Kit Bond + Fox News = Sunday Stupidity

So I'm torturing myself, aka watching Fox News, and just like actual torture, watching Fox News often leads to bad information. Missouri Senator Kit Bond is on right now defending torture like a good little lapdog and he's using this clichéd line that if we prosecute the high level officials that authorized torture (Dick Cheney), then we'll turn America into a Banana Republic. No, he doesn't mean we're all going to get a nice pair of khakis, he means that like a South American dictator, Obama would be using the law to get political power.

Of course that claim is embarrassingly stupid and only something a Republican could come up with, but what really bothered me was Bond saying we can't criminalize these actions. What actions, torture? We can't criminalize torture? That's essentially saying we can't criminalize crime. Torture is illegal. I keep hearing everyone from right-wing whackjobs all the way to President Obama saying we have to look forward instead of backward and we can't dwell on the past, but using that logic, we'd never prosecute anyone for a crime. Once the crime is committed, it's in the past; if I punched Kit Bond in the face, I don't think the judge would be too impressed with my "hey, let's look to the future" defense. Just to be clear, I don't advocate violence against anyone, even political figures, I leave that up to the conservative media.

Fox News apologist Chris Wallace continued this idiotic conversation by asking Democratic Senator Carl Levin if the next president considers Obama's tactics in Pakistan to be a war crime, should Obama be prosecuted? There's really no other way to say it after such a stupid question, but Chris Wallace is apparently a complete idiot. Presidents don't just get to decide what is and what is not a war crime, torture is undoubtedly a war crime and is considered as such by the entire modernized world. Once again, Wallace was just demonstrating that Fox's bias isn't just from Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, but it permeates every facet of the network, even their "fair and balanced" reporting.

Senators Levin and Bond continued their debate with Bond suggesting that releasing these torture memos have made us less safe. Levin, showing the common sense absent from his Republican counterpart, made the simple observation that releasing these memos wouldn't be necessary if the law hadn't been broken in the first place. Terrorist groups have already used the fact that we torture as a method for getting new recruits; the release of memos doesn't change that. The Republican Party, specifically the previous administration made America less safe, so all those people who claim Bush "kept us safe after 9/11," you need to remember who authorized the use of these tactics.