Cheney Says That's Not What He Meant. You Decide!

O.K. We're being very dispassionate here.

Dick Cheney now says that his comments about torture on the radio the other day, which some people think included an endorsement of waterboarding, in fact didn't.

This is good, because it allows to look at a transcript of what the Vice President said on Tuesday, and what he says now according to this article from the Washington Post. Just look at both and compare, right?

Not really. The salient fact is the denial by Cheney that what he said means what people think. He gives his partisans simply say "that's not what he meant" and are completely inflexible. So, the debate centers around parsing what was said, and objective comparison of statements goes away completely.

Any fair minded, of course, could look at what was said Tuesday and what's being said now and arrive at their own conclusion. The media, easily distracted, reports only the "controversy," with hard facts secondary, if relevant at all.