political context for the guys who don't remember the bush administration: george w bush was an absolute pants on head moron slated to be just one more ineffectual republican dunderfuck but his vice president, dick cheney, owned--and profited from directly-- haliburton, an oil company. when a small terrorist cell headed by a saudi arabian royal based out of afghanistan smashed two planes into new york, we somehow ended up invading Iraq for uhhhhhhh *checks notes* an entire generation.
dick cheney's oil company got all the rights to the oil resources that american troops took over and his direct friends in the military industrial complex got big fat contracts to buy, sell, and build all the other military and industrial shit involved in the war on terror. 8 trillion dollars of american taxpayer money didn't vanish into the air: it was paid to dick and his pals to slaughter a generation of middle easterners whose only crime was being born in the gap between valuable resources and evil men.
they did this right in front of us. anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knew what they were doing and why. they played Born In The USA at us and passed laws about where we could protest and what we could say when we did. but we knew anyway. it was daylight robbery on a national scale and the rest of the world watched us do it while the leaders of every other industrialized nation allied with us got to lap up the blood and scraps from our butchery.
no one older than 40 has forgotten this.
and the architect of this atrocity is saying that trump is a little much even for him.
ETA: OH YEAH THIS ISN'T EVEN MENTIONING THAT THE GUY WAS EXPLICITLY PRO-WATERBOARDING, HE LOVED WATERBOARDING PRISONERS, ABSOLUTELY HE CAME OUT IN FULL-THROATED DEFENSE OF TORTURING POLITICAL PRISONERS AND HOSTAGES AND HIS ONLY COMPLAINT ABOUT THE MANY MANY LOTS OF TORTURES THAT HAPPENED UNDER HIS ADMINISTRATION WAS THAT THERE SHOULD BE MORE TORTURING, DICK "WATERBOARDER" CHENEY