Day: 1/5/2010

Hannity And Morris Campaign For Waterboarding

Posted by on January 5, 2010 at 4:10 pm. 6 Comments :

Sean Hannity and his guest Dick Morris spent some quality time advocating for waterboarding yesterday. They fell all over each other to see who could be the most vigorous proponent of torture for the would-be crotch-bomber.

HANNITY: We can’t talk to this guy. We ought to be waterboarding this guy.
MORRIS: Absolutely. This is an exact example of something where his insistence on treating everybody as a civil liberties issue gets in the way of the intelligence. By the way, the information we get after we waterboard him should not be admissible this criminal trial.
HANNITY: But you agree with me. We should waterboard him.
MORRIS: Yes.
HANNITY: And by the way, you and I are going to be hammered tomorrow.

Let the hammering begin. However, I would like to direct my hammering at the breakout idiocy of Morris. After drooling over the prospect of a lovely torture, Morris swerved to another topic so that he could peddle his disdain for the Constitution:

MORRIS: But, Mr. Blogs, I don’t think the evidence that we get from waterboarding him should be admissible in his criminal trial. The Fifth Amendment still exists. But it should be actionable for intelligence to break up other Al Qaeda plots.

Mr. Blogs? I’ll assume that he’s talking to me and answer thusly: Mr. Prostitute Toe Sucker, you can’t simply dismiss the Fifth Amendment on a whim. What’s more, your whole argument against placing a terrorist in the criminal justice makes no sense. You say that providing an attorney will result in the defendant clamming up. But that would not be the case when the defendant was captured in the act at the scene of the crime. Under those circumstances, an attorney would not be advising a not guilty plea and seeking an acquittal. He would most likely advise a guilty plea and seek to trade information for leniency. Consequently, there would be a greater likelihood of extracting intelligence through the criminal justice system than through torture, which has been proven to provide unreliable data.

But Morris doesn’t stop spewing stupidity there:

MORRIS: …the other point here is the reason 9/11 happened is that Bill Clinton treated the ’93 bombing of the Trade Center as a crime, not as an act of war.

Actually, unlike 9/11, we caught the perpetrators of that incident and put them in prison. In addition to that, we bombed their foreign facilities and “retired” some of their operatives. If anything, our success may have spurred the terrorists to seek revenge.

MORRIS: I think that if we don’t take our country back in 2010, it’s not going to be there for us to take back.

Where is it going to be, Dick? Is it going to spontaneously combust? Will it join Atlantis at the bottom of the sea? Will there be an asteroid collision with the planet? Are you really suggesting that there will be no more America after the 2010 if Republicans fail to assume power? I think you and Glenn Beck had better sit down and coordinate your stories on the Marxist, socialist, progressive utopia in our future.

MORRIS: There are Democrats and there are Republicans. Now I used to be one of them. I used to be a conservative Democrat. I’m not any more because it doesn’t exist. […] If you’re a Democrat, you’re a Democrat, you’re a Democrat, and that’s all you can be.

So despite the fact that it has been Democrats who have battled to form working majorities, and it’s the Republicans who have voted in lockstep throughout this session of Congress, it is still the Democrats who Morris regards as philosophical purists. Even though Republicans have actual “purity tests” that their members are pressured to abide by, while Democrats are plagued by Blue Dogs who vote more like Republicans.

It’s always interesting to observe this sort of cognitive breakdown. It’s just that it’s becoming a bit too predictable for people like Morris and his Fox News enablers. It would be nice if every now and then they refrained from saying things so monumentally stupid it makes you pity them. Just for variety they should try to make sense once in a while – if they are able to.

Glenn Beck Tells His Biggest Lie Yet

Posted by on January 5, 2010 at 9:21 am. 8 Comments :

This is going to be a fun week. 2009’s Misinformer of the Year, Glenn Beck, has promised us a week during which he will end the debate on some of his most ludicrous, paranoid delusions. That will be a relief. I can’t be the only one who is sick to death of hearing him repeat endlessly his lies about Van Jones or ACORN or Saul Alinsky. But no more. This week is it. Next week…who knows? Unless, of course, he’s lying.

