Joy Behar: America Never Tortured, Until the Bush Administration

ABC’s The View featured the liberal media’s favorite Republican, Meghan McCain, as a fill-in host for Elizabeth Hasselbeck on Thursday, with an emphasis on how the 2008 GOP nominee’s daughter would repeat all her criticisms of "creepy" Karl Rove. They also had a discussion about U.S. government and torture. Joy Behar asserted torture first originated under George W. Bush:

This country has never done that before, until the Bush Administration and 9/11, obviously. That’s what they’re saying, that we've never done it before. It's interesting what's going on. It's like the left of the country wants law and order. Let's prosecute them, get it all out there. The right wing all of a sudden is laissez-faire, live and let live. And the middle is like why do we have to keep watching Cheney and Rove? That's real torture.

Behar clearly is not in line with others on the left, who assert that torture is a chronic U.S. government policy, even during the presidency of her hero Bill Clinton. This little exchange was also an outbreak of Joy’s inventive streak:

MEGHAN McCAIN: I think it's what separates us from the terrorists. We can't act like animals.

BEHAR: Animals don't torture each other.

No, they eat each other.

Thursday’s program began as promoted, with a discussion of how Meghan McCain thought Karl Rove was "creepy" to follow her utterances on the social-networking site Twitter, and her disappointment that the Democrats are running ads touting Rove and Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich as the faces of the Republican Party:

McCAIN: It's hard for people like me that really want new energy and new blood. It’s very unprecedented for someone like Karl Rove or Dick Cheney to be criticizing the president. Former vice president, and Karl Rove, and my big criticism is ‘You had your eight years. Go away.’ [An interesting thought, since Daddy’s been in the Congress since 1983, before she was born.]

SHERRI SHEPHERD: Do they feel like by doing something as hip as tweeting that you're going to fool young people?

McCAIN: I mean, I don't understand -- 81 percent of people under 30 consider themselves a Democrat. So I just don't understand how Karl Rove Twittering at all is going to –

BEHAR: Say that again. How many?

McCAIN: Eighty-one percent. It's a sad, sad stat. I hope to be able to help change that and I do believe the Republican Party has a lot of potential. But I don’t think Karl Rove is going to be the catalyst for that.

But is that "sad stat" real? If that statistic sounds too high, you may be right. Last year, the Pew Research Center survey on party identification of people aged 18-29 was only 58 percent Democratic, which is depressing enough: "In surveys conducted between October 2007 and March 2008, 58% of voters under age 30 identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who identified or leaned toward the GOP."