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In what was not a surprising interview for anyone who has followed Jesse Ventura and his opinions about both the Democratic and Republican parties, our military industrial complex and what's wrong with our corporate media today, Piers Morgan allowed Ventura to air his grievances on all of the above this Monday evening on CNN.

While I do not agree with Ventura on all of his views by any means, it's hard to disagree with some of the points he made during this interview. Our political system has been corrupted by too much money on all sides. The two political parties have crowded out any chance for most in a third party to get elected. Our militarism and how we treat other countries would never be accepted if the tables were turned and other countries attempted to treat us the same way we do them. And our media is utterly broken and I agree completely with the point he made here:

MORGAN: How much do you think the media have to take responsibility for some of the way the political system has gone? You now have very partisan cable networks. FOX on the right, MSNBC on the left, CNN sort of squeezed somewhere in the middle.

When you see them getting more vociferous and partisan, does that matter? Is that good for political debate? Is it corrupting political debate? What do you think?

VENTURA: I think it's awful. It's terrible. You know, the news used to be to report facts and allow you to make the decision. All these shows are nothing but opinion moderators. They're hired guns to push an agenda. I think it's horrible.

When our forefathers created this country, the media was supposed to be the fourth branch of government, the unwritten branch. Their job was to keep track of what the other three were doing and report it to the American people so the American people could judge it accordingly. What you have now is nothing but a media with opinion and a media that I remember the death of Anna Nicole Smith. It was the headline for a month -- a month. And yet the meat and potatoes of running our country gets cast aside because why? The media today is not in to reporting the news, they're in to creating it, and that is very, very dangerous.

Because the light went on with "60 Minutes". They found out the news could make money. So the bean counters came in. Now the news is nothing but entertainment. It's done to get ratings.

Where in the old days of Walter Cronkite, the news took a loss and they accepted that and they made up for it in their entertainment division. Not today. Today, the news is expected to get ratings and expected to generate money and that is horrible.

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Bill Maher and Jesse Ventura talked marijuana legalization, how to give third party candidates a chance in our elections, alternative voting, states rights, whether you can be religious without being a member of an organized religion and the Vatican's problems on Real Time. I thought it was a pretty good show all around tonight. I don't agree with Bill and Jesse on everything by any means but I sure as hell would enjoy the cable "news" shows more if more of them were half as informative as Bill's show was tonight.

For those of you without HBO, they'll have the Overtime segment posted a bit later on the Real Time web site if you'd like to watch it.

I have to say this was one of the more interesting Larry King shows I've watched in a while if for nothing else seeing what a cable news program looks like when two Libertarians and two Democrats out number the one Republican strategist Andrea Tantaros and instead of what usually happens when she's a guest on one of these bobble head shows. She ends up being cut off and out numbered when she tries spouting her usual Republican talking points instead of being allowed to filibuster a show. Imagine that.

While I don't consider the corrupt Rod Blagojevich anyone that should be considered a good representative of the Democratic Party, watching this show did make me wonder what it would look like if more of the panels on cable news were representative of where the American public is in regard to their political leanings. I would say this came a lot closer than what's fed to us on a daily dose by our media where conservatives generally outnumber anyone that strays too far from the Republican Party's talking points of the day. If nothing else having someone who's not your typical cable bobble head like Ventura was a breath of fresh air on this show.

Part one above and parts two through five below the fold.

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Mike Huckabee pretends like the tea baggers are not an astroturf movement already and that any semblance of them being a grass roots movement has not been dismissed a long time ago. This had to be one of the strangest panels I've ever seen on Fox with Geraldo bringing in Jesse Ventura, Mike Huckabee and Rod Blagojevich to weigh in on the latest event with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin doing their best to scare the crap out of the American electorate in Tulsa.

After showing some footage of Beck and Palin at their Taking Our Country Back tour, Geraldo has Huckabee and Ventura weigh in. Huckabee of course tries to pretend this group is still a grass roots movement and also fails to acknowledge that the two people he's being questioned about are his fellow employees at ClusterFox and the role they've played in promoting the movement.