“A week from today this program is going to change. I’m no longer going to be debating the things we already know are true.”

And how does he know which things are true? Easy. They are whatever things he said last year that the White House hasn’t refuted by calling his in-studio chat line. And we all know that by not returning Beck’s phone calls it is as good as an admission of guilt. That is, in fact, how I know that Glenn Beck idolizes Adolf Hitler. Despite my many invitations to him to call and deny it, he has not done so, and therefore it is safe to conclude that it’s true.

Starting off his landmark week of television, Beck is going straight to the root of the problem. He is attacking head on the question of truth and lies. In the process he has delivered what may be regarded as his biggest lie yet.

“If I were lying I’d be off the air.”

Huh? Beck may have taken lying to a whole new dimension. This is a lie that lies about the context of his lying. It’s a lie that doubles back on itself as its own exculpation. Since he is not off the air, his dementia contends, he must not be lying. Were his statement to be true, much of the broadcast spectrum would go dark overnight. And that’s just the part of the spectrum controlled by Fox News. We can even look at this from a non-partisan viewpoint. If his statement were true, then how would Beck explain the continuing on-air presence of Keith Olbermann and his comrades at MSNBC? Surely Beck believes they are lying, yet they are still on the air. How can that be so without making him a liar? Perhaps he only meant that market forces would drive him off the dial as disillusioned viewers tuned out someone they considered to be dishonest. Nope, that aint it:

“Lies that are broadcast nightly to an entire nation are easily stopped. They are called laws. Or here’s an idea, standards.”

Beck truly seems to believe that there are laws that could be invoked to bar him from broadcasting due to his infatuation with falsehoods. The First Amendment notwithstanding, this is something he has predicted would occur ever since a Kenyan socialist moved into the White House. But this is the first time he has asserted that such laws have already been enacted. He doesn’t say which laws they are, but he’s certain they are there. And since these imaginary censorship dictates have not been exercised, Beck takes that to mean that the officials at the Department of Truth have certified his babble. One person who knows he is certifiable is his boss Rupert Murdoch, whom Beck believes hired him as a truthteller.

“Even if you think I’m wildly irresponsible, you have to know that News Corp. is not stupid. It’s a company worth billions of dollars. You really think that this corporation would risk everything on an irresponsible crazy guy?”

With this Gordian logic, Beck concludes that because Murdoch hired him, he must not be crazy. He may be jumping to an unsupportable conclusion. Murdoch made his reputation by exploiting the fringes of journalism. His tabloid papers featured outlandish gossip, sensationalistic headlines, and topless models. He is the carnival barker of media barons. Murdoch probably doesn’t think he is risking much by providing a platform for this schizoid sideshow freak. That is the keystone of his business philosophy and the engine of his wealth. As far as Murdoch is concerned, the crazier the better. And he hit the mother lode with Beck (although advertisers disagree).

Beck spent much of today’s program lying about not having lied on his previous programs. For example, he declared that he had only ever called one person in the Obama administration a communist. Not only is that not true, but on this same show he insinuated that many people in the White House preferred Karl Marx to James Madison, including President Obama. Maybe Beck would argue that that isn’t the same as calling them communists, but that would only be true in his warped brain. Media Matters has many more examples.

Beck’s defense of his veracity only sinks him deeper into duplicity. But with today’s pinnacle of prevarication, Beck has raised the bar on bullshit. To assert that he would be off the air if he were lying is a truly brilliant deceit. And his ability to render it with a straight face deserves some credit as well. Bravo Mr. Beck. You have more than earned your place in the Liars Hall of Sham.

ADDENDUM: Lest anyone absolve Fox News from complicity with Beck’s mania, here is a year-end compilation of the biggest stories missed by the mainstream media per Fox News. All but one were stories either originated or heavily promoted by Beck (i.e. Van Jones, ACORN, ClimateGate, Tea Baggers, etc). Fox cannot dismiss the evidence that Beck is their prime source for news.