Madness is all relative at Fox News, irrationality is just a matter of degree, and vein-popping, spittle-flecked rants are a highly competitive sport. Even so, however, the reaction by Ralph Peters on Fox to the Senate release of the CIA torture report is one for the record book.
He starts big, calling its release a deliberate act of sabotage and an act of treason.
Tuesday’s willful, unnecessary and gratuitously destructive release of the one-sided “torture report”....
amounts to nothing less than providing aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime.
Where to go from there? Crazytown, that's where.
In Peters' deranged view, torture achieves its (supposed) intelligence aims
Will revealing successful practices make us more secure? No....
Will it “set the record straight?” No. It distorts the record grotesquely in the interests of political correctness,
Given the up is down, good is evil mentality at Fox, can anyone be surprised by this statement:
I’m far more shocked by her self-serving release of this report than by anything the CIA did to protect us.
And it wouldn't be Fox if the report's release weren't seen as yet another Obama conspiracy, in the vein of "everything Obama announces is a distraction from Benghazi", but with the Fox demon this time being Jonathan Gruber rather than a Libyan city:
is it an accident that the report’s release—the stuff of commanding headlines—has been timed for the day that Professor “Americans-are-stupid” Jonathan Gruber testifies on Capitol Hill about ObamaCare?
What a monstrous betrayal it is to compromise our agents and our allies just to shove a lackey’s testimony below the fold in tomorrow-morning’s newspapers…
I was under the impression that the torture report's release was done as an act of anti-American destruction and treason, but I guess it was done just to turn the news cycle away from Gruberghazi.
Following this, and setting the bar FoxNews high, Peters knows the CIA didn't torture, because of Islamic State:
But torture? What the Islamic State and its ilk do to their captives is torture. They shrink from nothing. We shrink from the thought of a terrorist gasping for breath.
Next up, we find Peters enlightening us about how 'the American people' really feel about torture:
Senator Feinstein and her supporters argue that the American people have a “right to know,” but they don’t know the American people. Living too long in a bubble with fellow members of the cultural elite, they have no sense of how the average American feels about terrorists
Tell us, how do 'your' people feel about torture, Mr. Peters:
the folks I know back home in the Pennsylvania coal towns would skin terrorists alive then get out the salt shaker. My people weren’t upset by water-boarding.
Americans are either fans of extreme torture or they're cannibals, it seems. This is Fox's esteemed opinion of the "real America", as it were.
So now we know, Americans love them some torture, so by revealing this report of torture, Democrats are gonna be popular with real.... wait, no.
Democrats are releasing the report to distract people from Grubergate, so the content of the report is really not relevant to them and ..... no, that's not it.
ISIS tortures people, so the CIA really doesn't torture, although average Americans love torture, but releasing this report distorts what was not torture, because no one supports torture except when they do, and therefore Democracts are in fact talking about what Americans love/hate, which is/is not torture, in order to get people distracted from some guy who probably hates/loves torture in all the wrong ways, because he said Americans are stupid.
Normally we'd call this a melt down, but since it's Fox it's called 'knowing your loyal wingnut audience.'