Planet Wingnuttia News for Friday.

Bill O'Reilly's response to waterboarding: ‘Torture, my ass.’ —Wednesday night on The Factor, Bill O'Reilly hosted Newsday columnist Ellis Henican, who criticized O'Reilly's tolerance of torture. “You disappoint me, you disappoint me,” Henican said, pointing his finger at O'Reilly.

Political History 101: O'Reilly falsely claimed Nixon never met with Mao … On the April 22 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that President Richard Nixon never met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. — While discussing President Obama's handshake …

Liz Cheney Claims Waterboading Isn’t Torture Because Similar Tactics Were Used In SERE Training »
On MSNBC yesterday afternoon, former State Department official Liz Cheney, who is the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, defended the infamous Bush-era torture memos that were recently released by the Obama administration. "The tactics are not torture, we did not torture," said Cheney.

To support her claim that the brutal techniques, such as waterboarding, that were authorized by the memos are not torture, Cheney invoked the common conservative argument that the techniques were derived from special forces training called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion (SERE):

O'DONNELL: Well Liz, we'll get to that argument in a minute, about whether the means justify the ends, whether torture justifies itself...

CHENEY: Well, it wasn't torture, so that's not the right way to lay out the argument.

O'DONNELL: Ok.

CHENEY: Everything that was done in this program, as has been laid out and described before, are tactics that our own people go through in SERE training.