It’s difficult to know where Rightwingers are now when it comes to the release of today’s remarkable, horrifying, redacted 528-page executive summary [PDF] of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,000-page report on Bush-era CIA torture.
“Torture never happened!,” they used to say. Then, “Okay, it happened, but it wasn’t torture!” Then, “Okay, torture happened, but it was necessary!” Now, “This report is just meant as a distraction from America’s real problem: ObamaCare!”
You get the idea. So did legendary syndicated cartoonist and blogger Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins), and he’s been covering it with brilliant, dead-on satire for years. With the release of the Senate report, almost a decade in the making, we’re posting a few very-much-related Tom Tomorrow toons from over the years below, as self-selected by Perkins on Twitter today.
“It’s not as if we’ve learned nothing in ten years,” he tweeted. “In a 2004 cartoon, I still had to explain what ‘waterboarding’ was.”
And, as he also made clear, none of what we are learning today is ultimately a surprise. “Presumably if the cartoonists knew about it, the White House did as well.”
They did indeed, as a glance at these toons from over the years makes clear yet again…
2005
2006
2009
2014
“Humor is just truth, only faster!” —Gilda Radner
Another Conspiracy fact logged in the books of our crooked history
This isn’t a left vs. right issue. This isn’t an American vs. foreigner issue. This isn’t a Christian vs. Muslim issue.
This is a human vs. inhuman issue. If Americans don’t understand that, we’ve already ceded our “moral high ground.”