Jeb! on Torture: I Wish I Knew How to Quit You!

Wish I knew how to quit talking about your war and your torture is more like it.

Nobody told Jeb Bush it was going to be easy living down his oldest brother's Iraq legacy, but someone might have told him to keep quiet about it as much as possible.

That could have applied to Big Brother's torture policies, but, no-o-o-o, Jeb! has to keep yapping. Here's Slate running down the latest:

At a forum in Iowa, Bush declined to make a “definitive blanket kind of statement” on whether he would authorize the harsh interrogation techniques OK’d by George W.’s administration. Bush declined to say which techniques he considered torture but asked specifically about waterboarding at a later event, he said “I’m not ruling anything in or out,” and used the Orwellian formulation, "There’s a difference between enhanced interrogation techniques and torture. Torture’s—America doesn’t do torture.”

We can infer from Bush’s comments—America doesn’t torture, but he won’t rule out waterboarding—that he does not consider waterboarding to be torture. He believes, in other words, that a technique described by the CIA itself as a “series of near drownings” that induce “convulsions and vomiting” and left one detainee “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth” does not constitute “severe pain or suffering, inflicted for the purpose of obtaining information,” as torture is defined under an international treaty the U.S. has ratified.

I'm sure after he said it, an aide came up and quietly said, "Governor, I thought we'd..." to which he just as quietly replied, "Yeah, I know..."

Bush looks like he's sitting on a pile of rattlesnakes and wants to finish his statement before someone asks, "Yeah, but waterboarding two suspects 266 times? Fer real?"

Jeb, this stuff is going to swirl around you right up to the moment you lose the 2016 election, so you'd better learn not to step in it all the time. But, as they say, that's a bridge too far.

Bonus just-ran-into-it video of Jesse Ventura on Larry King, giving us some, er, perspective on torture and Dick Cheney. To quote a Broadway show, Mamma Mia!

Jeb! Listen and learn...