Michael Knowles

If you say that you don't pray for the dead, by the way, and you use the initials RIP, then you are in fact praying for the dead because that stands for which is may he rest in peace.

In any case,

What's the good stuff that we should focus on about Cheney?

There's one line from a book about him, The World According to Dick Cheney, that really sticks with me.

He was asked if it bothered him that for the eight years he was vice president, he was called Darth Vader, you know, compared to the devil.

And so much so that he even put a little Darth Vader mask on the back of his truck.

And he said, no.

He said if he wanted to be loved, he would have been a movie star.

But sometimes it's more important to be successful than to be loved.

So Dick Cheney here is speaking specifically about the United States' use supposedly of torture, or at the very least, enhanced interrogation tactics.

And just want to make a point here.

I'm not a neoconservative.

I'm very, very skeptical, very opposed actually to ideological wars to spread democracy around the world.

That is not my flavor of conservatism.

However,

Everything that Cheney was just defending here is totally right.

First of all, the enhanced interrogation techniques that the United States used in the 2000s during the global war on terror were not really torture.

And one of the ways that we can know this is that we used many of these techniques on our own troops as part of training.

And unless you think that we were just torturing thousands of American troops, there's a distinction between these two things.

However, to take it a little further,