IIUC, it originated in an off-hand comment a month ago by Sean Hannity, in a combative interview with Charles Grodin, where he said Sure, he'd agree to be waterboarded, no sweat:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/22/hannity-offers-to-be-wate_n_190354.html
GRODIN: You're for torture.
HANNITY: I am for enhanced interrogation.
GRODIN: You don't believe it's torture. Have you ever been
waterboarded?
HANNITY: No, but Ollie North has.
GRODIN: Would you consent to be waterboarded? We can waterboard you?
HANNITY: Sure.
GRODIN: Are you busy on Sunday?
HANNITY: I'll do it for charity. I'll let you do it. I'll do it for
the troops' families.
<end quote>
It seems clear this was the kind of bullshit statement that countless people have been goaded into in a bar-room argument and Hannity had no intention of following through. What's new is that this low-level of bantering argument is now half of our public discourse and big incomes rest on attacking and defending them every stupid statement that comes out of these firehoses' mouths.
So what might have been forgotten was made prominent by Keith Olberman, who immediately offered $1,000 to charity for every second Hannity was waterboarded.
Good publicity stunt. Hannity never mentioned it again. Olberman repeated it every other show.
And then 30 days later comes Mancow, who is much less famous. And is now more famous precisely because he did this.
And Olberman gives him the money and has him on his show:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/23/oblermann-charity-mancow/
(BTW, FWIW, the charity is run by the guy who waterboarded Mancow, Sgt. Klay South, a guy with a massively reconstructed face who collects money for services for wounded veterans like himself. I wouldn't be surprised if this were all pre-arranged or at least pre-thought through.)
Essentially it seems like what we really have here is another version of CNN's Rick Sanchez, who Jon Stewart likes to refer to as "The Human Guinea Pig," a man who will martyr himself for ratings and has generated many imitators. (Most Daily Show watchers have seen the clip where he gets himself himself tasered to show us what it feels like.) And as with Sanchez, the arguments about why they are doing it really shouldn't be taken seriously. They are simply that, attempts to dress up the real motive -- "I'll torture myself to be looked at" -- with gravitas.
I think this genealogy also explain's Seth's suspicion that this whole stunt would only make sense if the intention from the outset was to prove waterboarding was torture. In a sense that is true: that was *Olbermann's* intention, and when Mancow answered Olbermann's call for his own reasons, he was carrying out Olbermann's project to Olbermann's intended end. (An end that was largely irrelevant to Mancow who just yearned to be noticed.)
BTW, it seems genius Mancow's thinking on this was that he could last at least 30 seconds because he'd hold his breath. As if no one ever thought of that before. But more importantly, this seems to reveal that his intentions from the start had nothing to do with proving this wasn't torture, since he was assuming from the outset that he would break. He was only aiming to last longer than the average person who wasn't really being tortured to get some sort of bragging rights. Obviously virtually anything you have to turn off when you can't take it anymore is torture if you don't get to.
But this kind of logical incoherence is inevitable when people are profoundly insincere about their true motives.
Michael