President Pain

Has there ever been a U.S. Presidency as sadistic as that of Richard Bruce Cheney/George Walker Bush Jr.?

Yes, it is finally revealed, Cheney and his henchman David Addington got then-Attorney General Alberto "I Don't Remember" Gonzales to author a -- this makes me sick -- secret order authorizing torture.

SECRET.

Like...double secret probation...only for administering unbearable pain the bodies and psyches of other human beings in your custody to elicit information that is more often than not rendered unreliable due to the damaging methods. Without due process.

You know, fascism:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

It's perjury, it's bad faith, it's just plain evil when applied to, say, Jose Padilla in our country's name.

It's SECRET -- not just from us, the citizens, we accept some of that from our government, like secret nuclear codes and backdoor peace negotiations. But this was secret from any other branch of government, from all our other elected officials at the highest levels of our representative government.

Per Digby -- "Sociopathic Governance":

When Bush said, "a dictatorship would be easier --- as long as I'm the dictator" he wasn't joking. They simply do not believe that they have to adhere to the rule of law --- it's awe-inspiring in its pathology. And the rest of us are like a bunch of frightened townspeople, hovering behind the curtains just hoping these drunken louts will pass out or leave town before they take a match to the place.

I am still stunned that we are talking about the United States of America issuing dry legal opinions about how much torture you are allowed to inflict on prisoners. Stories like this one are the very definition of the banality of evil --- a bunch of ideologues and bureaucrats blithely committing morally reprehensible acts apparently without conscience or regret.

It's like some sort of Gilded Age gathering of wealthy Robber Baron sadists, or the repulsive fetishistic power-trippers in Pasolini's Salo. They don't love the children -- they love their children, and provide amply for them alone.

They're too busy vetoing child healthcare legislation (SCHIP) to protect their private insurance companies and their enabling ideology:

He said the bill's funding level would have expanded the health program beyond its original intent and taken a step toward government-run health care.

"The policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage," Bush said.

"I happen to believe that what you're seeing when you expand eligibility for federal programs is the desire by some in Washington, D.C. to federalize health care. I don't think that's good for the country," he added.

That's Bush's legacy, cutting off children because their parents are merely struggling, not completely poverty stricken. And now all of the top ranked Republican Presidential contenders -- Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, McCain -- have gone on the record backing him up.

After what this country has been through, each and every one of them is a joke candidate.

All that history will remember Bush, Cheney and their whole gang for is pain.