Like father, like daughter

In the torture debate we've heard from many sources debating the merits and legality of torture. Except one: Dick Cheney's kids. Liz Cheney has a notion and she wants you to hear it. Her contention? Of course: it's not torture even if it was done, which it wasn't. She's gotta make a full throated defense, because she really doesn't want to make that weekly trek over to the federal pen to see her dad and put $50 bucks in his prison account.

O'DONNELL: Well Liz, we'll get to that argument in a minute, about whether the means justify the ends, whether torture justifies itself...

CHENEY: Well, it wasn't torture, so that's not the right way to lay out the argument.

O'DONNELL: Ok.

CHENEY: Everything that was done in this program, as has been laid out and described before, are tactics that our own people go through in SERE training.

Later in the interview, Cheney insisted that "We did not torture our own people. These techniques are not torture."

As we see the Cheney genes fully kick in, we get to see her move from basic lying to baldfaced lying, replete with invented "facts" to bolster her lies. SERE training (which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Evasion. Apparently they couldn't come up with a different second E.) is quite different than the torture that her old man got pushed through. It's so different that even the Bush Justice Department was kind enough to point that out....in their own torture memos. The CIA was kind enough to make the distinction as well.

But that misses the central point: soldiers go through SERE trailing to help them experience torture and learn to resist any possible torture by the enemy. But once your so deep into lying, that kind of stuff doesn't penetrate the mental undisclosed location you've sent your sense of morality or honesty to. I hope one day when I have children, or possibly midget hostages, that we'll have shared interests. Hopefully those intersts will be sports or a fondness for reading and not a shared affinity for enacting, covering up, and excusing torture. But then again, different strokes for different folks.