Fox News Host: Get Over CIA Torture Report Because "America Is Awesome"
As people work their way through the passel of documents that is the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on post-9/11, Bush-era CIA torture, Fox News is ready to weigh in: The long-planned doc dump is all political subterfuge. The reactions of some of the hosts of the network's Outnumbered, though, was Fox News at their most stridently jingoistic.
Skip to about 2:15 in the clip embedded above, and you'll first hear professional agitator Jesse Watters pulls a classic, "gotta hear both sides" defense. "They didn't even interview any of the CIA interrogators to do the report," he says. "It's kind of how like Rolling Stone does their reporting—they only get one side."
And then Andrea Tantaros, visibly angry, says anyone who would dare to know about the gruesome, dehumanizing, and illegal methods of torture used by the CIA is simply distracting from the "real" issues:
The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome. We've closed the book on [torture], and we've stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we're not awesome.
Awesome.