Alan Colmes Wants To Waterboard A Cancer Patient

A man with not much to do these days, Alan Colmes, who still works for FOX News, joined Imus today and agreed that Dennis Miller's appearance on The O'Reilly Factor last night was not top notch.

"Miller was busy playing with his hair," said Colmes. "When that's not working for him, he's got nothing going on."

Imus observed that O'Reilly did not get his money's worth with Miller, at which point Colmes chimed in, snidely, that O'Reilly is not paying Miller personally.

"I don't think you have to be contentious already," Imus told his guest. "I'm battling cancer, can you calm down?"

Shaken, the Liberal Colmes explained his new segment on O'Reilly with his sister-in-law, the hard-line Conservative Monica Crowley, called "Between Barack and A Hard Place" He cites the best thing Obama has done all week, while she cites the worst.

As for this week, Colmes approves of the decision to release the torture memos from the previous administration, which reveal how the U.S. handles detainees.

"We've got transparency in government for the first time in eight years!" Colmes all but shrieked with excitement. "What's amazing to me is that all of a sudden you've got Dick Cheney saying, 'Let's release memos saying this stuff works!' even though the memos already released say it doesn't work."

Colmes pointed out that the former Vice President was never a big fan of transparency when he was in the White House, which Imus deemed redundant.

"There is no bigger creep, no bigger hypocrite, no bigger phony on the planet than Dick Cheney, " said Imus, who does not entirely disagree with Cheney's request. "Let's get it all out on the table!"

Arguing in favor of torture (something he is notoriously good at), Imus said, "we're torturing bad people who deserve it...it's fun to torture people...and it worked!" Colmes, naturally, disputed these points on almost every account.

"We can't claim the high moral imperative when we torture people — we become as bad as the people we're fighting," he said, adding that some of the techniques being used dated back to the Spanish Inquisition and to Communist China.

Colmes suggested that since Imus was clearly such a fan of torture, that perhaps he should be subjected to some. "Do you want to be waterboarded?" he asked the cancer-stricken host of the program, who declined the offer.

His mind wandering, Imus wondered if Colmes, who sat next to Sean Hannity every night for more than 12 years, knew that only Hannity's top half was dressed in a suit when the show aired. Colmes said he had never looked below the table.

"You must have seen something when you were down there!" Imus said, then, to himself, "That was a good one, I-Man!"

-Julie Kanfer