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To give some indication as to how the nation's conservatives are responding to McCain's call to block Gina Haspel’s nomination as CIA director over her record and stance on torture, we look to Fox News. They have chosen demonization and mockery.
THOMAS MCINERNEY (FOX NEWS MILITARY ANALYST): Well she can't use [torture] anymore because we have determined in Congress that it's not legal. The fact is, is John McCain -- it worked on John. That's why they call him 'Songbird John.'
To be clear, we around these parts have little patience for Sen. John McCain as politician. He was a war hero, but his time in the Senate has been marked both by now-forgotten scandal and by years of principled stands against a great many things that he reversed himself on after attempting to extract maximum publicity for those stances.
But there is no evidence that McCain gave valuable information to his captors, there is prodigious evidence that he instead attempted to mislead them, and if there is even a single person left in Fox management who has somehow retained a scrap of dignity, sneering at McCain's war ordeal with a pissant nickname suggesting otherwise should land Thomas McInerney an immediate and permanent canning from Fox News. Forever. This is not negotiable; the fellow is a garbage human being, and his opinions should henceforth be rendered irrelevant.
But that is where we are, on the Fox News channel. The Republican senator who survived torture as a prisoner of war is being mocked and sneered at, by the enforcers of proper conservative thought, for condemning conservative efforts to spread the practice as United States policy. That is where the new conservative cult has brought us.
Pfft.