Remember how the one redeeming quality you could say that President George W. Bush had was that when he left office, unlike the Sith Lord he picked for a Vice President, he knew how to fall back and shut up when the new guy took over.  Yeah well those days are over.  Just in case we thought we forgot the biggest legacy left by his Presidency were the idiotic things he would say…good ole G Dubbya has decided to give us all a reminder:

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Former President George W. Bush says if he had it to do over, he would still waterboard the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Waterboarding is a simulated drowning technique that the Obama administration considers torture. Bush acknowledged Wednesday that the U.S. used the harsh interrogation technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and said he would “do it again to save lives.”

Bush made the comment while speaking to the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Mich.

Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and is the most senior al-Qaida operative in U.S. custody.

In his speech, Bush defended the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. He said ousting Saddam Hussein “was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him.” (Source)

Okay, 8 years is a long time and a lot happens.  Being President is a stressful.  Sometimes names, dates and events run together and your mind becomes a giant bowl of mush.  But come on.  Tell me this fool didn’t really go there.  Tell me he hasn’t forgotten the main reason why people disliked him to begin with.  This is actually scary.  It’s scary because it might mean this fool actually believes the loads of turds he was selling the American people for 8 years.  To actually admit that you would waterboard a guy, when waterboarding is clearly torture, means that Bush really doesn’t think waterboarding is torture.  And let’s be honest, that’s one of the dumbest conversations we’ve had in this country (although “Is President Obama showing enough emotion with the Gulf oil spill” is quickly approaching that level).  Whether you agree with waterboarding or not, if you take out the legal ramifications for a minute it’s blatantly obvious to see that “simulated drowning” is torture.  That’s really not up for debate.  Or at least it shouldn’t be.  So Bush is saying he would torture Khalid Sheik Mohammed again if he had the chance.  Never mind the fact that KSM was waterboarded in order to find a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.  A link that didn’t exist by the way.  So no Mr. President, you’ve already shown that you would waterboard someone even if it wouldn’t save lives.

And for extra credit, Bush throws in that removing Saddam was the “right thing to do”. Even most Republicans would admit that it wasn’t the right thing to do (albeit 7 years too late).  Okay if that was the case then why did you sell it as a part of the War against those who attacked us on 9/11?  Why did you claim that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction when he didn’t?  Why did you torture KSM to make him tell you about a non-existent link between Al Qaeda and Saddam?  Then after no link was found, why did you continue to tell us the American people that the link was there? Why didn’t you just come out from Day 1 and say “The world would be better without him, we’re going in”?  Want to know why?  Because going into Iraq was either an afterthought or you were pushed into going by relics from your father’s Administration (Looking at you Rumsfeld and Cheney).

Here’s a hint Mr. President, go back to not saying anything.  That’s been your best decision in about a decade.

Remember when Dick Cheney spent all that time defending water boarding as not being torture?  Well looks like one of our servicemen sided with the former Vice President and said “If it’s good enough for terrorists…it’s good enough for my 4 year old” *pause* Wait…what!?!?

A Washington state soldier is accused of holding his 4-year-old daughter’s head under the water in the kitchen sink mock “waterboard-style” because she would not recite the alphabet, The News-Tribune reports.

The Tacoma newspaper says Thurston County authorities filed a charge of second-degree assault of child against Joshua Ryan Tabor, 27, from the Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

According to court records, police in Yelm responded to a disturbance after Tabor’s girlfriend reported that Tabor “was irate, intoxicated and walking around the neighborhood with his Kevlar helmet threatening to break windows.”

The girlfriend told Yelm police that Tabor beats his 4-year-old daughter, who had locked herself in a closet, the newspaper says.

The News-Tribune said Tabor, according to court records, told a Yelm police officer that he and his girlfriend had “held (his daughter) down on the counter and submerged her head into the water three or four times until the water came around her forehead and jawline.”

He said that she was face-up during the ordeal, which she was forced to undergo for  “refusing to say her letters.” (Source)

What.The.Fuck.  The child is 4.  FOUR.  How the hell can you even justify this?  Both this fool AND his girlfriend need to go to jail.  The girlfriend because as a mother, maternal instincts should kick in and make you protect your child.  This man was torturing his daughter because she wasn’t reciting the alphabet.  Do you know how traumatizing that is going to be for that child?  I know we can’t do it…but it shit like this that makes me think forced sterilization of some people isn’t a bad thing.  This man and woman shouldn’t be allowed within 100 feet of another child.

