Utterly Pathetic.

Our former Vice President for Torture, Dick Cheney, maintains a steady pace on his attempts to derail and de-legitimize any investigation into possible (ha!) criminal activity under his the Bush administration. From a purely selfish standpoint, I can't say I blame him. If you were one of the major players -- in fact probably more culpable than the President himself -- in crafting policies in direct violation of established laws, both domestic and international, and you suddenly found yourself out of power, you might be more than a bit apprehensive about the extent of your criminality finding the light of day.

So his latest charge (really just a refrain he's been humming for several months now, only this time he's enunciating it a bit more clearly) is that "the process is political." Well, to an extent everything is political. His decision while a U.S. Representative in the 1980's to side with the Apartheid regime in South Africa was a political decision. His decision to reject a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., was a political decision (in 1978 he rejected it; in 1983 he voted for it -- so some measure of growth). So sure, on one level, of course it's political, because -- duh -- we're talking about our government.

However, on another level, we're talking about accusations -- and some significant proof even from the culprits themselves -- that some very illegal and very un-American (if "American" is meant to indicate adherence to the U.S. Constitution) activities were pursued under the former administration. Here's Cheney:

He criticized Obama for allowing a review considering the president previously said that CIA operatives involved in the interrogations would not be prosecuted. "I think he's trying to duck responsibility for what's going on here, and I think it's wrong," Cheney said.

What exactly is Obama ducking responsibility for? Obama wasn't the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania when these crimes allegedly occurred. It's fairly easy to tell that Cheney's trying to employ a classic bait-and-switch, in which he implies the target of the investigation is CIA operatives, when it should be apparent to anyone with a pulse that the real criminals are a bit further up the torture food chain, like maybe, I don't know, the VP himself. That way it's Obama who looks bad for going back on a promise, and not Cheney who looks bad for advocating torture.

However, my favorite Cheney argument against investigating his alleged criminal activity is this one:

"The fact of the matter is the Justice Department reviewed all those allegations several years ago," Cheney said. "They looked at this question of whether or not somebody had an electric drill in an interrogation session. It was never used on the individual -- or that they had brought in a weapon, never used on the individual."

So the Bush Administration Justice Department reviewed whether or not the Bush Administration had violated the law. I certainly see how that works, because I served on a grand jury once, and if the defendant said he or she was innocent, we naturally took his or her word for it, and voted not to bring charges.