Ventura dares to point out that the tea baggers are not anything that could be considered a grass roots movement and Rivera makes sure he doesn't get to say much more about it before ending the segment.

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Looks like Mr. Glazed-Chicken Duncan Hunter is at it again with defending our torture of prisoners. I don't know what else Chris Matthews thought he was going to get from the likes of Hunter given his past appearance on his show where he called detainee abuse "left wing rubbish". Now he's claiming that waterboarding isn't torture, and it makes our Marines tough! I think Jesse Ventura would disagree with him.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz did a pretty good job later in the segment when she was allowed to get a word in edge-wise and took Hunter to task for his claim that the government got any information from KSM after he was waterboarded.

Media Matters has a good run down of where that latest talking point came from and debunks it here-- Following Wash. Post article, conservative media advance falsehood that CIA documents prove interrogation techniques worked. Unfortunately since so much of the segment turned into a pissing contest between Hunter and Matthews over whether waterboarding is torture or not, those points were barely discussed.

Of course the fact that they have to make things up to justify the use of torture is no surprise since it doesn't work. It's meant to extract confessions and to get the prisoner to tell the torturer what they want to hear, not to get at the truth. But that's not going to stop the likes of Dick Cheney and Duncan Hunter from lying about it or the media from giving them a format to do it.

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The straight talking Jesse Ventura hits the nail directly on the head with the problem Sarah Palin's going to have if she aspires to run for higher office.

KING: All right. Let's move to Governor Palin, the former governor, soon to be former Governor Palin. What do you make of her resigning?

VENTURA: She's a quitter. Let me put it to you this way, Larry; by not being sexist, She could never make it as a Frog Man or Navy SEAL. Because if you utter the words in BUDS training, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training, I quit, you're gone.

I don't remember one person in my class that quit. I remember every person I graduated with. It offends me over the fact that she told the people of Alaska she wanted to be their governor. And she wanted -- and that's a four-year commitment. And now, right in the middle, she quits?

Well, if she's got plans of running for higher office, I would never vote for her, because if it gets too hot in the kitchen, she is liable to quit.

KING: Do you think there's an underlying reason maybe we don't know?

VENTURA: Well, I don't think she was put under anymore scrutiny with the media than I was as an independent. My children were attacked in Minnesota. Everything I did was put under the microscope.

But the point is, Larry, you don't quit. When you make an obligation and you take an oath, doesn't it mean anything anymore?

Apparently not Jesse. CNN left off King's grunt he got in response in their transcript...lol.

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Jesse Ventura on Countdown weighs in on why he thinks we haven't had any prosecutions for torture in the United States, "Mancow" Muller's waterboarding and Sean Hannity never agreeing to go through it himself.

h/t Jed Lewison at Daily KOS TV.

If Dick Cheney were one-tenth the man that Jesse Ventura is, he’d be at least twice as big a man as he really is.

Fine job with the mash up sir. Can we get Jesse a job on any of the cable news networks and let him interview Cheney face to face? I don't think Cheney would show up if invited.

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I think Joe Scarborough is attempting to make his show almost as unwatchable as Fox News. First he decides to attack Jesse Ventura for his comments on The View:

SCARBOROUGH: Perhaps Jesse should stop smoking whatever Jesse's been smoking and keep his mouth shut about things he knows absolutely nothing about. This is a guy who, by the way -- I must continue to say this -- that got paid two million dollars by this network, did one show and sucked so bad that they sent him back to Minnesota and said "we never want to see you again."

I wish I was that bad. Perhaps I am. Maybe they'll fire me and I'll take my money and go to Florida. [...] Seriously, that's the sort of stupidity -- it's just -- it should seriously be a crime to be that dumb and on TV. [mocking Jesse's voice] We only waterboard Muslims. Oh God.

