Technically, Ms. Rice, You're a Lying Douchebag

It doesn't look good for Republicans when Pat Buchanan, of all, people, is openly talking on national TV about prosecution over torture.

When Andy Card got his honorary degree from UMass @ Amherst almost two years ago, I made a prediction that after the Bush machine was finally broken down and parted out at a hefty price to corporations, lobbying firms, conservative think tanks and universities, they'd be facing grilling from people. For the most part bereft of Secret Service security, they're now suddenly exposed and much more accessible to people who want answers as to how these things could've been done in our good name and subsidized with our tax dollars.

Five years ago, Seymour Hersh had broken the story of the tortures that had occurred at the newly-infamous Abu Ghraib prison. With his story came the first of the now-iconic photos of American cruelty:

Lynndie England leading a naked man on a leash; Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman cheerfully posing, thumbs up, with a dead Iraqi prisoner; feces-smeared prisoners forced to make a human pyramid. Another naked man terrorized by a ferocious dog; And, of course, the poor bastard made to wear a hood and to stand on a box with his arms outstretched, made to think if he put his arms down he'd get electrocuted. Not long after Hersh's story broke, the prosecutions began, mostly choked off well below the command level, but just enough prosecutions nonetheless to assuage our growing fear that we are, at the top, a soulless, heartless country.

Later this year, the Obama administration and the Justice Department will release new photographs to remind us of what we've been up to these past 6+ years.

Yet to this day, Condi Rice insists, "We did not torture... here."

Yeah, technically, we didn't torture... here. Because it's a lot easier to torture Iraqis over there so we don't have to do it over here. Yeah, technically, we didn't torture... here because we always had extraordinary rendition and the CIA and Blackwater to spirit away mostly innocent men to countries that didn't mind torturing people on their own soil.

If Mohammed won't come to the waterboard, then the waterboard will have to come to Mohammed.

Yes, technically, as Condi likes to archly remind us from her invisible bunker, "I did not authorize torture or waterboarding." Yes, because she verbally signed off on it, according to a recent Senate Intelligence select committee finding that was divulged to the American people. Because Rice was smart and savvy enough to know that putting anything in writing gets added to the paper trail, something that still stubbornly existed even during the Alice in Wonderland, emails in the rabbit hole Bush administration.

So, yeah, technically, Rice didn't authorize torture. Technically, we didn't torture... here. Just like technically, I didn't write this blog post because no one saw me write it and post it. You have nothing on me. I wasn't even here when someone else wrote it for me.

Therefore, Madame Secretary, please don't hold it against me when I call you a craven, lying douchebag because you can't prove I wrote it. Technically, I wasn't even here. I was a mile away at work.

Although I nonetheless agree with the sentiment. And agreement isn't an admission of guilt, is it?