'Liz Cheney, Showing the Way'

Rush Limbaugh had a very good segment, in transcript at his webpage, about how Liz Cheney, Dick's daughter, has been kicking butts and taking names all over the cable news shows on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Rush zeroes in on how she does it, which is basically to put facts up against cliches and ignorance. The entire segment is worth reading. Rush gave this example of Liz's encounter with Anderson Cooper in a discussion of waterboarding:

She often starts by refusing to debate their cliched, fallacious premises. Here's another example. One more before we go to the break. Anderson Cooper: "More than 100 people are known to have died in US custody, some that were ruled a homicide. If these were tightly controlled things, how come so many people are murdered in US custody?"

LIZ: Anderson, I think that your question is highly irresponsible.

COOPER: Why?

LIZ: Because you are contemplating things that aren't conflated. When somebody dies or is "murdered" in US custody then we are a great nation and we take the people who are responsible and we put them on trial as you've seen happen throughout the last eight years. That is not the enhanced interrogation program, and to somehow suggest that those two things are the same I think willfully conflates something and ends up in a situation where we aren't able to take a truthful look at the last eight years as we go forward, because we are muddying the waters about what really happened.

RUSH: Anderson Cooper's there saying, "What's my next question?" Yeah, he's trying to probably figure out what "conflate" means and so forth. But what she's talking about here, he asked this loaded question, a hundred people died in US custody. And what he's implying is it happened because we waterboarded them or we tortured them. She said, "No, no, no. Your question is fallacious. The premise is irresponsible -- and whenever these kinds of things happen we have prosecuted." All you've gotta... We even prosecute the innocent, thanks to Jack Murtha. The Marines in Haditha. Congratulations, Liz Cheney, showing the way.

I have a video from April of Liz taking on someone named Nora O'Donnell at MSNBC, on the subject of the interrogation memos, about which Ms. O'Donnell knew almost nothing. Notice how Liz just keeps taking O'Donnell's cliches away and re-sets the argument on a foundation of facts.

Watch the video and you can see Ms. Cheney was all primed and ready to respond when Ms. O’Donnell first whipped out the “torture” libel--which Ms. Cheney certainly knew was going to be the main weapon used.

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