George Tiller

Re: Joan Walsh On Bill O’Reilly: I Told You So!

Posted by on June 12, 2009 at 10:25 pm. 31 Comments :

Earlier today I warned Salon editor Joan Walsh against appearing on the O’Reilly Factor to discuss the controversy surrounding the murdered abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller. I argued that there was no possible upside because Bill O’Reilly would just turn the interview into a shoutfest wherein O’Reilly would seek only to harangue and ridicule.

Guess what?

This was a pathetic display of bullying by an ignorant, dishonest, and obsessed man. O’Reilly deftly validated my long-held position that no Democrat or progressive should EVER appear on Fox News. O’Reilly loaded the segment with quotes and video clips to which Walsh had no prior access and could not reasonably respond with any authority. She, however, had no opportunity to do likewise, or even to respond to his questions. When he wasn’t hollering at her, saying that “You have blood on your hands,” he was bellowing at her to “Stop talking!” That is the natural state of an O’Reilly interview. It is a format in which he excels, but others can be made to look foolish. So even though Walsh has been an effective and articulate presence on other TV programs, it was easily predictable that she would be jostled and beaten here. Walsh herself seems to agree with me after the fact:

“If I’m sorry I did the show — and I’m not yet sure I am — it’s only because of one thing: He used me to try Dr. Tiller again, postmortem.” […] “I’m a little embarrassed because they make me look like a liberal Pollyanna, a lamb ready to lie down with the lion — to be eaten! Live and learn.” […] “Epic fail! What was I thinking?”

You ought to be sorry, Joan. But you’re right, he did use you. He used you to attack everyone who believes that private, personal medical decisions should be between the patient and the doctor. He used you to bash everyone with liberal values that are rooted in free choice and freedom from groups or governments that seek to impose their moral standards on you. He used you to validate himself and to reinforce the falsehood that he and Fox News are “fair and balanced.”

You should be embarrassed, too. And I hope that you have learned. I hope others can learn from your unfortunate experience. The deck is stacked against anyone who wanders into that lair. It has nothing to do with your debating skills or subject knowledge. It is fixed from the outset. O’Reilly is, as you said, “driven by demons.”

I simply cannot say this enough: Stay the HELL off of Fox News. The only thing they care about is ginning up the rage and hyping the resultant conflict. Just take a look at how they are already promoting the Walsh episode just hours after it was taped:

Notice they proudly plug the flaring tempers in part one. And, worse, part two is pitched as “O’Reilly’s Dr. Tiller shoot-out.” Remember, this is about a man who was just shot to death. This is all you need to know about Fox News and how they will gleefully exploit you in the most repulsive manner imaginable.

[Update – 6/21/09] Joan Walsh wrote another followup to her O’Reilly misadventure. She seems to have learned her lesson.

“I didn’t expect to go into a debate on late-term abortion, or the details of Dr. Tiller’s practice. I was asked to discuss my reasons for criticizing O’Reilly’s crusade against Tiller, and why I hoped he would turn down his rhetoric. I was sandbagged, but that’s the O’Reilly game plan.” […] “I should have been prepared for him to hit me again Monday, when I couldn’t defend myself, with selective re-editing that took out my criticism of him and made me look evasive and/or stupid.”

I can’t imagine why she didn’t expect to be sandbagged and ridiculed. She should have read what I wrote before her appearance. I predicted precisely what would take place. I just hope that others will learn from her mistake. When you go on Fox News you are abandoning the world of responsible media and volunteering to be victimized by unscrupulous practitioners of self-righteousness and deceit. Just say no!

Lying Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard

Posted by on June 9, 2009 at 3:20 pm. NO Comments :

Anyone who has ever tried to make an audience laugh knows how deceptively easy a talented comic can make their job look. The truth is, it is so difficult to do well that there is a famous (but difficult to source) quote reportedly made from an actor’s deathbed: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

It’s going to get a lot harder for people like Jon Stewart. The competition is heating up with some of the most hilarious, and unexpected, entrants into the field of funny. Republicans from around the country are trying out their best material in an effort to amuse and deceive audiences nationwide.

First up is Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, who cracked up a room of College Republicans with his famous “Hat” routine. The premise is that it doesn’t matter how you wear your hat (to the side, backwards, etc) so long as it is a GOP hat:

I’m asking you to go out and ask your friends to wear our hat. The hat of an idea.

For this bit, Steele had four students stand so that he could pretend to put imaginary hats on them. Steele intuitively knew that the bit would be much funnier with audience members standing there for no purpose other than to grin and display their naked heads. And I have to admire the deeper meaning of the invisible hats of ideas that obviously represent the GOP’s absence ideas.

The setup included a dire admonition that Barack Obama “has asked your generation to wear his hat.” I must have missed that speech. But I did see Steele’s previous speech where he promised to deliver “change in a tea bag.” How does he keep coming up with this brilliant material?

