Mr. Cheney was interviewed Tuesday by Scott Hennen, a conservative radio talk show host in Fargo, N.D. “Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” Mr. Hennen asked.
“Well, it’s a no-brainer for me,” Mr. Cheney replied. “But for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in.”
Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Cheney was not endorsing water-boarding, a coercive interrogation technique that simulates drowning and that many have said qualifies as torture. Mr. Snow said Mr. Cheney was not, in fact, referring to any technique, whether it was torture or not, because administration officials do not discuss interrogation methods…
Mr. Snow, who spent much of his day dealing with questions about the comments, told reporters that none of them related to interrogation techniques, which are classified. “I’m telling you what the vice president’s view is, which is it wasn’t about waterboarding. Period,” he said…
Mr. Snow said Mr. Cheney is not someone who slips up. One reporter noted that the vice president had once…shot a friend in the face during a hunting accident last February.
—NY Times
PETRUCHIO
I say it is the moon that shines so bright.KATHARINA
I know it is the sun that shines so bright.PETRUCHIO
Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house.
Go on, and fetch our horses back again.
Evermore cross’d and cross’d; nothing but cross’d!HORTENSIO
Say as he says, or we shall never go.KATHARINA
Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please:
An if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.PETRUCHIO
I say it is the moon.KATHARINA
I know it is the moon.PETRUCHIO
Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun.KATHARINA
Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun:
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is;
And so it shall be so for Katharina.
—Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, scene v
So let’s get this straight: a “dunk in water” is a “no-brainer,” but it’s also not torture because that’s just not the kind of folk we are. This Cheneyism also puts me in mind of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland who tells the heroine that a word means precisely what he wants it to, no more and no less.
This is the Bush folk approach to unpleasant realities. They define them as they wish and according to what is most convenient at the moment one of them speaks. The more of this bestial bedevilment of our language and twisting of reality I hear, the greater will be my delight at the drubbing of historic proportions (Republican consultant Stu Rothenberg used that term, not I) I’m anticipating come November 7th. If Cheney is “not someone who slips up,” he’s got a whale of a surprise in store in two weeks. It’ll be one of his biggest slip-ups of his life.
