Joe Scarborough is back at it again, apologizing for torture and telling lies about whether it works. Every time I think this show can't get much worse, I turn it on like I did this morning and realize I'm wrong. This had to be one of the more disgusting segments I've watched in a while, and that's saying a lot for this show. Scarborough and his panel members, David Ignatius and Jon Meacham, did their best to help revise history and help Scarborough play torture apologist while discussing the new film coming out this month, Zero Dark Thirty.

Glenn Greenwald has more on the problems with the premise of this movie: Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves:

Earlier this year, the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which purports to dramatize the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, generated substantial political controversy. It was discovered that CIA and White House officials had met with its filmmakers and passed non-public information to them - at exactly the same time that DOJ officials were in federal court resisting transparency requests from media outlets and activist groups on the ground that it was all classified.

With its release imminent, the film is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden.In the New York Times on Sunday, Frank Bruni wrote: "I'm betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie 'Zero Dark Thirty.'" That's because "'enhanced interrogation techniques' like waterboarding are presented as crucial" to finding America's most hated terrorist. [...]

The claim that waterboarding and other torture techniques were necessary in finding bin Laden was first made earlier this year by Jose Rodriguez, the CIA agent who illegally destroyed the agency's torture tapes, got protected from prosecution by the DOJ, and then profited off this behavior by writing a book. He made the same claim as "Zero Dark Thirty" regarding the role played by torture in finding bin Laden.

That caused two Senators who are steadfast loyalists of the CIA - Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin - to issue statements definitively debunking this assertion. Even the CIA's then-Director, Leon Panetta, made clear that those techniques played no role in finding bin Laden. An FBI agent central to the bin Laden hunt said the same.

What this film does, then, is uncritically presents as fact the highly self-serving, and factually false, claims by the CIA that its torture techniques were crucial in finding bin Laden. Put another way, it propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods.

And Mediaite's Tommy Christopher did a nice job of breaking down just how dishonest this Morning Joe segment was: Joe Scarborough Claims Zero Dark Thirty Torture Scene True, Screenwriter And Facts Disagree:

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From this Tuesday's Morning Joe, former Gov. George Pataki really was not happy with author Kurt Eichenwald's new book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, or his op-ed which Susie wrote about here -- 9/11: When The Facts Didn't Fit Their Neocon Fantasy.

Unfortunately for him, Pataki managed to make a fool of himself while going after the author and throwing a bit of a fit on the show, because he freely admitted he hadn't read the book and didn't intend to. Nothing like conservatives sticking their fingers in their ears and going lalalala I can't hear you when someone's trying to tell them something they don't like. Eichenwald did a good job of pushing back at Pataki's assertions that the book was just intended as a hit piece on the Bush administration, actually read a few passages from the book and told Pataki that the most positive feedback he's gotten on the book is from members of the Bush administration.

I'm not sure where Scarborough slithered off to while this segment was airing, but he was no where to be found. I guess he wasn't so worried about one of his guests being attacked by another one, like we saw when he had so much concern for Reince Priebus when Chris Matthews jumped on him for the birtherism and racist dog whistles.

Partial transcript below the fold via:

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I don't know if Jon Meacham has just been ignoring the things Mitt Romney has been saying on the campaign trail, or if he knows full well and he's just being completely dishonest here. On this Sunday's Meet the Press, Meacham suggested that "religion will be less important" and that it's not "in either candidate's interest to be bringing up specific religious issues" come the general election. I guess he missed this:

Romney: Obama Wants to 'Establish a Religion Called Secularism'

Romney is already attacking President Obama's faith, but par for the course with Romney, he's doing it completely dishonestly by trying to pretend the President is an atheist. The reason for doing so being obvious, which is, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out the other night, the only group voters trust less than Mormons, is atheists (which I find extremely depressing).

And Meacham's suggestion that Mitt Romney's Mormonism is not going to be an issue in the general election is ridiculous, given the large number of Evangelical voters in the Republican base and their mistrust of his religion. There is exactly one candidate where it would not be to his advantage to talk about his faith for that very reason, and it's Mitt Romney.

