Torture Zombie
by digby
Wow. If I didn’t know better I would think that this man was in the employ of America’s most hated enemies. It’s hard to think of a more destructive person:
[T]he debate doesn’t simply involve warring economists. Instead, one of the louder voices belongs to David Addington, the architect of the George W. Bush administration’s harsh interrogation policies and a former chief of staff for then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
Addington has taken on a new role as enforcer of tea party dogma during the intensifying partisan bickering over the debt ceiling. From his perch as the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for domestic and economic policy, Addington is throwing verbal thunderbolts at House Speaker John Boehner’s current debt-ceiling proposal, which he argues will pave the way to tax increases…
Addington kept a low profile during the Bush years, granting no interviews and largely shunning lawmakers from either party. But he wielded enormous power behind the scenes, helping Cheney craft the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program and most of its detention initiatives.
Critics of those policies say they’re horrified by Addington’s reemergence onto the public stage.
“To see this person who led the country into legal and moral disaster resurface as a respected commentator is somewhat galling,” said Ben Wizner, the litigation director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “Addington was as responsible as anyone else for the U.S. becoming a torturing nation. He has done damage to the U.S. that will take decades to reverse.”
Addington didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment, but Heritage Foundation spokesman James Weidman noted that Addington had handled domestic issues for Cheney as well as national-security ones.
This would be the problem with not playing the blame game or looking in the rear view mirror. If you don’t destroy these zombies’ ability to wield their malevolent influence, they just keep coming back. Some day people will realize that they are dangerous, even when they’re out of office.
Some liberal legal scholars—citing the fourth section of the 14th Amendment, which says “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned”—believe that Obama has the power to disregard the congressionally imposed debt ceiling. The White House has disregarded that advice, preferring to continue the to-date fruitless negotiations with Boehner and Republicans. That means Addington, as strong a proponent of unbridled executive branch authority as can be found in either party, is now in the strange position of supporting lawmakers trying to bind a president’s hand.
That’s just hilarious. There is no such thing as hypocrisy or intellectual consistency among conservative zombies. They just eat your brains and move on.
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