And then there is Bill O’Reilly. In a sidesplitting debate over torture and abortion, O’Reilly challenged Juan Williams to explain why liberals object to torture but defend abortion providers like Dr. George Tiller. Williams attempted, through O’Reilly’s interruptions, to answer saying that torture is against both domestic and international law, but Tiller’s work was entirely legal. To which O’Reilly responded:

“You can dance the law dance all day long. And laws are passed by men. Laws can be revoked. They can be passed.”

The joke, as O’Reilly sees it, is the law itself. It’s just a dance and we don’t really need to comply with it because it’s just stuff that some people came up with in legislatures and courtrooms. Just imagine the comical scenarios that would ensue if we extend O’Reilly’s view of the law to burglary, rape, and terrorism. I can see O’Reilly now, defending Osama Bin Laden before a military tribunal, doing a jig while testifying that he can “dance the law dance all day long.” After all, the laws against flying planes into buildings could be revoked.

Almost as funny as his legal pirouettes is his contention that “the attorney general ruled waterboarding was not torture. It was legal.” As if the attorney general has the judicial standing to make such a ruling. He isn’t a judge. The best he can offer is an opinion, and you would think that O’Reilly has enough of those of his own. And to compound the laugh factor, O’Reilly seems perfectly satisfied to accept the constraints of the law (as he misinterprets it) with regard to waterboarding, even though he dismisses the law as it applies to abortion. Who’s dancing now?

This brings us to Newt Gingrich who made this declaration last night:

“Let me be clear. I am not a citizen of the world!”

I’m going to guess Plutonian, because he is just so out there, stretching the comedy envelope. He is objecting to a part of Obama’s speech wherein he referred to himself as “a citizen of the world.” I wonder if Gingrich knows that John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, and even Ronald Reagan used the very same phrase. Gingrich also mined comedy gold by railing against the “fact” that our nation’s school curriculum doesn’t include American history. Makes you wonder how closely he was paying attention.

It’s going to be hard for working comics and satirists to compete with the new Republican Rubber Chicken Society. Not many people are better at spinning lies…er…stories than desperate Republican politicians and pundits. It may be too much to ask our professional laugh-smiths to create humor from scratch when the GOP can just pull it out of their butts. I mean, how can you compete with headlines like:
“Fox Newser Accused of Dragging Cyclist Through Central Park.” And:
“Peter Doocy [Steve’s boy] Joins Fox News.” And:
“Sarah Palin Mystifies and Annoys the Republican Establishment.”
“Coburn’s STD Lecture to Congressional Interns Put On Hold Due to Pizza Dispute.”

Yes, those are real. And so is the danger that reality will make comedians obsolete. Thanks GOP.

Bill O’Reilly Lies About Army Recruiter Shooting

Posted by on June 6, 2009 at 10:39 am. NO Comments :

Ordinarily it would not be news to report that Bill O’Reilly lied about something. But in this case he is layering lies on top of lies as he squirms to extricate himself from his lies.

On June 1, Pvt. William Long, was fatally shot at an Army recruiting office in Arkansas. This was the day after Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed at a church service. Both of these tragic events deserved attention from the press and sympathy from the public. And that is just what they got.

Never the less, O’Reilly sought to politicize the matter by falsely claiming that there was a deliberate distortion in the news coverage in favor of Dr. Tiller. He delivered an outraged rant in which he asserted that Tiller’s murder was over-emphasized in the media, while Long’s shooting was virtually ignored – except, of course, by himself and Fox News. The problem with O’Reilly’s tantrum is that he was completely wrong on the facts. Rick Sanchez of CNN took the time to set O’Reilly straight:

The next day, O’Reilly recognized that he could not ignore the blatant factual errors in his screed. So he issued an apology of sorts. But his apology just revealed more of his arrogance and dishonesty. He starts off with a condescending declaration that this is a “rare” correction he is being forced to make. What he doesn’t say is that it is only rare because of his reluctance to admit his frequent errors, not because he doesn’t make any. He goes on to describe the person to whom he is supposedly apologizing as a “snide and surly guy.” This is the sort of graciousness O’Reilly offers when he is apologetic:

In addition to the crude and self-serving remarks noted above, O’Reilly based his entire apology on another fundamental lie. He sought to excuse himself for his mistake by saying that he was only “talking about primetime” but neglected to say that. But in his original remarks he specifically said:

“Only Anderson Cooper at 10 o’clock covered this. Nobody else. So all day long it wasn’t news to cover an Army recruiter gunned down in Arkansas.”

O’Reilly did not forget to mention that he was only talking about primetime. He explicitly stated that CNN’s failure to cover the Long shooting occurred “all day long.” So his so-called apology was just another obfuscation of the truth.

The whole premise of this segment was based on a trumped up controversy from the start. O’Reilly, and much of the right-wing media, were up in arms about what they perceived as a disparity in coverage between the Tiller and Long shootings. But they fail to grasp some basic realities of news coverage. While these were both tragic events, they were also different events.

