by Rich Miles
Update at bottom of piece: I found it.
I don't know how it happened exactly, but the comment by Jack Jodell that's attached to this post was actually created BEFORE the post was written. All I saved was the title, and Jack popped up with his remarks. I guess that's because the topic of this post is pretty obvious.
On April 24th, Fox News golden boy Shepard Smith had a bit of a hissy-fit on the air. He slammed his hand down on the countertop in front of him, and declared in no uncertain terms, "Goddammit, we're America! We do not fucking torture!"
He did this live on the air, in the presence of two of his colleagues, one of them female. Not that her femaleness should matter, but to rightwing fanatics such as Smith, it presumably does. One must always be a gentleman, after all!
At any rate,no matter what your political leanings, I ask you to consider what your response to such an action would have been if the "sinner" had been a leftie - a Democratic-leaning commentator. The Fox pundits would be climbing the walls, going off on how the very nature of being a liberal lent itself to such indecency, such obscenity, and so on and so forth. Somewhere in the rattling would almost certainly be something about the end of Western civilization as we know it, or some such drivel.
But because the miscreant is from the right wing, the incident first off, disappears, and the few comments one can find on the incident - well, I can't find any comments on it. A rather serious breach of etiquette, not to mention FCC rules, just simply - disappears. From the annals of broadcasting. It's gone! I did about 10 web searches, looking for Shepard Smith, the quote, the quote in quotes, etc., etc., and nothing came up. I saw it right after it happened on You Tube, but now, a day or more after the fact, it's not to be found.
If you want to see/hear this piece, try your own search. If you find the piece, drop back by here and leave a link for it in the comments. You'll be doing me and your fellow readers a favor. And if you don't find it, leave a comment saying so. I'd like to know if Fox News has "disappeared" this little mistake.
In the next few days, I'm going to discuss why it's so important to foxites to convince themselves and us that what our people did on our behalf is both necessary, and NOT torture.
From preliminary research, the reasons for this are pretty scary psychological stuff. Denial is not just a river in Africa...
Update: Operator error - I don't know why I couldn't find it before, but this time I got 296,000 hits in a search. Here's one randomly chosen one for your perusal.
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3 comments:
Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Addington, Yoo, Rice, Fleischer, Gonzales, Bybee, and many others in Bush's corrupt administration are all massive liars and war criminals. Just as were those guilty of the same crimes in Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan, this group should also be tried, convicted, and punished as soon as possible!
Rich, I'm not clairvoyant. When I wrote my initial comment, I assumed something had fouled up in cyberspace and the rest would appear shortly, and I had a feeling what the rest would be about.
This past week was astounding. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, aided by Justice Department documents made public, did an outstanding job in proving that we did indeed torture, that plans for this torture were drawn up well in advance White House examination of whether or not this torture was legal, and that the torture was implemented by both the CIA and military jointly and separately, and that it occurred prior to a formal statement being issued by the Bush administration as to its legality. Timelines also prove that torture did not prevent further terrorist attempts nor did it yield preventive information as that lying Dick Cheney asserts. Nor was it done randomly by a "dew bad apples" as that lying Rumsfeld has asserted. Plain and simple, a conspiracy to implement torture was developed from the top levels of that administration, and then they attempted to present a bogus explanation of its supposedly legality through legalese spin. Plain and simple, we broke international law, international treaties, and domestic law by deliberately using waterboarding, slapping, sleep deprivation, and other acts of torture, and this was directed from the top. All these directors must pay the price by being tried, convicted, and severely punished, plain and simple. And whether Fox "News" agrees or disagrees is immaterial anyway, as they ignore or distort the truth 90% of the time no matter what. 'Nuff said---let the trials begin!
In legal defense of the behavior of those who employed enhanced techniques - by definition ( the ultimate denial ) they didnot torture.
Now let's see if that has the same impact on the World Court, or even ours, that it had at Nurenburg.
To quote Cheney: If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, it doesn't need a duck's bill to be a duck.
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