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Tuesday, 18 December 2012

where are the posts attacking Joe Scarborough?

Posted on 18:45 by Unknown
A weird aspect of the Zero Dark 30 conversation, and I would argue a straightforward dodge, is the idea that we don't know whether people will read ZD30 as an argument for torture and incorporate that into their advocacy. We already have people doing that. Take Joe Scarborough:
Scarborough then told the panel that Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty “presents a narrative that is going to make a lot of people in the mainstream media, in the Democratic party and in the administration uncomfortable, and that is the truth that Barack Obama learned, the first briefing that he got after after he won the election, and that is that the CIA program, whether you find it repugnant or not, actually was effective with KSM and other people getting actionable intelligence that led to couriers, that led, eventually, years later, to the killing of Osama bin Laden.”
...
Scarborough went on to complain about the years he’s had to endure people telling him that torture doesn’t work (yeah, that must have been torture), but “I knew that was just not true. It did get information, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists, that eventually led to not just the killing of Osama bin Laden, but a lot of victories.”
Far before the general release, we've got a man with a national morning news show-- someone with a far larger audience than the critics of the movie-- claiming that the movie that proves that torture leads to "a lot of victories." So my question is, where are the complaints from these critics about Scarborough? Where is Andrew O'Hehir? Glenn Kenny? Devin Faraci? Scott Tobias? Where are all of the people grousing on Twitter? Why is it that the complaints all fall on the people who are criticizing the movie for supporting torture, rather than for those who are praising it for supporting torture? They've penned long diatribes against Glenn Greenwald, Jane Mayer, Peter Bergen, and others for suggesting that ZD30 supports torture, yet on Scarborough, they're silent. It's especially strange given how many of them profess to oppose torture.

Scarborough is the tip of the iceberg. When the movie is widely released, the conservative press will fall all over themselves to claim that it proves why we need to torture. Those arguments will show up at RedState and World Net Daily and The Corner and elsewhere. I sincerely hope that the sophisticated film critics are just as forceful in condemning each of them as they have been in condemning people questioning the film.

Update: It would also be really, really cool if some of this film critics could discuss this topic in a way that isn't drenched with condescension. We get it: you guys are media insiders and true sophisticates. Congratulations.
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