Tiller was a well known public figure whose position as a lightening rod for controversy guaranteed scrutiny from the press. Long was unknown and, without further investigation, there was no cause to suspect that his murder was anything other than a personal dispute that got out of hand. So the immediate reaction from the media was understandably different. For better or worse, the death of an Anna Nicole Smith will always generate more buzz than the death of a Jane Doe.

Even after it was discovered that Long’s killer was a convert to Islam, and the shooting might have a political component, it was still not controversial in that all Americans would abhor such an act. In Tiller’s case, the overriding debate about abortion stirred conflicting reactions. And if there is anything that the media loves, it’s conflict. That’s the explanation for any disparity in reporting, not some imagined preference for Dr. Tiller’s life over Pvt. Long’s.

There are two things that we can learn from the aftermath of these events. First, that the press will always fan the flames of controversy. And second, that O’Reilly can always be counted on to be a lying jerk.

Update 6/9/09: After making such a big fuss about CNN not giving enough coverage to the army recruiter shooting, Fox News failed to cover today’s press conference given by the survivor of the attack. Both CNN and MSNBC covered it live. Fox chose, instead, to broadcast remarks by Newt Gingrich from the night before.

NARAL Spokesperson Rejects Bill O’Reilly

Posted by on June 4, 2009 at 5:55 pm. NO Comments :

Mary Alice Carr, vice president of communications for NARAL Pro-Choice New York, was asked to appear on the O’Reilly Factor to discuss the murder of Dr. George Tiller. She gave him the only answer that is acceptable and then explained why in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

In her column, Carr movingly described why she believed that Bill O’Reilly bore some responsibility for the heinous shooting death of a doctor at a Sunday church service. She pointed out how O’Reilly repeatedly taunted his viewers with thinly veiled messages that Dr. Tiller was an evil practitioner who had to be stopped. On his program, O’Reilly had labeled the doctor “Tiller, the baby killer.” He said that Tiller has blood on his hands and that anyone who doesn’t stop him has blood on their hands as well. Carr recognized that it was disingenuous for O’Reilly to pretend that his words have no effect, particularly after boasting about how influential he is:

“O’Reilly knew that people wanted Tiller dead, and he knew full well that many of those people were avid viewers of his show. Still, he fanned the flames. Every time I appeared on his show, I received vitriolic and hate-filled e-mails. And if I received those messages directly, I can only imagine what type of feedback O’Reilly receives. He knows that his words incite violence.”

Nonetheless, Carr had a moment of introspection wherein she considered accepting his recent invitation to appear on his show:

“But then I realized I just couldn’t. Because if the murder of a man in a house of worship wasn’t enough to make Bill O’Reilly repent, what hope did I have?”

She made the right decision. And it is not just the right decision for Carr, it is the right decision for anyone asked to appear with O’Reilly or any other Fox News demagogue. It is long past time for Democrats and progressives to come to the same realization that Carr did. You cannot win an argument with these people. Their minds are locked shut and they are doing their best to see to it that their viewers suffer the same malady.

I have written extensively on the need to Starve The Beast: Just stay off of Fox News. There is no reason to help them by lending them our credibility. There is no reason to give them cover as being “fair and balanced.” There is no reason to help them to prop up their ratings by permitting them to fabricate the sort of melodrama upon which they thrive.

Mary Alice Carr did the right thing. Now we just need to get everyone else to realize what she did: that there is no reason – ever – to go on Fox News.

Right Wing Extremists Validate Concerns About Right Wing Extremists

Posted by on June 1, 2009 at 8:23 pm. 1 Comments :

Last April, the Department of Homeland Security published a report entitled: Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment (pdf). The report generated significant controversy amongst conservatives whose complaint seemed to be that the report was referring to them. At the time I wrote…

So why is Malkin, and the rest of the conservative cabal, defending these dangerous malcontents? Is it because they support criminality in pursuit of a radical conservative agenda? Or is it because they see themselves in the descriptions in the report? Either way it is clear that that they are acting as advocates for these repugnant cranks. They are apparently offended that the government would seek to protect citizens from domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph.

Now we can add the name Scott Roeder to the list. He is the suspect in custody for the murder of Dr. George Tiller. All signs point to the fact that this crime might have been prevented if proper attention were being paid to the potential risk posed by someone known to be dangerous. And that was the purpose of the DHS report – to direct attention to risks and dangerous people and groups. The report was prescient in its specificity:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a
single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

~~~

Paralleling the current national climate, rightwing extremists during the 1990s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes to increase group visibility and recruit new members. Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties as well as white supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion, inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage.

It is abundantly sad when events prove that ominous warnings were valid and ought to have been heeded. Perhaps the worst example of such behavior was the Bush administration’s neglect of warnings about Al Qaeda, including a National Intelligence Estimate entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Stike in the U.S.” The knowledge that people with partisan political axes to grind feverishly seek to set such warnings aside compounds the sadness and shock.

Republicans like to pretend that they are the protectors of law and order. But when it comes to their defense of extremists on their side, they are nothing but enablers.