Sen. Kit Bond: waterboarding is like swimming; And more absurd right wing rhetoric

The right’s deranged support for waterboarding
POSTED: Wednesday, December 12, 2007

FROM BLOG: The Carpetbagger Report(http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/) - Reality-Based Commentary, Analysis, and Tirades on Politics in America
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Over the last couple of months, conservatives’ rhetoric when it comes to torture-by-waterboarding has taken a turn for the worse. Not too long ago, the right argued that waterboarding is a necessary evil — torture is wrong, they’d say, but in extreme, Jack-Bauer-like circumstances, maybe the nation should tolerate waterboarding for the worst of the worst.

That was the talking point in, say, the spring. More recently, the right has tried out a new tack: waterboarding isn’t a necessary evil, it’s hardly a big deal at all.

Yesterday on PBS’s Newshour, host Gwen Ifill asked Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) whether waterboarding constitutes torture. Bond replied that the technique is actually more like “swimming”:

GWEN IFILL: Do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It’s like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that’s beside the point. It’s not being used.

Republican “strategist” Rachel Marsden recently said on CNN, “One man’s torture is another man’s CIA-sponsored swim lesson.”

But Marsden is just some right-wing flack — Kit Bond is the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Worse, Bond isn’t alone.

Duncan Hunter offered a similar take last night.

Appearing on Fox News Tuesday night, long-shot GOP presidential candidate Duncan Hunter declared that opposition to waterboarding is “part of the Democrat blame America first” agenda and goes “right along with their desire to close Guantánamo, where the terrorists are gaining weight on American menus that include honey-glazed chicken and rice pilaf.”

Hunter’s comments came immediately after Bill O’Reilly told him that Republicans John McCain and Mike Huckabee oppose waterboarding — and just before the New York Times posted an interview with Huckabee in which he said he thought Hunter is “extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of defense.”

Remember, Hunter isn’t just some nutty talking head on TV, he’s currently the Ranking Member on the House Armed Services Committee and a presidential candidate.

All of this is eerily reminiscent of Deroy Murdock, a contributing editor to the National Review, who told readers last month, “Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.”

What is wrong with these people? How, exactly, did we get to a point in which conservatives brag about their support for medieval torture techniques? What happened to conservatives sheepishly arguing that torture was wrong, but occasionally necessary in extreme circumstances?

The mind reels.

How do they live with themselves?