Matt Baume Explains to Mary Cheney How Drag is Different from Blackface

Last week Mary Cheney asked the world why blackface is bad but drag isn't, in a post on her Facebook page:

"Why is it socially acceptable -- as a form of entertainment -- for men to put on dresses, make up and high heels and act out every offensive stereotype of women (bitchy, catty, dumb, slutty, etc.) -- but it is not socially acceptable -- as a form of entertainment -- for a white person to put on blackface and act out offensive stereotypes of African Americans?"

Matt Baume, who usually reports on same-sex marriage news around the country, also works with drag queens and is frustrated by the amount of people who do not know how to answer her question.

Baume hopes that the next time we discuss Mary Cheney we talk about how she supports the Keystone Pipeline, donated money to Republican candidates who oppose marriage equality, and supported Sam Brownback, who wanted to keep a law in which police officers could arrest you for being gay.

"If [Mary Cheney] really understands drag that deeply, maybe she should spend a little less time with Sam Brownback, and a little more time with other gay people."

Hell Freezes Over: Fox ‘News’ Catches War Criminal Dick Cheney Lying About The Torture Report Live on TV!

In the wake of the torture report, Dick Cheney has been pulling double duty — presumably powered by dark, necromantic forces at this point — defending the Bush administration’s actions on the mainstream networks. While most of these interviews are standard Cheney obfuscation, his Fox interview deserves special attention. It appears as if Fox, of all networks, has caught Cheney in the middle of a lie.

Early in the interview, Bret Baier noted that “The Feinstein report suggests that President Bush was not fully briefed on the program and deliberately kept in the dark by the CIA.”

Cheney, however, denied it:

Not true. Read his book. He talks about it extensively in his memoirs. He was, in fact, an integral part of the program. He had to approve it before we went forward …. We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that.” Cheney goes on to declare that “the men and women of the CIA did exactly what we wanted to have them do in terms of taking on this program.

Later in the interview, Baier points towards some of the more depraved tactics used by American’s own Stasi: “At one point, this report describes interrogators pureeing food of one detainee and then serving it in his anus.” Baier then asked “something the agency called ‘rectal rehydration.’ I mean, is that torture?”

I don’t know, dear readers, what else would you call force-feeding an individual through their colon?

Aside from proof that stupid questions can exist, Baier asked if either Bush or Cheney knew about it, and whether or not it was “exactly” what the CIA had been asked to do.

Cheney, however, claimed to have no idea what was going on:

Liz Cheney Whines: President Obama Is ‘Slandering Patriots’ Like Her War Criminal Dad By Admitting America Used Torture

Liz Cheney has another bone to pick with President Obama and she promptly embarrassed herself on Fox News to whine about it.

During an interview on Hannity with fill-in host Monica Crowley to discuss President Obama’s recent remarks about torture being used by the Bush Administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Cheney accused Obama of “slandering” people like her war criminal daddy Dick Cheney. She also claimed that what “patriots” like her father did to Guantanamo prisoners wasn’t torture and that the activities kept America safe. “You know Monica, this president is an utter disgrace,” Cheney said.

He’s got a situation where, as your last two reports showed, you’ve got crises erupting around the world. And he is expending more time, more energy, more passion, more aggressive activity in targeting and going after patriots, heroes. CIA officers and others who kept is safe after 9/11. He’s lying about what they did, he’s slandering them, he went to Cairo and did it in 2009. Today he did it from the podium of the Oval Office. It’s a disgrace. It’s despicable.

Here’s the video via Raw Story.

DYING VET’S ‘FUCK YOU’ LETTER TO GEORGE BUSH & DICK CHENEY NEEDS TO BE READ BY EVERY AMERICAN

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Still Don’t Think Dick Cheney is a Disgusting Hypocritical War Criminal? This Clip From the Archives Should Change Your Mind

It seems like a lifetime ago when Bush, and his cronies like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were beating the war drums back in 2002 and 2003 about how “grave” a threat Iraq was to the security of the United States. I can still remember the day the war started and the day just a few weeks later when Bush ridiculously landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit declaring “mission accomplished.”

Yet here we are, it’s 2014, and Iraq is back in the news as radical Islamic militants known as I.S.I.S. continue to take over numerous cities within the country.

Recently I ran across comments made in 1991, by a Republican of all people, who essentially predicted the chaos we’re now seeing in Iraq if we were to ever invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein:

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we’d have had to hunt him down. And once we’d done that and we’d gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we’d have had to put another government in its place. 

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi’i government or a Kurdish government or Ba’athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? 

I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.