Torture Is Having Another Star Turn

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Monika Bauerlein,
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From the “Fascinating Factlets” file:

The FCC, which regulates “indecent material” on broadcast radio and television, does not generally permit the word pussy to be aired between 6 am and 10 pm. That means that though a broadcaster can publish a story containing the word online, it can’t do the same on its main network, which has a far broader reach.

So…it’s fair game after 10 pm? This means that only night owls got to hear Donald Trump’s latest bit of puerile insultmongering. Everyone else got the bleeped version, or perhaps no version at all because who needs the grief from pissed-off viewers? In any case, the key takeaway here isn’t that Donald Trump called Ted Cruz a pussy. What else would you expect from Trump? The key takeaway is that he was mocking Cruz for not being gung-ho enough about waterboarding, and it was a huge crowd pleaser. The audience went completely gaga over Trump’s fetishization of torture. If he had called for prisoners to be tortured on national TV—”Celebrity Interrogator” hosted by Dick Cheney, maybe—I think they might have expired on the spot from sheer bliss.