I think we're going to hear this sort of rhetoric from Republicans on the campaign trail as their primary race finally winds down and the GOP and the media begin doing their best to revive Romney after what's been a really damaging primary season. President Obama doesn't need to go after Romney for his faith. His fellow Republican presidential candidates have already done most of the damage for him.

Transcript below the fold.

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Joe Scarborough did his best to attempt to rewrite the failings of conservative governance we've suffered over the last few decades along with some of his own history, surprise, surprise with a big assist by some of his fellow panel members, Jon Meacham, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist.

While discussing some of the right's disdain for the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, Scarborough throws out the first whopper during the segment, that George W. Bush was not really a conservative. The New Yorker's David Remnick notes that the Republican Party doesn't seem to be the “party of ideas” any more and here's how Scarborough responds.

SCARBOROUGH: Two things have happened over the last decade. One, the election of George W. Bush... a man who claimed to be a conservative, but The New Republic had it right in 2000. Bush was for big government and he was for big business. The New Republic predicted it. I remember the cover of it.

And yet conservatives went along for the ride for the better part of eight years, they let him double the national debt without complaining. They let him engage in a Wilsonian foreign policy where he spent his second inauguration talking about ending tyranny on the four corners of the globe. They remained silent. They betrayed their values. They forgot everything they said in the 1990's and they sold their soul to have power in the White House. And then Barack Obama got elected. And then they lost their mind.

These Democrats have had the Bush derangement syndrome and they did. But then what did they get? Obama derangement syndrome. So it because less about ideas and it became more about destroying Obama and Jon Meacham, that's why they stopped focusing on balancing the budget, on having restraint.

Scarborough seems to have a pretty short memory because by his own definition here, he's part of that problem he's complaining about, and he apparently doesn't remember that he claimed that we won the Iraq War back in 2003 while berating anyone who dared to speak out against it. For a reminder of Scarborough's previous statements, go read Extreme Liberal's Blog here -- Joe Scarborough – A Look Back At His Previous Statements About War! Here are a couple of the quotes from Scarborough among many that they dug up in that post:

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From Think Progress--Politico’s Allen And VandeHei ‘Interview’ Cheney So That They Can Write His Op-Ed:

Despite Cheney’s well-known and worn-out attacks on Obama, Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei secured an interview with the former vice president in order to inform their readers today of the shocking revelation that Cheney thinks Obama is projecting “weakness” on Afghanistan. The paper’s top reporters sat down with Cheney for a 90-minute interview and transcribed Cheney’s attacks without challenge, criticism, or rebuttal.

[...]

Instead of playing Dick Cheney ghostwriters, perhaps Allen and VandeHei can take a lesson from McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay on how to fact check his baseless smears.

I would say Andrea Mitchell could take a lesson from them as well instead of hyping The Politico's "exclusive interview".

Speaking of pathetic journalism, what is Jon Meacham smoking with this article: Why Dick Cheney Should Run in 2012:

I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting. A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama's unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.

Man did Joe Scarborough drink himself a heavy dose of Cheney Kool-Aid before this Monday's show. After hearing Liz toss out the idea of her daddy running in 2012 on Fox News Sunday the day before, Scarborough argues that Cheney running would be a wonderful idea and that no one could take him on in a debate. Jonathan Alter points out that the Bush administration was not exactly popular with the American public but that doesn't seem to phase Scarborough one bit. He wants Cheney out there fear mongering for the GOP and says at much at the end of the clip.

Rough transcript:

Scarborough: By the way I'm glad she did that because I have been pressing, by the way the buttons for like a couple of months-Cheney 2012.

Brzezinski: (laughter)

Scarborough: What's so funny?

Brzezinski: Ah...just the thought...makes me a little tired. That's all I'm going to say.

Scarborough: Tired in a way like you're going to be so excited and you can almost sense the confetti falling in your hair? I know you're excited about it too.

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During the Meet the Press panel discussion on the return of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, for some reason, Jon Meacham felt the need to compare a hug between Al Gore and Bill Clinton after the journalists were returned home to Brokeback Mountain. WTF Jon?

