Sarah Palin The Daily Banter Torture

Sean Hannity Clearly Didn’t Learn His Lesson, Defends Sarah Palin’s Waterboarding Remarks

A smart man doesn’t blindly leap to the support of questionable characters twice in a row. Then again, Sean Hannity isn’t a very smart man. After totally hosing himself with his ebullient support for Cliven Bundy, who ended up being an unapologetic racist, you’d think Hannity might’ve stepped very carefully for a while — perhaps exercising some restraint and common sense combined with the very harsh lesson he learned, you know, four days ago. But nope.

Yesterday on his syndicated radio program, Hannity came to the rescue of his Fox News Channel colleague Sarah Palin following her NRA rally crack about how if she were in charge she would baptize terrorists by waterboarding them. Because nothing says “holy sacrament” quite like forcibly restraining a man on a downward-angled board, holding a wet towel over his face, then dumping water over the towel until the man feels like he’s going to suffocate and die. As I wrote yesterday, Jesus would’ve totally been into this. I mean, Palin claims to be very religious — maybe she discovered a biblical passage that allows baptism through torture and which mitigates how sacrilegious her remarks were, so much so that Christian conservatives have condemned the line.

Hannity’s rant began like so.

“Sarah Palin gets the cut of the weekend. You know every liberal would be, ‘That’s outrageous!’”

Uh, yeah, liberals and a lot of conservatives, too.

“What do you wanna do with terrorists? You know I always like to bring it back to like your basic family unit.”

Can you tell where this is going? He’s walking right into the most easily-debunked point regarding crime and punishment, perhaps ever. I’ll circle back to this point at the end.

“Let’s say, God forbid, one day you’re in a parking lot, somebody comes and they try and grab, um, all of — let’s say you have three kids — they try and grab all three of your kids but they only get one.”

Wow, he’s really thought this through. Why on Earth would he include such a bizarre detail? You have three children, and then a kidnapper tries to grab all three in a parking lot but the kidnapper is only able to get one. Why the hell is this relevant? Why not just keep it simple and say a kidnapper grabbed your child?

“Well, let’s say they get your three kids.”

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