Left largely unremarked during this week’s episode of Dancing with the Torturers is a curious dispute over whether soul-mortgager John McCain agreed that techniques good enough for the Viet Cong are good enough for us. A 2007 memo from the Justice department’s Office of Legal Counsel reports the CIA saying he signed off on enhanced ghoulishness:

“[S]everal Members of Congress, including the full memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Senator McCain, were briefed by General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, on the six techniques that we discuss herein. In those classified and private conversations, none of the Members expressed the view that the CIA detention and interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate.”

But a McCain spokesbot said Monday that — are you sitting down? — the CIA got it wrong:

“Senator McCain clearly made the case that he was opposed to unduly coercive techniques, especially when used in combination or taken too far — including sleep deprivation.”

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We’ve never really appreciated high-school movies — they never reflect our own experience. We may have been a card-carrying geek in our teen years, but we had a great time.

We credit the genius of a mid-century architect, who designed our school as a long building with the gym at one end and the auditorium at the other, effectively separating the freaks from the jocks.

We also credit well-funded public schools in the Seventies, when art, music and drama weren’t yet considered frills.

And we credit a wonderfully casual attitude among parents, who really didn’t care that we proudly displayed a vibrator in the bandroom trophy case, or that we performed a musical called “Lock Up Your Daughters.”

Those days are long past, of course. But every so often, something brings them to mind:

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JPMorgan Chase, which last fall quickly declared it would use its $25 billion bailout to add yet more names to its title, has also been using the time we bought to screw its long-term credit-card customers.

It’s a great scam. Chase spent years deforesting the world to mail low-interest balance-transfer offers to folks who enjoyed generous credit lines — from 2 to 6 percent interest for the life of repayment, in most cases.

If you did the math, even including the transfer fee, it was a sweet deal. Sure, there was fine print — always pay on time, lower-interest balances would be credited first, the usual. But as long as you played by the rules, you were safe.

Presuming, of course, Chase didn’t change the rules.

Which, for an estimated million customers, they have.

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A year on, we can’t really blame her — she is who she is. And left to her devices, she would have remained as obscure today as she was a year ago — Bill Kristol’s wet dream, and a long-running GILF joke at Wonkette.

No, it’s war hero turned national terrorist John McCain we blame, a man who, after selling out everything but his houses to the Bushies for two years, decided that, if he couldn’t be President, he was going to take the country down with him.

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Not since the late, great, Potter Stewart have we so enjoyed the sweet mystery of jurisprudence:

Mr Lane was alleged to have been photographed placing his genitals on an army sergeant’s forehead — a practice the court defined as “teabagging” — while the sergeant was asleep.

It’s like laundering money — now that Australia’s High Court has entered “teabagging” into the public record, we can happily use the term on their authority, requiring only the proper citation to establish its provenance.

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Let us take this moment to marvel at the majesty of the English language:

“We have seen very strong pricing to date this year, and we are projecting a favorable pricing environment moving forward.”

The gentleman from whose mouth that escaped is Brad Schwartz. Mr. Schwartz is a veep at “MillerCoors, a joint venture of SABMiller PLC and Molson Coors Brewing Co.” He’s joined in his Favorable Pricing Environment by David Peacock, president of “Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, the largest U.S. beer seller by revenue.”

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“I share the President’s conviction that as a nation, we must, to the extent possible, look forward and not backward when it comes to issues such as these.”

Henceforth, the Department of Justice will cease the investigation and prosecution of past crimes, and focus exclusively on prosecuting crimes yet to be committed.

Holder: We’re Launching “Preliminary Review” Of Torture [TPM]