In lockstep with Donald Trump, the Brussels terror attacks brought new enthusiasm for torture to The Five. “You gotta think we should be open to it,” cohost Brian Kilmeade announced.
Earlier in the day, Trump – who has never served in the military nor held any public policy position – responded to the attacks with his usual fact-free braggadocio: “If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding. You have to get the information from these people,” he told the completely credulous Curvy Couch Crew on Fox & Friends.
So, naturally, the Trumpkins on The Five talked up "more than waterboarding” too.
First, they attacked Hillary Clinton for saying the U.S. needs to remain “consistent with our values.” As if American values are for weaklings.
Cohost Dana Perino complained that the phrase “consistent with our values” is a “code word for saying that we will not do anything that’s too tough… that’s basically saying, ‘I won’t do what George W. Bush did.’” Because, you know, Bush did such a fabulous job preventing terror attacks (cough, 9/11) and fighting terrorism (cough, Iraq war). But, of course, nobody mentioned his miserable record.
Cohost Juan Williams cited a poll showing that Clinton is more trusted to handle terrorism than Trump.
Trump-loving cohost Eric Bolling didn’t believe it until Williams cited the actual poll and the results. So Bolling tried to dismiss it by saying it was taken prior to today. Then he gave an out and out campaign spiel:
BOLLING: Here’s all you need to do: listen to Bernie Sanders, listen to Hilary Clinton, listen to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich and go, "Which is the one I feel most secure with?" And vote that way. Because, ultimately, that’s the most important thing a president can do, is keep you safe. The rest doesn’t matter. The rest is noise.
“In other words,” Williams responded, “the fact that Trump doesn’t know what he’s saying, what he’s doing, we should just ignore.”
Cohost Brian Kilmeade admonished, “That’s your opinion, Juan.”
Then Kilmeade moved on to suggest that if only we could waterboard “and more,” we wouldn’t have any more terrorism.
Kilmeade asked Trump-loving cohost Kimberly Guilfoyle, “What Donald Trump said over the last couple of days, if you changed the laws, he’d be into waterboarding Abdeslam (the recently-arrested Paris-attack suspect), to get the most information possible and possibly, in his theory, and maybe José Rodriguez of the CIA, would have got the information that stopped this Brussels attack.”
That was way more speculation and opinion than Williams had offered, but nobody complained now.
In fact, Guilfoyle helped validate the torture a-go-go.
GUILFOYLE: Right, but you have to be able to do what it takes in a lawful way. And the point is, you can make laws, especially in times of terror like this, where there are exigent circumstances, national security is at stake. So you take the people that you trust, your valued advisors, you talk to the Justice Department and you come up and you craft some means to be able to do so.
…A new administration can bring in their experts and their new pieces of legislation, like PATRIOT Act and things like that to be able to effectively combat terror.
Kilmeade gave it all a stamp of approval before closing the discussion.
KILMEADE: And for those who say that it doesn’t work and if you’re not sliced up in a hospital right now, trying desperately to stop the bleeding, if you were able to stop that, if you were able to stop that attack some way, somehow, you gotta think we should be open to it.
It takes a special brand of hateful for a news network to use a tragedy like the terrorist attacks in Brussels to start promoting torture, in large part as part of an effort to promote Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy.
Watch it above, from the March 22 The Five.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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