Fox News wants you to ignore the torture report because ‘America is awesome’

Remember watching American cable news in the 2000s?

You’d get that same march-to-war vibe if you turned on Fox News after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a long-delayed report about how the CIA tortured detainees in a shadowy network of secret prisons around the world and then repeatedly lied, both to the White House and Congress, about the nature and efficacy of its illegal program.

Because most of the report’s findings implicated Bush rather than Obama, Fox News was able to once again start playing the tune that took it to the top of the cable news charts: defending every conceivable action of every member of the Bush administration and beating the war drums loud enough for even its aging audience to hear.

On Tuesday, the same day the Senate’s report was released, panelists on the Fox show Outnumbered—which features the hilariously outrageous concept of one conservative bro having to talk to multiple ladies at the same time—recited a whole litany of reasons why Americans shouldn’t care about the report. (As a reminder, this report found that torture virtually never produced any kind of actionable intelligence.)

Here are some of the Outnumbered panelists’ reasons, as compiled in a video captured by Raw Story.

1. “The United States of America is awesome.”
2. “People do nasty things in the dark, especially after a terrorist attack.”
3. The report is just an attempt by the Democrats to distract the country from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s grilling of Jonathan Gruber, an economist who helped design the Affordable Care Act and has since said that the law was only passed due to the “stupidity of the American voter.”
4. “Senate Democrats just want to get one last shot in at Bush before they go into the minority.”
5. The report is as “one-sided” as Rolling Stone‘s piece about the UVA rape case (bonus victim-shaming dog-whistle!).
6. “Democrats didn’t care about transparency when they were destroying hard drives at the IRS.”
7. “Sunlight at the CIA? That’s one place I don’t need sunlight.”
8. “Thousands of people were killed at 9/11 and the Bush Administration did what the American public wanted: do whatever it takes to keep us safe.”
9. We “as a country” don’t do this type of thing anymore. There was no mention of who was president when the program was halted.
10. “It’s not torture.”
11. The real conversation should be about the treatment of women in the Middle East.
12. The real conversation should be about North Korea.
13. The real conversation should be about Russia.
14. “All this does is having our enemies laughing at us.”
15. Obama just straight-up loves apologizing for America because of how much he hates America.
16. “It’s not about democracy now. No, no, It’s about politics. It’s about Democrats being so fundamentally lost as a party that they have to return to an old playbook.”
17. “The United States of America is awesome. We are awesome.“
18. “This Administration doesn’t want to have this discussion not to show us how awesome we are. They wants to have it to show us that we’re not awesome.”

Totally takes you back, right? It was such a throwback segment that no one even mentioned #Benghazi. At one point, someone even mentioned Christina Aguilera.

What the Fox panelists didn’t mention was that the report detailed former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage giving intentionally inaccurate briefings to foreign officials. In these briefings, he let it slip that President Bush didn’t believe he himself was trustworthy enough to be told where America was forcibly rectally feeding prisoners, a significant portion of whom were only held there in the first place due to faulty intelligence.

None of that matters, however. America is under assault from within. Speaking of which, cue the War on Christmas in 3…2…1…

Screencap via Fox News/YouTube