YOWZA.
LIMBAUGH: The idea that torture doesn’t work– that’s been put out from John McCain on down– You know, for the longest time McCain said torture doesn’t work then he admitted in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last summer that he was broken by North Vietnamese. So what are we to think here?
Dear God. He basically just accused the guy who was just 5 months ago his own REPUBLICAN PARTY NOMINEE FOR PRESIDENT, and a decorated war hero to boot, of treason. I happen to think McCain is slime, but for entirely different reasons.
The McCain reference comes in at around 1:20 (if you want to avoid the other lies and bile that come beforehand):
Like my earlier diary (which happened to hit the top of the rec list, thanks!), I really don't even know what more to say about this.
Rush Limbaugh seems to now be engaged in a bloodsport-like contest with Glen Beck to see which one can out-crazy the other on the air.
Since I don't have much useful to say about the latest low from Rush, I'll regale you with some thoughts on the all-too-related TV show "24".
Ya know, I used to be a fan of "24". There, I admit it--I thoroughly enjoyed and was enraptured by the first 3 seasons of the show. For that matter, I really thought the ending of the third season wrapped up a bunch of story threads that had lingered through the other seasons nicely, so I thought that they should have ended it right there.
Instead, they continued into the 4th season...and I watched, appalled, as the show went from depicting torture by the "good guys" as at the very least a rare and "justifiable" thing (yeah, I know, there's never a justification for it) to a tactic used by EVERY character on ANY other character for NO reason whatsoever.
Even more disgusting, not only did they have people being tortured left and right in the 4th season of the show, they actually depicted the victims of torture as essentially "shrugging it off" after the fact. In one case, the Secretary of Defense orders his own son to be tortured for no particular reason (oh, wait--it turns out the son was bisexual or gay; apparently that justifies scrambling his brain). A CTU agent is "mistakenly" tortured and is back on the job within a few hours. A guy who was involved in the plot purely for some money is tortured AFTER he states flat-out that he has no problem telling them everything he knows in return for cutting a plea deal. The ex-husband of Jack Bauer's girlfriend is "mistakenly" (he doesn't know anything) tortured by electrocution--by Jack--and a few minutes later turns around and decides to help Jack solve the crisis, and even saves Jack's life. Naturally Jack decides to kill him later on anyway in favor of saving some other prisoner (who, presumably, is also tortured).
I kept watching the fourth season in the hope upon hope that they were setting the storyline up to make a point about the uselessness of torture. This was before I realized that the point of the show is to encourage the torture of...well, basically, anyone at anytime for any reason, or no reason whatsoever. The show had turned into torture porn at it's sickest.
That's when I went back to the earlier seasons and realized how ludicrous even most of the "justifiable" scenes involving torture were. Case in point: the opening scene of the 2nd season--this is the original "Ticking Bomb Scenario" fantasized about so much by the GOP.
In this scene, some prisoner in Indonesia is being tortured by some Asian special agent types. They've somehow gotten him to confess that a nuclear bomb is set to go off in Los Angeles within the next 24 hours. This of course ignores the obvious--in real life, the guy would've just said that the bomb was set to go off in, say, Miami within the next 72 hours or whatever. CTU would've sent everything they had out to Florida, L.A. would have been obliterated, and that would have been that.
Anyway, I stopped watching the show after that, and haven't seen a single episode (including the original 3 seasons, which have now been forever tainted for me) since. It's gone from being a guilty pleasure to a sickening reflection of what we've become over the past 8 years.