When Republican congressman Tim Murphy abruptly resigned—having been exposed for attempting to get his mistress to have an abortion—the scramble to find a GOP candidate for the upcoming special election seemed sure to bring out someone with something resembling “Christian values.” You know, someone who wasn’t going to try to get his mistress to have an abortion.
One thing that the Republican Party has taught the world over these past few years is that there is always wiggle room at the bottom. If you thought electing and then being one hundred percent complicit in an overtly racist and emotionally unhinged president was the “bottom” for Republicans, you’ve got another thing coming. The Republican Party finds itself in the position of speaking to the lowest common denominator in our electorate these days—angry, fearful and confused bigots. Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district is gearing up for a race between Democrat Conor Lamb and the GOP nominee Rick Saccone. What makes Saccone such a perfectly Republican candidate? His support and rationalization and promotion of torture of course.
Over the years, drawing upon his experience in Iraq, Saccone has promoted waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, as well as threatening prisoners with execution, dogs, and electrocution, as necessary tactics for obtaining information from detainees.
To put Saccone’s support into its truly cruel perspective, consider this from the Intercept’s Lee Fang.
Saccone has long maintained that the simulated drowning of several suspects, a technique known as waterboarding, does not qualify as torture because it is quick and does not inflict permanent physical injury. The technique, he claims, produced “valuable information in the war on terror” when it was used on suspects such as Abu Zubaydah, who he says divulged much-needed intelligence in only 34 seconds of waterboarding.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, however, found that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, so brutally in fact that he became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The Bush administration claimed that Zubaydah was a high-profile member of al Qaeda and that through brutal interrogation, he had revealed ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Those “ties” of course, were later retracted by the government—because that was a lie.
He was the first detainee to be waterboarded, and his brutal torture was documented in a Senate report. He is among those held without charges and with no likelihood of a trial. The government long ago admitted that he was never the top leader of Al Qaeda it claimed he was at the time of his capture in 2002, but it insists that he may still be dangerous.
Nothing about the torture he was put through in proving he “may still be dangerous.” Saccone has been embraced by Donald Trump because he supports the kind of shoot first, never ask questions policy philosophy that has crashed our country’s economy, sent us into immoral wars, and continues to promote a level of domestic and global inequality easily replicated in a sci-fi novel.
Before entering Pennsylvania's special House race late last year, Saccone had pursued a U.S. Senate bid in which he raised just $67,000. He was the surprise winner to become the House nominee on the second round of voting at a nominating convention in November.
Outside conservative groups like Ending Spending and pro-Trump 45 Committee have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race, while the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC tied to House Speaker Paul Ryan, has opened two field offices in the district with plans to recruit 50 canvassers to knock on 250,000 doors.
As DK Elections pointed out last year—the Republican Party knew exactly what they were getting when they began backing this yahoo.
On the other side is Democratic candidate Conor Lamb. Amongst the many reasons Daily Kos decided to endorse Lamb was that he totally hasn’t been a proponent of torture techniques that have been deemed inhumane. Being inhumane is not simply a “small detail” to the likes of Trump and his Republican brethren, it’s an essential “skill set” in today’s Republican Party. As the Daily News points out, Saccone has explained his candidacy this way:
Saccone, who has described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump” has backed a number of conservative policies since he won a state House seat in 2010.
The dirty secret of the Republican Party is that they were all Donald Trump before Donald Trump.