The Korean and Kriss tell the stories of their great Ocean City adventure. There are tales of beer bongs, 100 Proof Captain Morgan and a sketchy ass couple looking to have threesomes with young, unsuspecting minorities. Kriss goes over some pet peeves, the debate over health care has turned to some pretty stupid arguments, the Catholic Church is behind the curve again, an old man takes a stand against bad parenting and the funniest College rivalry t-shirt EVER.

There’s a problem with getting the show on iTunes for new subscribers. If you already get the show on iTunes you’re fine but if you’re looking to find us in the iTunes store it’ll probably be a couple of weeks until we’re back up and running. You can manually add us to iTunes by going to Advanced->Subscribe to Podcast and then add this url. We’re looking for writers for TheInsanityReport.com and guests for the Insanity Check Podcast. If you are interested, email us at InsanityCheck@theInsanityReport.com. Also hit us up if you’re good with graphic designs or music production (we’re looking for a new opening for the podcast). Join the Facebook Group for weekly updates on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Back from my mini-vacation, I’m greeted by none other than former Vice President Dick Cheney himself and his peons making their rounds on Sunday morning news programs.  Honestly, I’m getting real sick and tired of this man.  I’m even sicker that the media isn’t putting him to task for the blatant falsehoods and asinine statements he’s making.  In a soft balled interview with Fox New’s Chris Wallace (God forbid Cheney take his bullshit to a network that might actually ask him some tough questions), Cheney said that the launch of the investigation “offends the hell” out of him.  Well, the fact that we have a former Vice President that openly and willingly admits to authorizing violations of the Geneva  Conventions offends the hell out of me.  The “what we did kept the country safe” excuse is so ludicrous it burns me up that the media is allowing this to continue.  Even the most violent and deranged sociopaths in this country are protected by Miranda Rights, given trials, allowed adequate legal representation and despite how disgusting and repulsive their actions, they are treated as human beings.  Yet here’s Cheney, former Bush Administration officials and some in the media that are acting as if we HAD to use these techniques in order to protect this country.  And its blatantly false.  We’ve seen the reports that not only was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded 183 times but he was done so AFTER we already used less harsh techniques on him to gain all the useful intelligence we got from him.  These are the facts.  Facts that Cheney seems to forget.

What’s really sad is when even people that don’t agree with these techniques being used, still say the Obama Administration “shouldn’t pursue an investigation”.  Take Senator John McCain.  McCain himself was a victim of torture back in Vietnam and he states that these techniques were clear violation of the law.  Yet he still says we shouldn’t investigate these criminals.  It’s absolutely madness.

The Korean is back in the studio with Kriss. The two discuss the upcoming trip to Ocean City with the Usual Suspects, Tedd Kennedy dying of brain cancer, pricks that should be dead but aren’t, CIA torture investigation & Darth Cheney weighing in, Michael Jackson’s death ruled a homicide and KFC decides its going to try to help us all die faster.

There’s a problem with getting the show on iTunes for new subscribers. If you already get the show on iTunes you’re fine but if you’re looking to find us in the iTunes store it’ll probably be a couple of weeks until we’re back up and running. You can manually add us to iTunes by going to Advanced->Subscribe to Podcast and then add this url. We’re looking for writers for TheInsanityReport.com and guests for the Insanity Check Podcast. If you are interested, email us at InsanityCheck@theInsanityReport.com. Also hit us up if you’re good with graphic designs or music production (we’re looking for a new opening for the podcast). Join the Facebook Group for weekly updates on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration launched a criminal investigation Monday into harsh questioning of detainees during President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, revealing CIA interrogators’ threats to kill one suspect’s children and to force another to watch his mother sexually assaulted.

At the same time, President Barack Obama ordered changes in future interrogations, bringing in other agencies besides the CIA under the direction of the FBI and supervised by his own national security adviser. The administration pledged questioning would be controlled by the Army Field Manual, with strict rules on tactics, and said the White House would keep its hands off the professional investigators doing the work.

