Fox News Explains America Is The Best, So Who Cares About Torture?

The nice folks at Fox News are pretty darn angry about the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's post-9/11 torture program, but not about anything revealed in the report. No, the great patriots at Fox are mostly angry that the report is being released at all, especially at a time when it will distract from the very important appearance of Obamacare Archfiend Jonathan Gruber, who's testifying before a House panel today. Obviously, the Dems are just trying to cover up the War Crimes of the Affordable Care Act by nattering on about some Muslims who got their feelings hurt. OK, and at least one guy who was a case of mistaken identity died of hypothermia, and two other guys who were tortured even though they had already worked as CIA informants . But they never called the American people stupid, now did they? You see, it's all about priorities. Let's see how Fox Fair And Balanced the shit out of the torture report today!

Fox News analyst K.T. McFarland explained that the release of the report was just Dianne Feinstein's way of messing up the Senate before having to give up leadership of the Intelligence Committee to the Republicans -- without noting that the likely new chair of Intelligence, John McCain, actually supported the release of the report and stood by its findings. [Correction: John McCain will chair theArmed Services Committee; the new chair of Intelligence will be CIA pal Richard Burr, who said today the report “only endangers our officers and allies in a blatant attempt to smear the Bush administration.” Wonkette regrets the error]

But never mind that. The point is, the Dems lost the Senate and are just petulantly "trashing the place before they leave." Or maybe -- and we know this is probably some kind of wacky conspiracy theory -- Senate Dems wanted the report to be made available to the American people and knew that once Republicans took control of the Senate, it would likely be shelved and not released at all. Yes, we know, that's pretty crazy thinking.

On Outnumbered, Bill O'Reilly errand boy Jesse Watters explained that America just doesn't need to know any details of what those nice CIA agents did to Keep Us Safe (even if it didn't), explaining that "people do nasty things in the dark especially after a terrorist attack." Speak for yourself, Jesse -- we just stayed up all night watching CNN and weeping.

Andrea Tantaros had a peculiar logic for insisting that the report should never have seen the light of day: America is the best, and in a democracy, you don't need information about what you've already had an informed debate about. Or something like that.

In any case, she did make a lovely Freudian slip, subsituting terror for torture -- twice:

These terror tactics have been stopped, because as a country we decided we are better than this, so we stopped them. Which is MY point, then why are we putting out this memo? We've had this discussion, we've had this debate, and it's not about democracy now, no no. It's about politics. It's about Democrats being so fundamentally lost as a party, they have to return to an old playbook, the plays that they ran right when Obama got into office trying to prosecute CIA officials for these terror tactics.

Yes, yes, we know, Barack Obama was actually notorious for deciding to look forward, not back, and never went after the architects of torture. But the larger point is that politics is a bad thing that democracy should never be sullied by, we guess.

Of course, if all this stuff should have remained secret, that sort of makes you wonder how we'd have had a debate about it in the first place, but maybe we just lack the sophistication to see how that would work. Besides, said Tantaros, America is just the best, and any evidence that suggests otherwise is bad for our Bestness:

The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome. But we’ve had this discussion. We’ve closed the book on it, and we’ve stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.

We hear that everything is also cool when you're part of a team. In addition, former veejay Kennedy wanted to know why the Senate Intelligence Committee isn't talking about the abuse of women and children in the Arab world, which is something that really matters. Tantaros agreed, and then added -- moments after accusing Democrats of being stuck with using the playbooks of the past -- that this is just what she'd expect from an administration that went on "apology tours":

They apologized for this country, they don’t like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again ... Because they believe, naively, if we can just shame ourselves and convince the world how horrible we are, and put us on a moral equivalency with all these other countries then maybe they will stop beheading Americans and putting our heads on sticks. They’re fools.

Or maybe it's all a distraction from how Obamacare caused Benghazi.

[ RawStory / MediaMatters ]