Política Pop

Just the other infamous Richard – Nixon, that is – might be comparable to him. Like Paul Krugman says, Tricky Dick “was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.” Both apparently followed the same maxim of “when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.“

The former vice president showed no remorse yesterday when admitting once again, to Fox News Chris Wallace, that he himself knew of the use of interrogation techniques that are widely classified as torture, such as waterboarding.

His rationale: we tortured, therefore we were safe.

However, to this day, Cheney hasn’t been able to give the public a single specific example of how torturing detainees provided his government with crucial intelligence to avoid another September 11.

“It’s clearly a political move,” Cheney says of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate alleged abuses of terror detainees by CIA officers. Even those who might have gone beyond George W. Bush’s Justice Department legal guidelines should be spared of any scrutiny, according to Cheney.

“I’m very proud of what we did.”

By JOSÉ MANUEL SIMIÁN

The second installment of my Meet the Prensa columns on Mediaite is online.

In this interview, Nuyorican commentator Gerson Borrero reflects on his career, soap operas (“they make people stupid”), Fox News (“drive-by racists”), and Telemundo and Univisión (which he accuses of discriminating against Sonia Sotomayor).

It started as a quiet radio talk show—a dialogue between two journalists from competing Hispanic television networks. Both were praising the way their stations had been covering the ongoing hearings of Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee.It was the usual display of Hispanic pride, respect for the accomplished judge and her mother, and the reshaping of the American Dream.

Then NPR’s Tell Me More host Michel Martin asked what Gerson Borrero had to say.

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