Jesse Ventura, ‘The View,’ and torture
Ventura tackles waterboarding, and Elizabeth Hasselbeck, on ABC’s daytime talk show
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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