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Dick Cheney, Torture, and True Lies

In all the hubbub about torture, the CIA, and Dick Cheney, I feel like the responses from the Bush Administration are a lot like the Gubernator's response to his wife's question in True Lies:

Helen Tasker: Have you ever killed anyone?
Harry: Yeah, but they were all bad.

Well, touché. So, like, it doesn't matter that we've created our own system of Gulags across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, because we're only doing the "debasing ourselves and everything our country has ever thought to stand for" thing to bad people.

I've said many times that despite all the policies that I disagree with that President Bush espouses, his general cluelessness, etc., the thing that brings me over the hurdle is the fact that he has dishonored the Office of the President of the United States. That office is, to me, a kind of secular holy thing. It is literally the personification of American history, values and dreams. President Bush has not only repeatedly dishonored that ideal and made mendacity the norm for doing business, his gut instinct is to impugn the patriotism of anyone who questions him. He could use more than a little lesson from his former fellow party member, Teddy Roosevelt, from 1918:

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."

Amen to that.