Bill O'Reilly is so invested in torture he cannot let it go. He cannot. It is his signature issue, what he will carry water for no matter what the facts may be.

He led off his show tonight with two questions. First, why does the President refuse to torture but has no problem killing terrorists? Two, can President Obama keep the nation safe when he refuses to torture terrorists to gain information to prevent attacks? Does this sound as ridiculous to you as it does to me?

I realize I am preaching to the choir here on C&L, but maybe it'll get in The Google enough times that some poor confused soul will actually happen across this post and understand why Bill O'Reilly is full of it.

In order to accept BillO's premise; that is, torture yields answers which will not be gotten any other way and it is the only way to get those answers, one must also accept that the Bush administration knew the name of Bin Laden's courier way back in 2003 when the waterboarding interrogations were in full force and effect. And if that is the case, then why on earth would he put on Bush administration lackeys like Karl Rove to defend his arguments?

What surprises me is how deeply invested O'Reilly is in this whole argument. He truly believes, with his entire heart and soul, that torturing someone is the only way to get information from them. Does he write for "24"? Either BillO is seriously into S&M or he's got some kind of fixation with the idea that being violent with prisoners/detainees is a strong, manly way to behave.

Rather than try to lay this out for BillO myself, I'm going to let Lawrence O'Donnell explain it in his own words, as broadcast on his Rewrite segment.

Simply put: Torture doesn't work. If I were as nasty as O'Reilly, I'd suggest that he be waterboarded until he admitted torture doesn't work, but I'm not. I'm guessing he'd agree that it doesn't work in order to stop the torture, but then, he'd be lying, wouldn't he?