Liz Cheney's blueprint to take down liberal arguments is fairly simple. Disagree and breakdown their premise. Identify them as part of groupthink, liberal conventional wisdom. Parroting the leftist talking points. Lastly, cite facts that support your point and defeat theirs. Here's some examples. On Good Morning America, The takes on left wing hack Larry O'Donnell. Regarding waterboarding, he states:
O'DONNELL: "It is torture. This government's prosecuted people in the past for doing exactly this, but Dick Cheney believes it's not torture and that's essential to his position. If it was effective, why didn't they use it on the 500 people that Bush-Cheney released from Guantanamo, 75 of whom we know now have gone back into the terrorism business. That was a failure of the Bush-Cheney administration to keep America safe by processing people correctly at Guantanamo. Is that accurate?"
LIZ: Let me go through all of the inaccuracies in what you've just said. First of all the question of whether or not enhanced interrogation is "torture" has been answered and it's been answered legally and it's not that Cheney or President Bush or anybody else "believed" it to be torture. The justice department of the United States --
O'DONNELL: (interrupting)
LIZ: Lawrence, I let you go.
O'DONNELL: Are you afraid of waterboarding, Liz?
LIZ: No. Waterboarding is not torture.
O'DONNELL: (pompous laugh)
LIZ: You know what, though? I would refer you to Attorney General Holder's testimony --
O'DONNELL: Why has this country prosecuted people for waterboarding?
LIZ: Lawrence?
O'DONNELL: Why did we do that?
LIZ: Because they did a number of other things in addition to waterboarding. Attorney General Holder had a hard time explaining exactly what the legal definition is of waterboarding that would make it torture. We've done it to our own people. Secondly, your argument about why didn't we do it to 500 other people proves our point. It was used in three cases when we had terrorists who had information about potential attacks on the United States of America. So the notion that somehow, you know, we should have waterboarded everybody? I'm surprised that that's a position you've taken.
This is how you do it - stay on offense, don't accept liberal BS, cite the facts. Regarding Attorney General Holder, He couldn't explain the legal definition of waterboarding. Louie Gohmert and Dan Lundgren was questioning him. Gohmert's a former appellate judge, and they zeroed in on Holder. Holder was destroyed in a Q&A about waterboarding and "torture" in general. It boiled down to a position that the administration has taken -- and that, by the way, is legal doctrine. It is a legal doctrine that was evolved during the Bush administration. The Obama administration has adopted it and continues to use it, and that is it can't be torture if the interrogators do not intend torture. If they're waterboarding somebody, for example, and they don't intend permanent harm or physical harm that has any lasting effect -- psychological, whatever -- if they do it then there's no torture. They pointed out to Holder that Navy SEALs go through it as training.
A lot of military people go through it as training for if they are captured. And how to resist it. And so they asked him, "Are you saying we're torturing our own people?" And Holder had said, "No, because when we waterboard SEALs we're not intending to harm 'em." Well, we weren't intending to harm Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We were trying to get information from him! We weren't trying to harm him. So Holder was totally defeated on the whole notion of torture. This was not reported in the Matrix (Media). Lawrence O'Donnell has no clue that it happened. He has no clue that Obama's own attorney general has been defeated demonstrably on the whole concept of waterboarding being torture. Liz Cheney knew, and so she hit O'Donnell with it. So the whole notion that waterboarding is torture is not even an official legal position of the Obama administration.
Another fine example. Liz Cheney on Anderson Cooper. Cooper asks: 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.
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." Liberalism is a series of mirages and images and PR -- and the truth does not need a majority to win, as Liz Cheney is illustrating. She's going on these programs solo, ganged up on by at least two and maybe more people who oppose her and she's wiping them out with something as simple as the truth. She often starts by refusing to debate their cliched, fallacious premises. Thank you Liz Cheney for showing us how it's done.
(HT Rush Limbaugh, Hot Air, National Review, Fox News, & NewsBusters):
Rush Lumbaugh: Liz Cheney Conducts a Clinic on How to Destroy Liberal Arguments
HotAir: Liz Cheney to Obama: Stop Letting the Polls Shape Your Policy on Terror
National Review: On 'Torture,' Holder Undoes Holder
FOXNews: Holder Tongue-Tied Over Waterboarding
NewsBusters: Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC: Cheney Speech 'Sleazy,' 'An Abomination'
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