Despite the announcement of the criminal probe, several Obama spokesmen declared anew — as the president has repeatedly — that on the subject of detainee interrogation he “wants to look forward, not back” at Bush tactics. They took pains to say decisions on any prosecutions would be up to Attorney General Eric Holder, not the White House. (Source)

I find the conservative/Republican arguments against Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to launch a criminal probe into Bush era torture techniques used idiotic.  Honestly, I can’t understand what the big deal is.  Torture is illegal. Yes, we know it happens all the time.  But when its exposed, someone has to pay for it.  This idea that this criminal probe will damage the CIA’s “morale” is asinine.  I don’t care if President Bush himself told interrogators that they could waterboard suspects, those interrogators KNEW they were committing torture.  They knew they were violating the Geneva Conventions and they did it anyway.  So yes, they should face some kind of punishment.  We’ve long established that “just following orders” isn’t a valid excuse for committing an illegal action.  Hell, we had several movies about that, the most famous being “A Few Good Men.”

I think the conservative/republican reaction bothers me for a few reasons:

1.  Saying “But it worked” isn’t acceptable.  We could say the War on Drugs and locking up drug users doesn’t work but people still fight against legalizing drugs.

2.  They say we shouldn’t look into the past and that it will affect the morale at the CIA.  Funny, that didn’t stop the Bush Administration from launching the investigation into Abu Ghraib and prosecuting those Army soldiers.

3.  The Department of Justice is independent of the President.  The DOJ is just doing what it should be, investigating criminal activities.  The CIA violated the Geneva Conventions.  That’s not just something we can say “Oh well, we’ll do what we want.”  If our soldiers were tortured by another country, we’d be raising hell about how they violated the Geneva Conventions and we’d be calling for prosecutions.

I’m honestly perplexed as I watch Morning Joe and see Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan and a few other conservatives say how the President is a “wimp” and is making a grave mistake because he’s allowing Attorney General Eric Holder uphold the laws of this country.  It’s unbelievable how they defend this indefensible behavior.  Yes, the President said he wants to move forward, but after a preliminary investigation the Attorney General has apparently found some things that were so egregious that he can’t turn the other cheek on.  Republicans claim to be the party of morals but when it comes to holding criminals in the CIA to the laws, they apparently lose their moral compass.

I’ve said it before…I support torture.  Not as an intelligence gathering technique but as punishment for those that we know 100% are guilty of committing horrendous crimes.  For instance, the 17 year old who raped and murdered an 8 month old should be tortured.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who we have no doubt was a mastermind behind the September 11^th attacks.  We waterboarded him 183 times.  The Bush Administration says that waterboarding isn’t torture and we did it to gain information to protect this country from future attacks.  Bullshit.  First off, waterboarding is clearly torture.  Secondly, you don’t torture someone 183 times to glean information from them.  You do it because you want to exact revenge for the death of 3,000 innocent civilians.  And you know what?  I’m cool with that.  When someone commits an atrocity against their fellow man in the manner in which this ass clown did, they forfeit their right to be treated in a civilized manner.  I am not cool with using torture though to gain information from an individual. Why?  Well, first off, its like abusing your kid.  If you were to beat your child for no reason, they would eventually start trying to do things, anything, to make you happy just so you wouldn’t beat them any more.  Same thing with torture.  It gets to the point when you don’t know if a prisoner is just telling you things because they know its what you want to hear and they want the torturing to stop.  Basically, you could be getting faulty Intelligence.  But the second reason you don’t torture prisoners for information, especially prisoners that you have faulty evidence on is because you could be creating terrorists.  I’ll be honest.  If you ripped me from my family and put me in a detention camp where I wasn’t even considered a real prisoner….all with shoddy evidence…once I got out I’d be ready to kill everyone I thought was remotely responsible.  That brings me to the story of Lakhdar Boumediene.  For the last 7 ½ years he’s only be known as “Prisoner 10005″.  Just watch this video.

