Douchebag of the Week (Aug. 28-Sept. 4)
This here is Tim, a.k.a. onefootinthegrave, a.k.a. Hannibal Cash Esq.
He was kind enough to warn everybody on August 30, “During football season I may reach Masshole levels of arrogant douchebaggery.” He’s certainly got the pose down pretty good, we’ll give him that. But Tim can be forgiven for taking pride in his World Champion Steelers or, in a few more months, World Champion Penguins. Heck, even Pittsburgh’s baseball team recently claimed a title of their own.
But it’s funny because we were actually thinking of Tim that day when former veep Dick Cheney decided to emerge from his bunker and take to the morning airwaves of Fox News Sunday. When host Chris Wallace brought up some of the specific interrogation techniques mentioned in the inspector general’s report—such as waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a mere, oh, 183 times—Cheney didn’t fail to display his contempt for the Constitution:
“Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States, and giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States.
It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well.”
That’s rather odd, because while Cheney was calling Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to ask a former prosecutor to review CIA interrogations of high-profile terrorism suspects a “political move,” that very same day down the dial on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” John McCain—you know, the guy who was the Republican candidate for president just one year ago and is still very much a member of the GOP—seemed to have a slightly different take on that effectiveness:
“I think these interrogations once publicized helped al-Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq. I think the ability to work with our allies was harmed.”
But silly John, what would he know—having only been a prisoner of war and being subjected to extreme torture for a mere five and a half years?
Of course, it got us thinking back to February of this year when Cheney was saying how he feared that “the people populating Obama’s ranks put too much faith in negotiation, persuasion, and good intentions"—because that’s, um … a bad thing?
You might say that comment back then rubbed Tim the wrong way:
What the fuck do you know about keeping this country safe you warmongering cocksucker?
When you die, I will go to jail for pissing on your grave.
As far as we’re concerned, Tim’s earned the right to boast about the Steelers, the Pens, or whatever the hell he wants. Rest assured that when Dick Cheney’s soulless, douchebag carcass is mercifully put six feet under, we’ll be right there pissing alongside him.