SCRAPING BOTTOM.

At New York, Jonathan Chait offers this assessment of Dick Cheney defending torture on TV:

The host, Bret Baier, asked Cheney about Bush’s reported discomfort when told of a detainee’s having been chained to a dungeon ceiling, clothed only in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself. “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’?” Cheney said... 

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

OK, take a second and try to imagine how the lowest sort of hack might respond to this. You probably envision sputterings about 9/11, and Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary does supply those. But his real achievement -- one I confess I couldn't have predicted -- is to reduce the issue to one of style, and to claim Cheney's opponents are not disgusted by his defense of practices denounced by civilization for centuries, but by Cheney's balls. Here is a man who, when confronted with shackled, raped, broken-legged innocents, looks them in the eye and says "sucks to be you," and liberals are too lame to appreciate it:

The discussion about torture reminds us of the qualities that always annoyed his opponents most about Cheney. It’s not just that he does things they hate, it’s his air of defiance in which he doesn’t even accept the premise of the questions posed to him that makes them think he is evil... 

Chait’s argument rests on the notion that even if you thought torture might be necessary, the decent thing to do is to act shocked or horrified by the ill treatment of even the bad guys of al-Qaeda. Cheney won’t play that game...

Try to imagine defending a sullen, unrepentant murderer thus: Ooh, you're just mad at Dick because he's not all [high feminine voice] "I'm so sorry I gut-ripped that old man with a letter opener." Well, he won't play that game! The defense rests! 

Whatever they're paying Tobin, it's not enough.