How does Dick Cheney or Liz Cheney or Sean Hannity or any of these other Right Wing nutcases justify this?  Honestly, I couldn’t even fault this guy if one day he decided to blow up a building.  You torture an innocent man, lock him away for 7 ½ years…when he gets out, his daughters don’t even know him….come on.  All in the name of our National Security.  I swear, what a bunch of hypocrites.  If another country did this to a U.S. citizen we would be raising Hell.  Oh wait…that’s right…we already are.  Laura Ling and Euna Lee were found guilty of committing a “grave crime” and sentenced to 12 years in a harsh labor camp in North Korea.  Of course they’re innocent and of course they shouldn’t be there…but considering the precedence we’ve set with Gitmo and the fact that we have a former Vice President defending it…what do you think is going to happen in the rest of the world?  When you make it a policy to detain and torture innocent people, don’t be surprise when other countries return the favor.

I can’t stand Nancy Pelosi.  Not only is she an idiot, but she gives the Wicked Witch of the West a run for her money in how to best scare little children.  She’s just as much as a nutcase as some of the idiot Republican congressmen and women I talk about.  Hell, I put her up there with Michelle Bachman.  This is why I commend President Obama.  Not only is he putting up with morons on the Right, but now he has to deal with incompetent fuckers like Nancy Pelosi.  The main reason the President didn’t want to pursue legal action against Bush Administration officials in this whole torture fiasco is because he knew that what’s happening now would occur.  Nancy Pelosi, like a typical politician, doesn’t want to accept any blame or responsibility for her complacency with what the Bush Administration did.  She claims that she and the rest of the Democrats were lied to by the CIA is ridiculous.  While I have no doubt that they CIA does do some shady stuff, I remember the climate back in 2001 – 2003.  Democrats basically rolled over for whatever the President wanted because they didn’t want to appear “soft on terrorist”.  I have no doubt that Pelosi knew about waterboarding back then.  Her claim that they talked about it but didn’t admit to using it is bullshit.  Why would they tell you about it if they weren’t using it?

What we’re seeing here right now is Nancy Pelosi dancing around trying to avoid responsibility for her actions…or in this case, inaction.  I was hard on now Secretary of State Hilary Clinton when she tried to blame her voting for the War on the Bush Administration.  This is the same thing.  You voted for something or allowed something to happen because you didn’t have the balls to stand up and hold your ground.  You caved in like a California sinkhole.  Nancy Pelosi should have listened to the President and shut the fuck up about prosecuting Bush officials.  How you going to call for someone else’s head when you were right there cosigning them?  That’s like calling the cops on a bank robber while you’re sitting in the driver’s seat of the getaway car.  As much as I don’t want to see a members of the equally(if not slightly more) fucked up Republican party gain power again, part of me wishes there was some way to replace this fool.

Two points real quick:

1. If 50% of the country thinks that torture techniques made this country safer, then that means the other 50% either isn’t sure or doesn’t think so. 50% isn’t a gotdamn minority and I need idiots like Joe Scarborough to stop touting that percentage like it means something. Also, didn’t the election of Obama prove that poll numbers mean shit? The day before the election some polls had the race tied and Obama ended up trouncing McCain by 7%.

2. As the other guest tried to point out (but was talked over and dismissed), comparing Dick Cheney speaking out to Al Gore is not even close to the same comparison. Al Gore disappeared off the face of the earth for a year and came back with a beard looking like Moses coming down off the mountaintop. When he did reappear, his focus was on the environment, not fearmongering everyone into believing they were going to die in a terrorist nuclear attack.

I said it before,I’ll say it again. As a candidate, President Barack Obama stated that he was going to close Gitmo, didn’t believe in torture and wouldn’t support it and would be changing the way the United States is viewed overseas. Now as President, he has the audacity to actually keep campaign promises and douchebags like Dick Cheney and Joe Scarborough are trying to claim he’s making the country unsafer and fear mongering about how unsafe they feel. Honestly…FUCK YOU. I don’t have to time nor the inclination to explain to these morons the ramifications of having this country support State sponsored torture. I mean for fucks sake think about what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture. According to Cheney we need to torture, wiretap domestically without a warrant, suspend Habeas Corpus, reclassify individuals as ‘enemy combatants’, etc. If you can’t see how that is a gross misuse of governmental powers, you’re an idiot. Joe Scarborough will bitch about universal health care and the government taking over the banks…but he’ll turn a blind eye to the government torturing people. GTFOH.

