Rick Santorum, last seen getting beat in the GOP junior varsity presidential debate a couple weeks back, reemerged to basically make a fool of himself.

In a radio interview, Santorum claimed torture victim John McCain “doesn’t understand” torture.

Speaking on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Santorum, the presidential hopeful and former Pennsylvania senator, says McCain is misguided in his stance against the enhanced interrogation techniques sanctioned during the Bush administration but discontinued by Obama’s White House, which has labeled them torture. “Everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation,” Santorum said, referring to the courier that led Americans to Osama bin Laden. “And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.”

John McCain is not a lot of things. He’s not exactly as lovable as a CareBear, or sharp as a tack these days, but if there’s one thing where McCain’s experience is beyond reproach, it would be his years in a North Vietnamese prison camp that left him disfigured. It just reminds me of this classic John Stewart jab:

Bill O’Reilly: [to John McCain in an interview] But I think that coerced interrogation… the Bagram guys tell me it works, it’s just a matter of degree.

Jon Stewart: That’s Bill O’Reilly giving lectures on torture to John “five years of drinking my own urine in a bamboo cage” McCain.

Trusted McCain aide and alter ego, Mark Salter, comments on Santorum via Facebook:



Ron Paul may be the wackiest candidate in the GOP field. But for pure, blind stupidity nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today.

Update VetVoice chimes in with “The Tortured Don’t Understand Tortur (and other lies).” Give it a read.