Sam Donaldson

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On Sunday's ABC Roundtable, Liz Cheney and Sam Donaldson got into it on the torture investigations.

The only reason she's on is to defend her father once again. This is old and tired. Why does Dick only appear on FOX News to defend his position? We know the answer to that one. Chris Wallace makes with the Love Boat eyes and crawls on his tummy to try and get Dick all excited. They are like two cats in heat. Sam Donaldson wouldn't take Liz's ridiculous arguments. I mean, she actually says that there already were investigations...cough...cough...by the Bush administration and they passed with flying colors. She then continues to lie about the 2004 report and says that nobody was raped...Sure, Liz...

Liz: You do, you say it has already been looked at..

Sam: By who?

Liz: By career prosecutors...

Sam: In the Bush administration justice department.

But Sam, they were less political than Eric Holder, who is a political appointee...

When Sam brought up drilling people in the head and rape, Liz Cheney was outraged. Not at the act, but at the accusation...

Liz: That is totally, that is inexcusable..

Sam: It's in the report...

Liz: Nobody raped anybody...

George: The law said the threats were illegal, It's against the law.

Liz: Wait a second, that's not clear.

{}

Sam: Everyone except one person that I know has commented ....says torture is waterboarding is wrong.

Liz: Waterboarding isn't torture. We can go that path...the lack of seriousness here is important...

When a conservative is losing an argument, one of their weapons is to say that you're not serious. It's a one stop shop argument fixer. Kristol uses the word "serious" a lot to make himself sound intelligent, but nobody buys it except FOX.

Oh and Liz is still trying to sell her best product of all: Waterboarding isn't torture. How many times has she denied it already?



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This Week Pundits Whitewash Torture

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The panel on This Week wasn't much better than the one on Fox News Sunday with their whitewashing of torture and whether there should be investigations. The worst of them being George Will and Peggy Noonan. When asked about whether there will be prosecutions for those that devised the policies on torture George Will thought the Obama administration was striking the right "balance".

Will: Yes. His balance was right. Whether Congress will stick to it or not, the New York Times and others of that faction are inciting Congress have hearings on this and perhaps they will. Perhaps they should. The problem with transparency is it's transparent for the terrorists as well and as you had a clip on here of former Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff saying, the bad guys train to resist what they know we can use and they are helped by when they are captured knowing what we cannot use. So this has a cost.

No George. They already knew that we were waterboarding. Your argument is bunk. You and Brit Hume really need to get with the program here. Next on the list is Cokie Roberts who is just oh so glad that those CIA tapes were destroyed.

Roberts: That's certainly true but we don't have, give them ammunition, and you know whoever at the CIA destroyed the tapes of the waterboarding, it was the wrong thing to do but I'm really glad they did it because I would hate to have those tapes out on the Internet and people uh, being using those because I think they would be wonderful recruiting tools for terrorists and the truth is we do wonderful work all around the world, this country, people in this country, organizations in this country, the US government get no credit for it, partly because of these kinds of techniques and just getting them out of there I think is just tremendously helpful.

So Cokie, do you really think that the terrorists don't know what went on because those tapes aren't there to watch? Do you really think this was not already a recruiting tool without the tapes? I fail to follow your logic here. The only thing not having the tapes out there assures is that the people who were in them are never held accountable for what they did.

Then we have Sam Donaldson who throws out the whole Nuremberg trials argument in one fell swoop by giving the CIA agents a pass who tortured prisoners.

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Heh. Sam Donaldson really smacks down the ever-unctuous (and historically inaccurate) George Will on This Week's roundtable discussion about the teabaggers:

WILL: What this was about, as was the original Boston Tea Party - which was barely about taxes but about Parliament's role in their lives, was a view that we're now in something called the "third wave" of government. You had the expansion of the New Deal, you had the expansion of the Great Society to complete the New Deal, what those people who rallied there were saying this is something different, this third wave is to erase the distinction between the public and private sectors, and that frightens them.

DONALDSON: Oh, they weren't saying that, George. What they were saying is, we don't like Obama. And this is a proxy way to say that. Because it's true, he's going to lower taxes on 95% of the American public, and the rest are going to have higher taxes. You were quite correct, it's not about the level of taxes. Those rallies were mainly, it seems to me, organized to say, "We don't like Obama" across the board.

Peggy Noonan, believe it or not, is the one who more accurately nails the mood as anti-ruling class. Unfortunately, Fox News- and talk-radio voters are invariably under-informed as to the root causes of our economic woes.

Notice that when it comes to conservatives, they always consistently attack the legitimacy of any Democrat who wins the White House. So no Democrat is ever really the President, and should be challenged at every turn! There, wasn't that easy?


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Paul Krugman Takes Sam Donaldson to School on This Week

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From This Week the panel discussion on the stimulus package. Following Stephanopolous' opening Republican frame that the money from the stimulus package isn't going to make its way into the economy right away, Paul Krugman shows us why talking heads in the media should not argue with Nobel Laureates in economics.


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This Week: What's Left of the Republican Base?

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The panel on This Week discussing what McCain needs to do to pull out this election and apparently the last argument they feel he or any of the Republicans has left is fear of lack of a divided government. It amazes me that these talking heads in the media didn't have this mortal fear when the Republicans had control of everything. After admitting that the Republicans are losing the independents and the middle George Will makes this observation near the end of the discussion:

The need to Sen. McCain to rally the base and appeal to the base, first of all even though the base is as you said in the earlier segment much smaller than it was then, was implicit in the numbers from 2006, in 2006 Republican candidates in the off year elections got more votes from Evangelical Christians than Democratic got from African Americans and labor union members combined. Evangelical Christians by....(crosstalk)..I'm just telling you..that base is not just the base. It is almost the Republican party.