When it comes to cable news morning shows, each of the three major networks have their own style and blend.  CNN for the most part is the responsible station that while they still make mistakes, are pretty fair and balanced, albeit boring.  Fox News is the class clowns of the News world and I honestly think that deep down inside even they don’t take themselves seriously.  MSNBC, while it has great evening programs, probably have the worse morning show.  Yes, its worse than Fox.  I can view Fox & Friends as entertainment and not to be taken seriously.  Morning Joe on MSNBC however is hosted by two idiots that think they have original thoughts when in actuality they are just a couple of idiots.  Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough are painful to watch in the morning.  But this morning it was particularly painful because the spawn of evil Sith Lord Darth Cheney (Liz Cheney) was on to defend her daddy’s decision to speak out against the current Administration’s stance on torture.

I knew it was going to be bad when Joe Scarborough, who wasn’t in studio, called in just to help defend the red herring arguments that Liz Cheney was using.  It’s like Scarborough has dog ears and republican bullshit is the whistle that only he can hear.  Here’s the illogical arguments that Liz Cheney and Joe Scarborough, along with Dick Cheney and a host of other republican morons, are using to defend torture:

1.  It’s not torture

This was the first argument used back when this topic came up when George Bush was still in office.  It’s not torture, its “harsh interrogation techniques.”  This has to be the most juvenile argument I’ve ever heard.  Its like when you were in the car with your sibling and you put your finger as close to their face as possible and when they said “stop touching me” you’d respond “I’m not touching you.”  Sure, compared to some ancient Medieval torture methods like the rack or removing someone’s internal organs one by one when they are still alive, waterboarding seems pretty tame.  But its still torture.  This is like when Whitney Houston was like “I’m too rich to do crack…I do cocaine…I’m not hooked on drugs.”  WTF?  This redefinition is nothing new for these fools, I’m just mad that news hosts like Mika and Joe let them get away with it.  Remember, these same people trying to redefine torture also later said “Well, even IF it was torture…the treatment of these terrorist prisoners isn’t covered under the Geneva Convention because they aren’t Prisoners of War but “enemy combatants”.  Are you kidding me?  That is absurd.

2.  It worked

The most recent claim now being spearheaded by Dick Cheney and his daughter (who Joe Scarborough is obviously infatuated with ) is that these methods worked and therefore we should continue them.  Since when did this become the issue?  Of course torture produces results.  You water board someone 183 times in a few months and they’re going to talk.  That’s not the issue.  The issue is, is torturing someone the morally right thing to do AND does publicly supporting it benefit us in the long run.  Think about it.  When there’s a serial rapist, the police aren’t allowed to take him into the interrogation room and waterboard him until he confesses.  Our laws don’t allow that.  It would be a lot easier for President Obama to get his policies through if he murdered his political opponents.  Again, I don’t see anyone asking Robert Gibbs when the President plans on getting rid of his Eric Cantor problem.  These things are things that happen in other countries though.  I did a story last week about a pregnant British woman that might face the firing squad in Laos, which hosts a really inhumane prison.  The British and some American groups are outraged.  Yet we allow Dick Cheney and hosts like Joe Scarborough to come on TV and say that because torture works, we should keep doing it.

Here’s the problem, in the short term torture gets your results.  But in the long run, the collateral damage you do far outweighs any benefit.  When your policy on handling prisoners goes around the Geneva Conventions and the policy is to torture, then you’ve made it difficult to make any kind of political solution to the terrorism problem.  Let’s not mince words here.  Waterboarding is torture.  Forcing someone to go through simulated drowning isn’t a harsh interrogation technique, it’s torture.  Plain and simple.  If ass clowns like Dick or Liz Cheney think that because it works we should do it, then I don’t see why they have such a problem calling it what it is.

And I’ll leave with this note.  If torture is such an effective technique, how come in places like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Middle Eastern countries that support torturing detainees, how come they still produce terrorists.  How come terrorists still plan attacks from these countries?  If torture is such an effective policy, wouldn’t there be zero crime in those countries?  Of course its foolish to come up with such conclusions…but its no more foolish and idiotic than the ones the former Vice President and his daughter are using.