Talk about torture.

As the nation is dragged toward a debt-ceiling crisis by a band of radical Republicans determined to invalidate laws they don’t like but don’t have the power to repeal, party elders got together for a light-hearted roast of accused war criminal Dick Cheney in New York Tuesday night. The ad in Commentary read:

He was White House chief of staff. He was House minority whip. He was secretary of defense. He was vice president of the United States. Now…he will be the main course.

Ben Smith at BuzzFeed has the exclusive details. Read them.

Apparently guests shared details of the off-the-record gala, which featured humor from Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Mukasey and spoiled nepotista (and party wrecker) Liz Cheney, who wants to be the first Wyoming senator who’s actually from Virginia. There were light-hearted water-boarding jokes, and someone – reportedly Sen. Joe Lieberman — rocked the house by saying “something to the effect that it’s nice that we’re all here at the Plaza instead of in cages after some war crimes trial,” one of Smith’s sources told him.

If only.

At least a couple of people have a conscience buried under all their money, because they told Smith they thought some of the jokes were inappropriate. “There were some waterboarding jokes that were really tasteless,” one said. “I can see the case for enhanced interrogation techniques after Sept. 11 but I can’t really endorse sitting there drinking wine and fancy dinner at the Plaza laughing uproariously about it.”

But judging from the uproarious laughter reported, most attendees didn’t have a problem with it.

I found my blood boiling after reading Smith’s piece. Our tax dollars keep Cheney alive, on the best healthcare government money can buy, while his political inheritors shut down the government to stop the uninsured from getting help. Doctors keep trying, and failing, to give Cheney a working heart; instead, he seems to be kept alive by spite.

The former vice president and his neocon buddies couldn’t get together to reminisce about their war service, because they all ducked the military — Cheney most famously with five deferments during the Vietnam war (which of course he supported.) In fact, that’s their hallmark: You might be a neocon if…you never met a war you didn’t like, and never met one you would fight in, either. Instead, at the roast, they mocked a man who did serve, Gen. Colin Powell.

And while right-wing nut bags rail against President Obama for running up the deficit, let’s remember it was Cheney who drove that deficit with tax cuts for his wealthy friends and two wars of choice, famously telling his minion, George W. Bush, that “Reagan showed us deficits don’t matter.”