Keith Olbermann offers Sean Hannity $1000 for every second he can endure waterboarding. Lawrence O'Donnell weighs in on why someone like Hannity would
April 24, 2009

Keith Olbermann offers Sean Hannity $1000 for every second he can endure waterboarding. Lawrence O'Donnell weighs in on why someone like Hannity would offer to be waterboarded in the first place.

Olbermann: You'll do it for charity? For the troops families? I'll take you up on that Sean. For every second you last, $1000. Live or on tape provided other networks cameras are there. $1000 a second Sean because this is no game. This is serious stuff. Put your money where your mouth is, and your nose. And I'll double it when you admit you feared for your life. When you admit the horrible truth. Waterboarding, a symbol of the last administration, is torture.

[....]

O'Donnell: The reason Sean Hannity thinks torture is a good idea. The reason Sean Hannity thinks it works is because it would work on him. There are two different kinds of people out there in the world. The warriors which are a very, very tiny minority, less than 1% of our population is ever going to face combat and then there's the rest of us.

I am like Sean Hannity, one of those cowards, just like Dick Cheney who has refused throughout my life to enter the military and ever subject myself to anything dangerous occupationally where I might lose a tooth. That is exactly Sean Hannity's approach to life and he has exactly the same cowardly fear that I do of combat or submitting myself to anything of the kind of risk the American military does. And so people who live where Sean Hannity lives and those safe places and the safe Cheney home where no one in the Cheney family would ever submit themselves to military service, ever submit themselves to the risk of torture. They think torture works because it would work on them.

Because they are soft. They are weak people compared to our military service people and they would crack under torture. But al Qaeda, people who have devoted their lives to destroying their enemy, the people are willing to die in their exercises, they were all willing to die on 9-11. Sean Hannity thinks torture is going to work on them because he has never, never known the kind of commitment that those people have and nothing he's done in his life measures that kind of commitment that the American military has or that our enemies have. Our enemies are more committed than Sean Hannity will ever be.

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