Dick Cheney Explains Why He Loves Torture (Because He Is Darth Vader)

Evil zombie Dick Cheney came back from the dead recently to hack up a book, mostly as a courtesy to the hobos pillaging Borders stores across the country, who would otherwise go without the materials needed to kindle their trash can fires. That book is here now , and it is causing "controversy," for the people who were unaware that Dick Cheney is an evil zombie, despite how many times he admits that he does not have a soul. "There are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington," is what he said, because everyone who reads this book is basically waterboarding themselves to death. Also, Dick Cheney would like everyone to know that he is Darth Vader , that scary monster from "Star Wars!"

Dick Cheney went on important journalism forum the TODAY Show on Monday to say a bunch of words that are frightening when they come from Dick Cheney, for example, "heads exploding" and "extracting pounds of flesh." We have not read this book, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir," so we can probably assume it is just a handbook, for murder.

In the book, Cheney defends his support of waterboarding and the war in Iraq. "I was a big advocate of pursuing controversial policies in order to keep the country safe, and obviously the critics extracted their pound of flesh for that," he told Matt Lauer in an interview on the "Today" show.

The critics may have extracted a pound of flesh in the past, but many are back -- heads exploding or not -- with their own take on the statements in Cheney's book.

Colin Powell, former secretary of State, called Cheney's statements about him and Condoleezza Rice "cheap shots." He went on to add, "My head isn't exploding. I haven't noticed any other heads exploding in Washington, D.C."

Conservative commentator George Will said, "Five hundred and sixty five pages and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years was we went to war -- big war, costly war -- under false pretenses."

The Atlantic lists the reasons "why Americans loathe Dick Cheney," including the war in Iraq, Halliburton, the NSA spying on innocent Americans and using waterboarding in interrogations.

"Cheney defends the indefensible," Human Rights Watch blogs. "To be clear, interrogation techniques Cheney is defending include forms of torture outlawed under both U.S. and international law.

That would all be important if Dick Cheney had been operating under U.S. law, but apparently he was actually in the jurisdiction of the Galactic Empire, so too bad for "human rights."

In the interview that aired Tuesday morning, Cheney also conceded he'd been a lightning rod for criticism during the Bush administration. "I'm Darth Vader," he said, referring to a movie villain.

If Dick Cheney is Darth Vader, where does that put America in the whole Star Wars timeline, exactly? Which is the one where no one has a job and murderous ghosts from the past keep coming around even after we thought they had vanished forever? [ LA Times / Guardian ]