Another Cheney fan rediscovers waterboarding really is torture

Now if only we could persuade Limbaugh and Cheney to take the treatment (emphases mine)…

Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture | NBC Chicago

… WLS radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided to subject himself to … waterboarding live on his show.

… "I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.

.. With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand,  Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.  

Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop.  He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child.  "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said.  "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "

Last year, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens endured the same experiment -- and came to a similar conclusion. The conservative writer said he found the treatment terrifying, and was haunted by it for months afterward.

"Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture," Hitchens concluded in the article.

One the one hand, Mancow is a complete idiot*. How could he have failed to do even a trivial amount of research?

On the other hand, as a human being, he’s an improvement over Cheney, Limbaugh, Rumsfeld and the like. He at least has a sense of honor.

* In the modern sense of the word, as in someone who’s cognitively intact but voluntarily makes astoundingly bad choices.