Let's bring in Rudy Giuliani. Former Republican mayor of New York City, former presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani. This seems like a great place to start. [begin douchey sarcastic voice] Why is it that people like Jesse Ventura are so concerned about how we treat people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Why is that?

h/t to Bob Cesca for the transcript and apparently he was as disgusted after watching this as I was. I'll let him take it from here.

Jesse Ventura was a Navy Seal who survived the SERE program and served in Vietnam. He "knows nothing" about torture and war, Joe? And you do? That's rich.

As for your question to Giuliani, Jesse is worried about torturing people like KSM because it endangers our soldiers.

Scarborough then goes into an angry tirade when Carlos Watson dares to suggest that waterboarding doesn't work.

SCARBOROUGH: I’ve got to stop you right there. How do you dare come on this set and say that’s [waterboarding] not effective? That’s just not the truth! And if you have any evidence that it is not effective, let me know right now!

We're not the only ones who noticed Scarborough's angry defense of torture this morning.

Think Progress has taken up Scarborough’s challenge, with this comprehensive document explaining why Bush’s enhanced interrogation tactics were a failure.

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Jesse Ventura wrapped up part of his book tour with an appearance on The Ed Show. Not as much fun as his body slamming of the right wingers who decided to try to take him on over whether waterboarding is torture or not, but a good interview none the less. He put the outrage over Pelosi into perspective and said that the Franken/Coleman debacle needs to come to an end and for Minnesota to finally have its second Senator after their Supreme Court rules in a couple of days.

Schultz: Governor, I've got to ask you, do you think that Nancy Pelosi has played this correctly, and has she really beaten back a real push by the conservatives to make her look terrible on all of this?

Ventura: Well to me, to me it's very much a smoke screen. Going after the Speaker doesn't get to the heart of the problem. The truth of the matter is if the Bush administration hadn't done torture this would all be irrelevant, so let's go to the, let's go to who started it all and that is the fact that, you know, Vice President Dick Cheney and his lawyers changed the name of torture and they called it enhanced interrogation, and they think that by just changing the name of something, that makes it acceptable.

Schultz: Well you have been very critical of the former Vice President. In your opinion as an American, do you think he's gone too far to stir this up, to pit one administration against another in saying the President is weak right now?

Ventura: Well yeah. Well he's going to say that. After all he's the opposition and he's defending the position they take of taking us to these two wars and everything that went on for the last eight years. I personally am offended greatly by the fact that my country now tortures people. I don't like that a bit. It's very much like an old friend of mine used to say, once the nose of the camel gets under the tent, there's no stopping the camel from being in the tent. And when you start to waterboard, where will it end?

Schultz: Okay, and from your experience as a Navy Seal, how do you think the Seals feel about all of this?

Ventura: Well, certainly I would hope they don't condone torture because it's against the law. It's already been proven that you don't get information from torturing someone because when you do torture them they will say whatever it is to stop the torture, so it's not reliable information and again, should we be stooping to the level of our opponents? I don't think so. You know, our country should be above that and waterboarding is torture because I've had it done to me at SERE school. And so I know what it's like to be waterboarded and I find it very interesting that all the people that say "oh it's just waterboarding" have never had it done to them.

Schultz: Gov. Ventura, respectfully, I've always called you that, Jesse, what do you think of this political side show for a very serious situation in Minnesota with Norm Coleman and Al Franken? As former governor, what do you think Gov. Pawlenty should do after the Minnesota State Supreme Court rules coming up in the next few days? What do you think?

Ventura: Well I think that whatever way the Supreme Court goes he should follow suit and declare the winner because Minnesota needs its second Senator. They've gone through the process and the initial election was so close that by law I believe it required a recount. Well when they did the recount, Franken apparently won and it's time to move on and it's time to get going and let him become the Senator if indeed the Supreme Court rules that way and end this matter. And besides, I find it very interesting that Norm Coleman the Republican in thirty five years he has never had a private sector job. I think it's about time as a Republican, he finds out what it's like to work in the private sector.