Bush almost seem like a lovable old softie.”  Chris Rovzar, New York magazine’s Daily Intel

“But perhaps even more impossible to fathom is that with each passing day Cheney makes Bush look more and more like a sympathetic character. If things keep going the way they’re going now, it’s entirely possible that history will come to judge Dick Cheney as the best and worst thing to ever happen to George W. Bush’s legacy — worst because Bush’s misplaced trust in him during his presidency more often than not led to unfortunate consequences, and best because Cheney’s post-presidency attacks on him are enough to make even the most dedicated Bush-hater feel sorry for him, even if only just a bit. ” – The Cajun Boy, Gawker.com

“Mr Cheney’s memoir, which he is reportedly writing on legal pads in long hand, is due for release in 2011. Robert Barnett, who negotiated the book contract, has told potential publishers the memoir would be ‘packed with news’. He also reportedly said Mr Cheney himself had declared, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets.” – Brad Norington, The Australian

Never mind that Cheney had eight years to do something as logical in a time of two wars as repeal the Defense Department ban on gays in the military.  In trying to cement his “Sister Souljah moment“, Cheney is out-and-about all gung-ho for the gays:

Cheney said:

“I think that freedom means freedom for everyone,” replied the former V.P. “As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don’t support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. … But I don’t have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that.”

Gays are perplexed by this surprise voice seemingly supportive in the midst of a national movement.  But with friends like these…  Nobody gay gives two hoots for Mary Cheney; she is, effectively, our version of a Jew for Jesus.