Fox News host: ‘Waterboarding? More like awesomeboarding!’

During a discussion about the film “Zero Dark Thirty” on Tuesday night, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld decided he would rename the internationally banned torture technique known as “waterboarding.” His term? “Awesomeboarding.”

The response was elicited by a question about a review of “Zero Dark Thirty” written by New York Magazine critic David Edelstein, who presents the movie as brilliant, but also nakedly pro-torture.

“Like I always say: Waterboarding? More like awesomeboarding!” Gutfeld exclaimed.

He went on: “The unspeakable truth here is, everybody wants torture on the table,” he insisted. “If you ask one person one question, say your child or your spouse was abducted and they had a person in custody and they had the information and time was running out — would you mind if we use every means available to extract information?”

The conservative opinion host has a history of defending the Bush administration’s torture program, but “awesomeboarding” is a new one, even for him.

The former comedian exclaimed in 2007 that waterboarding “might be torture,” but professed to love it “more than life itself” because “people I hate” detest it.

“That’s my recipe for life,” he explained. “If The New York Times, NPR, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn and Hugo Chavez hate something, then it must be awesome. So I cherish waterboarding. I want to make it our national sport, our national bird. I want to make the waterboard the state flower of Vermont, instead of the Birkenstock.’