It's been a very long week watching the right-wing freakout over the the prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, with everyone from John Bolton, to Ted Cruz, to the hairpiece Donald Trump, to you name it sticking their two cents in on whether we should have negotiated to get Bergdahl released and on whether the trade for the prisoners at Gitmo was worth it.
During a panel discussion on this Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on the topic, Maher finally said out loud what's been missing from the discussions we've been hearing in our corporate media, and that's why we could not have just tried these "terrorists" being held at Guantanamo Bay in a court of law -- we tortured them.
You can debate all you want to, as the group did here, over whether these are bad people or not, and whether they might pose a threat to the United States at some time in the future or not, and who we should and should not be classifying as terrorists.
None of that matters much if, as Maher pointed out at the end of the clip above, we can't try them because the Bush administration decided it was a good idea to torture them, and we can't hold them any more because we can't call them enemy combatants if we're going to draw down and get out of Afghanistan. Maybe one of these days the so-called "journalists" we've got out there who are following Fox's lead and drumming up their latest fake controversy could bother to point that out to their viewers as well.
Maher was also right on when he explained to former Bush and McCain flack Nicolle Wallace that President Obama is not a king and that he could not just close Gitmo if the Congress was not going to cooperate with him. He also called her out when she made the ridiculous statement that she thought it would be okay if we just locked up everybody on the planet who is not friendly to America.
Wallace doesn't do so well when she doesn't have her BFF Joe Scarborough screaming like a crazed Banshee and taking up for her as she's used to ever since they decided to make her a regular fixture on Morning Joke on MSNBC.
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