Day: 12/8/2011

Bill O’Reilly Gets Occupied – Brandishes A Lethal Umbrella

Posted by on December 8, 2011 at 7:58 pm. 7 Comments :

The senior eminence of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, demonstrated yesterday just how tender his thin skin is. O’Reilly was surprised by a chance encounter with a “fan” who wondered whether he was attending a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich (he wasn’t). But the encounter got a little out of hand when O’Reilly’s inner bully emerged.

The funny thing about this episode wherein O’Reilly physically assaults someone who did nothing more than ask him a question, is that this is a tactic that O’Reilly has championed for years. It was O’Reilly’s own producer, Stuttering Jesse Watters, who was so often dispatched by O’Reilly to ambush unsuspecting folks in an attempt to embarrass or harass them. When criticized for this cheesy debasement of journalism, O’Reilly steadfastly defends it as rooted in the proud historic tradition of Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes (it’s not).

However, subjected to the same sort of reporting that he favors, O’Reilly proves that he can dish it out but he can’t take it without lashing out and whining to a nearby law enforcement officer. And as the video shows, the only person who engaged in potentially unlawful violence was O’Reilly himself. He deployed his umbrella with such force that he broke it.

On his Fox “Spin Zone” program tonight, O’Reilly sought to portray the curious citizen as a threat who was “armed” with a cell phone camera. O’Reilly said that the man was “running at [him] in the dark, screaming.” Of course the video tells an entirely different story. And for some reason O’Reilly didn’t bother to play the video. I wonder why.

O’Reilly followed his self-serving defense with a discussion of the event with a former police detective. The two of them brazenly misrepresented the video that they refused to play. Clearly they didn’t want the audience to know what they were talking about. And, of course, his guest absolved O’Reilly of any wrongdoing.

At one point O’Reilly conceded that he and his minions have used the same tactic to get interviews, but he lied by asserting that if a subject asked them to leave they would do so. Here’s some pretty conclusive evidence that that was not the case:

So what we’ve learned from this is that O’Reilly is a liar, a bully and, like most bullies, a coward. It’s too bad the fellow who suffered the wrath of O’Reilly’s umbrella doesn’t have his own TV show to set the record straight. However, if any of O’Reilly’s friends watched the video, they now know what to get him for Christmas.

Time Magazine: #Occupy Wall Street #1 Story Of 2011

Posted by on December 8, 2011 at 12:49 pm. 14 Comments :

The editors of Time Magazine have selected the Occupy Wall Street movement as the top news story of 2011. This was a year that featured a contentious primary race for the Republican nomination for president, a bitter congressional battle over the debt ceiling, and a trial of staggering importance to the nation that found Michael Jackson’s doctor guilty of manslaughter.

Nevertheless, Time managed to make the right choice. The Occupy movement is an unprecedented expression of the First Amendment rights of free speech and the redressing of grievances. This country has never before seen a protest that planted itself in a public square and remained there long after most other rallies would have dissipated and gone home. And this phenomenon replicated itself in hundreds of cities across the nation.

As a result, the public debate over policy and governance flipped 180 degrees from the phony discourse over debt and the size of government, to the far more relevant subject of economic fairness and the abuse of power by the wealthy, the well-connected, and the giant multinational corporations who have no allegiance to America or its citizenry. It shoved the AstroTurf Tea Party out of the headlines and caused the Republican establishment to admit that they are “frightened to death” of Occupy and the 99%.

While Time got the top spot right, there were a couple of glaring omissions in the remainder of their top 10. Somehow they left out the killing of Osama Bin Laden which, after a decade of consuming a major portion of the national consciousness, ought to have earned a spot on this list. It is likewise curious that the News Corp phone hacking scandal was overlooked. That affair resulted in the closure of Britain’s largest circulation newsweekly, 17 arrests (and counting), numerous resignations of top management, Parliamentary hearings that compelled the appearance of Rupert Murdoch and his son James. This was not only a huge news story, it was the biggest news story about the news in decades.

These omissions might have been excusable if the crush of major events simply pushed the stories further down the list. But Time saw fit to include the “Penn State Sex Abuse Scandal,” and “Freak Weather” in the list. Do they really believe that those stories rank higher than the downfalls of the world’s top terrorist and top media propagandist?

[I’ll leave it you to decide which is which]
Rupert MurdochOsama Bin Laden

Fox News Shrink Keith Ablow Offers His Psycho Analysis Of President Obama

Posted by on December 8, 2011 at 3:23 am. 6 Comments :

There is a lot of nonsense on Fox News. After all, this is the network that employs Dick Morris and Sarah Palin. It’s the network that brings in people like Jon Voight, Victoria Jackson, and Ted Nugent, to discuss serious matters of government and finance. But there may be no other Fox contributor that comes even close to the delusional lunacy of Dr. Keith Ablow.

Lou Dobbs hosted a segment of his Fox Business Network program that sought to explore President Obama’s identity crisis, wherein Ablow offered his typically twisted analysis of Obama’s psychological defects. The excrement that spews from his lips is so utterly perverse that I think I’ll just let it speak for itself:

“When you don’t have a core you’re able to slip the binding of your own existence and play other presidents.”

“Where’s the fire? Where’s the leadership? Why can’t we get anything done? Well, what if there’s nobody inside there other than the guy on GQ magazine on the cover?”

“If you go through enough abandonment, which this president has, if you are disenfranchised, you can cut yourself off from those feeling of rage and fire. That is all you can do to not disintegrate.”

“That’s why we’re adrift, Lou. Because there’s nobody in the White House, not really.”

“This is a president who captured the White House but considers himself different than us. OK? Quite different. And not sure at all that he liked us.”

“The whole reason the Birther movement came up is because people were flummoxed. They couldn’t figure out how can you be President of the United States and seem not to like the citizenry of the United States?”

“The answer is he doesn’t hate us. He simply isn’t there to hate or love. Because, guess what? Long ago he severed himself from all core emotions.”

There you have it. Obama is a phantom president whose own lack of emotion caused right-wing extremists and Tea Partiers to doubt his citizenship. And Ablow put forth these baseless theories in an embarrassingly childish performance that was peppered with repeated interruptions and pleas for attention.

Ablow is fond of pretending that he can psychoanalyze people who he has never examined or even met. That is a sign of certain quackery reminiscent of “doctor” Bill Frist’s pathetic attempt to diagnose the terminally ill and vegetative Terri Schiavo. What’s more, Ablow is in violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics (Section 7.3), which state:

“On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.“

Ablow’s unethical hackery fits well on the Fox airwaves, and his credentials suit the requirements of the so-called “news” network that has proudly cast off any semblance ethics. He is the co-author of a book with conspiracy schizoid Glenn Beck, who has tried his own hand at psychoanalyzing the President as well – with hilarious results.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that characters like this fill the schedule on Fox. Notwithstanding how easy Fox makes it look, it really is difficult to come up with consistently demented lies and insults of the “quality” that Fox has maintained. So perhaps we should cut them some slack if they have to resort to lowlifes like Ablow on occasion just to avoid having dead air.