Jesse Ventura, ‘The View,’ and torture

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura (I) “has found his talking points,” said Emily Kaiser in the Minneapolis City Pages. Following a similar appearance on “Larry King Live,” Ventura went on ABC’s “The View,” where he had a heated debate about torture and waterboarding with “token-Republican” Elizabeth Hasselbeck. “Let’s just say Ventura destroyed Hasselbeck on her own show.” (watch Ventura and Hasselbeck argue it out)

The normally “brash, straight-talking” Ventura made some good points, said Rebecca Cole in the Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp, but he also “dodged a direct answer to Hasselbeck’s question” about what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding, and when.

In all, the Hasslebeck-Ventura debate was “good-natured and lively,” said Sam Stein in The Huffington Post. It also reinforced a “peculiar aspect” of the waterboarding debate: Those, like Ventura, who’ve experienced the technique “insist it is ineffective at best and torture at worst,” while Hasselbeck and others who haven’t say it works in “thwarting terrorist attacks.”

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