He actually went on to make some good points about jailed journalists in other countries that we should care about being freed as well, but his statement about Gore and Clinton frankly left me scratching my head as to why he felt it necessary to blurt something like that out.

GREGORY: Well, I, I would be remiss if we didn't spend a little bit of time on one of the images of the week, and it's such a great political story, and here it was in Burbank, California. You had a former president and a former vice president, Clinton and Gore, with the two journalists from North Korea coming home. And there was the much commented on lingering hug between the two.

Jon Meacham, a fascinating political story.

MEACHAM: Oh.

GREGORY: They were together in the '90s, after the 2000 race they were estranged for a while. They seem to be back together again.

MEACHAM: Yeah. It, it's the new--it's like the Bush-Clinton "Brokeback Mountain." You know, we're back, we're back to that. I, I think the--what's so terrific, in a way, is Clinton was able to get these reporters out. That's a very serious matter. We are--North Korea is a, a, a foe of almost epic--possibly epic dimensions, and anything that gets us in there to get a sense of who these people really are is a good thing. Sending the--sending Bill Clinton, whose emotional intelligence is off the charts, was really lucky for us. If anyone can come back and paint a character sketch of what's going on with those people, it'll be Bill Clinton. And I just want to say, if, if it's all right...

GREGORY: Sure.

MEACHAM: ...there are two places where this is going on right now. Newsweek has a correspondent, Maziar Bahari, who is being held in custody without access to a lawyer and without a formal charge in Iran. There are a number of show trials going on in Iran as that regime, like the North Korean regime, tries to hold onto power. And would urge all of us to pay attention to the situation in Iran, in that we have people who are being held without due process, which is personally tragic but also a significant political story, because it's about a regime trying to fight history.

From Fareed Zakaria GPS. John Meacham pushes back against Peggy Noonan's "let's move forward" nonsense. John Amato: Peggy Noonan sounds like she ate a few of those funny mushrooms about forty five minutes before she went on the set and everything just turned so damn mellow. Digby puts it best when she says:

If I had only been listening with half an ear I would have thought that I was hearing some very stoned woman having a stream of consciousness conversation with herself at a Grateful Dead concert. I half expected her to bring up the dolphins again. What in God's name is she smoking? And why is she on my TV?

I think I understand Glenn Beck now. He's channeling Peggy Noonan's schtick, but adds an eight-ball of coke to the emo-cocktail that takes his phony compassionate crying to a new level of absurdity. They think they will look more credible if they seem to care more than you or I in the fuzzy dice kind of way.

ZAKARIA: Let's talk about Obama and terror, because that's another part of this whole puzzle. You've had Dick Cheney giving a very unusual interview in which he says, effectively, Obama is weakening the country and setting up a scenario where, if there is by some chance another attack, it could be seen as Obama's fault. You know, other Republicans saying that he should have kept in place all these provisions regarding torture, regarding whatever else, in order to fight the war more vigorously. You've had a little bit of a controversy around all this, Peggy. You think that the memos about torture should have been released, but we should have moved on, or should never have been released? NOONAN: Oh, it seems to me the world knows that things were done wrong. I think Obama has made it clear, coming forward, that his plans are to leave that old stuff behind. There is always a temptation to focus on what the last administration in its mistakes did. I think the problems that are here, however, are so pressing, that sometimes you've just got to stop and say, "That was then. This is now. Move forward." MEACHAM: Winston Churchill said that the British people can face any misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, as long as they are convinced that those who are in charge of their affairs are not deceiving them, or not themselves dwelling in a fool's paradise. The American people can do that, too. We can handle the truth. The covenant of modern democracies is, give it to us straight and we will do what it takes. And as General Powell, I think, once memorably said, you know, we've gone abroad many times, and the only thing we've asked for is the ground in which to bury our dead. I think that governments have to be responsible, because governments are us. I mean, otherwise, the entire idea of civic and republican -- lower case "r" -- virtue collapses. So... ZAKARIA: So, you would be comfortable with investigations? MEACHAM: Sure.

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