Splashings about

Not wanting you Brits to miss out on this fun (and celebrating that my power stayed on all night, deluge or no -- W00T!), I update my previous report:

Seems that yesterday a Chicago radio talker, one Erich "Mancow" Muller, thought he'd have a go at being waterboarded, expecting to prove it isn't really torture. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face," quoth he. "I really thought, 'I'm going to laugh this off.'"

Here's how that went. As you see, Mancow lasts maybe 6 seconds before spluttering shakily that it's "absolutely torture" and he'd "confess to anything" to make it stop.

I'm with John Cole:

1.) I’m not sure why we have to keep waterboarding wingnut radio hosts to prove that torture is in fact torture, but this is just starting to get silly. How many times have we now waterboarded someone like this to prove what we have known all along- that waterboarding is torture.

2.) One of the things that supposedly separates humans from other animals is that we are able to learn from the experiences of other people. Apparently this ability is not available to right-wing radio hosts.

3.) Not to diminish Mancow’s experience, but if he thought that was torture, think what the real deal must be like. You are snatched out of nowhere, flown across the world, kept awake for days on end in a freezing room with little food, woken every time you fall asleep on your metal bed, thrown against the wall with that lovely procedure known as collaring, slapped, had dogs threatening you, yelled at and beaten, and so on and so forth. That goes on for a couple weeks to soften you up, then you are dragged by multiple burly men and waterboarded repeatedly. You have no dead man’s switch like [Christopher] Hitchens did, you have no “safe” word to stop the process, there are no cameras and friends there to make sure you are alright. These people have been abusing you non-stop for days or weeks, for all you know this is when they finally kill you.

Of course it is torture. I’m sick and tired of having this stupid damned debate.

Josh Marshall notes that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann immediately withdrew his offer to similarly-cocky TV talker Sean Hannity to donate $10,000 to the charity of Hannity's choice, should he ever follow through on a weeks-old offer to undergo waterboarding. Instead, Olbermann's 10 grand is headed to Veterans of Valor, the charity founded by the ex-Marine who served Mancow his pint or two.

While all this was going on, McClatchy Newspapers (the one US element of the MSM that never bought the White House's pre-invasion line on "Saddam's WMD" but reported heavily to the contrary) was comprehensively pulling lying Dick Cheney's pants down.

And a commenter at The ModerateVoice was proposing a new reality show:

American Torture Idol - all of the Bush kingpins and a couple of others for fun (Gingrich, Rush) - best torture performance gets OFF the table, others keep coming back for more. Let's find out how [they] feel about it after that.

'Appens I have some water to spare, so be my guests, boyz . . .

-- lotus