Jesse Ventura, a Waterboard, Dick Cheney, and One Hour.

Larry King Aside. I often wonder how Larry King has managed to stay at the top for so many many many years. I lived in South Florida in the mid-sixties during my high school years and Larry’s early career. I didn’t get it then; now, decade upon decade later, I still don’t. I know many of you do get it, and I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. But for me, he’s one of those major stars who I believe ought to be on their knees every morning, noon, and night thanking God for their good fortune. Perhaps he does.

Larry likes – has always liked – to keep things “infotaining,” well before that word was in our lexicon. His genius was to figure out that it’s all about infotaining in the guise of “hard ball interviewing.” As a corollary, he learned early on what the inside-the-beltway folks learned: it’s about access. Tough questioning is incompatible with both infotainment and with continued access to the universe of stars and politicians he caters to. He’s admitted that he never reads any of the books of his guests, and rarely does he seem prepared beyond what one could glean from a David Brooks column or a People magazine. In fairness, given his schedule, one wouldn’t expect him to read every book, or know every detail, but since it’s always been so obvious he’s quite a dunce, then, I’ll always ask, “how did he succeed at such a level?” It’s softball questions + access + the luck of the Irish = Larry King, now well past 45 years of me head scratching and his success.

Anywaaaaaayyyyyyy, Larry King aside, my interest in the continuing Dick Cheney “Self-Indictment Tour” brings us around to Mr. King and his recent interview of Jesse Ventura, the growly icon of American style individuality and former wrasslin’ Governor of Minnesota.

Larry asked, “How’s Obama doing?” Jesse gives Obama a “too soon to tell,” grade, and continues, “In my opinion, George Bush is the worst president in my lifetime,” and went on to explain that Obama had inherited a mess he, Ventura, “wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” Nothing new there. Ventura clearly admires President Obama, but reserves judgment on his performance thereby showcasing a rationality his detractors often miss. In any event, when Ventura later opines negatively about Thank-God-Former-President Bush’s intelligence,” Larry displays that lust for infotainment versus journalism with his quick and testy, “Alright already with Bush, O.K.?” As you see in the video, Jesse, the man least likely to be affected by an “alright already,” forged on.

In his response to Ventura’s statement of the obvious about Bush’s intellectual “legacy,” King underscored what’s important to King: access. He wants to interview Bush at some point in the future and can’t afford to let Jesse’s appraisal go by without a comment. Also, Larry doesn’t think deeply enough to have much appreciation for why anyone would be much interested in Bush now. Bush is old news, a political Paris Hilton, and to Larry, they’re fungible commodities – Bush is now a “celebrity” to be wooed and “accessed.” Yet, for that celebrity value, Larry would like to get his hands on Bush again and again, likely to softball him through others’ criticisms, and to assist him in establishing a meaningful legacy. Don’t “misunderestimate,” as Bush might say, how much he relies on Larry for that kind of treatment, and, most importantly, expects it from him.

And Exactly Where Was Dick Cheney on the Night of the Sharon Tate Murders? The real significance of the interview arrives after Jesse describes his own background as a Navy SEAL and how, during his training prior to deployment in Vietnam, he attended a mandatory Survival Escape Resistance and Evasion (SERE) “school.” There, Ventura was waterboarded. He describes it as a quite dangerous practice even in the carefully controlled training environment of SERE – “waterboarding is torture,” he says, definitively. This from a man like Ventura. Don’t forget the context. Don’t forget the underlying honest to God machismo of this man. I trust the appraisal of a man like Jesse Ventura, a man who has been there and who has great internal courage and capacity for pain.

The “iconic” moment of this interview arrives soon thereafter, and gives us and future generations a Ventura quote that reduces the pro-waterboarding, “ticking time bomb” argument to the absurdity it is. Larry asks, “What’s it like?” to be waterboarded. Here you go, get your “quotes for all occasions” document open and be ready to cut and paste:

“I’ll put it to you this way. Give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney, and an hour,
and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”

Now, let’s be real, Cheney would never survive an hour of such treatment. And no one, even Cheney, ought to be compelled to do so, even poor Sean Hannity who briefly, ever so briefly, offered to be waterboarded. Sure, there’s a feeling many have that it would serve justice for Cheney to experience the SERE school exercise – perhaps he’d resign from the Chickenhawk Brigade afterward. Of course, the real meaning in Jesse’s quote lies within its implicit refutation of the rightwing belief that waterboarding elicits truthful and actionable information. Moreover, it also implicitly addresses the “ticking time bomb” mantra employed by every pro-torture advocate. In a true crisis where time was of the essence, why would one employ, am intelligence gathering technique that

1. Elicits false information which
2. thereby induces action based upon that false intel that perhaps then leads to tragically wasted time; and
3. will likely, as further and ever more rigorous waterboarding follows, utterly incapacitate or kill the prisoner, rendering follow-up questioning impossible?

Now, Because I Can’t Help It, Back to Larry. After Jesse’s suggestion about Cheney, Larry, in character, laughed his patented annoying “hehheh heh hehheh heh.” Jesse, though, was not amused. Go back and stop the tape just after Jesse says “Sharon Tate murders” (at 2:29). Look at his eyes; notice how he feels at that moment, how he surveys King, and the depth of his purpose. That’s what athletes everywhere call a “game face.” Jesse, distinctly the beltway outsider, is s.e.r.i.o.u.s as, sorry Larry, a heart attack. King, as befits an infotainment and access maven, is manifestly not serious; he thinks Jesse’s kidding, but not about the waterboarding suggestion. No one would waterboard Cheney to provide him a learning experience (although I really wouldn’t put it past Ventura)

I think King’s amusement was deeper, more revealing: no one would seriously suggest that the Vice President should be held accountable. Like Larry’s earlier testy deflection of Ventura’s jab at Bush, he believes what happened in the last administration is old news, let’s move on, “hehheh heh heheh heh.”

And that modus operandus is still endemic among the “sober punditry” of our press corps, unshaken by Bush’s two disastrous terms. The punditry, as Glenn Greenwald, Digby, and many others have noted, rely on access to political insiders, and “Access Denied” to them is far worse than a “No Vacancy” sign is to a tuckered out driver at 3:30 a.m. So, to keep their access, their “punditry license,” they accept patent falsehoods, or deflect serious discussion, particularly during Republican administrations for whom the punditry feel a special affinity.

This, we now know, was the manifest failure of the press during the Bush era when we needed hard-hitting investigative journalists the most. For the present Democratic administration, however, these pundits feel quite ready to take shots at Obama, apparently “access be damned.” But if access is truly denied them on an energetic scale, we’ll see, they’ll again become “court stenographers.” The “fourth branch” of government, the press, has been seriously injured by a combination of access-centeredness brought about by the lust for ratings and a pundit class that is quite overbalanced with Republican apologists. We may be saved by the growing reputation of blogs and online news sources and a youthful demographic that tends to get its news and analysis there. . .

Fort the time being, it’s difficult, but sometimes someone charges through the barbed wire containment strategies of infotainers like Larry King. Jesse, the wrasslin’ Navy SEAL, with a deft and quick headlock on the truth gave us a quote that deserves a place in Bartletts.

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