Tactical differences aside, Bill O'Reilly has been one of George Bush's most effective and consistent mouthpieces and media cheerleaders for Washington's imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every lie Bush told about Iraq--WMD, ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11, bringing freedom and democracy to its people--was dutifully echoed and rationalized by Bill O'Reilly.
Not content with the Iraqi and American blood spilled as a result of his earlier lies, now O'Reilly is helping Bush deceive Americans all over again regarding Iran.
It's what O'Reilly means when he talks about Washington's "noble mission" in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's no shock that death and destruction followed O'Reilly's latest "Gidget goes to Afghanistan" junket.
'Surge' Success Means America's Successful Conquest of Iraq
Workers shouldn't get sucked in or deceived by the tactical debate raging among O'Reilly and other supporters of this filthy, illegal predatory imperialist war. The entire framework of this debate is fraudulent, designed to throw dust in our eyes and obscure the illegality and immorality of Washington's invasion and occupation of Iraq. When they talk about the surge succeeding, they're talking about the success of Washington's pacification of Iraq. They're talking about whether or not the US conquers Iraq and establishes a puppet regime that will facilitate Washington's control of Iraq's oil and strategic position in the Middle East.
The invasion was based on lies. Never forget that fact.
The reason Bill O'Reilly hates Mark Cuban and Brian DePalma's new movie is because it illuminates what he has been trying to shield from US working people.
Redacted is not a work of fiction.
The brutal rape and murder of 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza, the burning of her corpse, and the murder of her family in the village of Mahmoudiya--is a reality. It happened. And the world knows it happened, despite the attempts by Bill O'Reilly and other apologists for Washington's filthy colonialist aggression in Iraq to suppress it.
Cuban and DePalma are not "hurting the troops" or "helping the terrorists." Bill O'Reilly is.
"Unless the White House is involved, this isn't a major story"--Bill O'Reilly, 9/30/03
From COSMOS LEFT ("OReilly Cleans Outhouse at White House," Oct. 1, 2003):
"Except the White House is involved, O'Reilly, and only a shameless apologist for George Bush could utter the above words....
"It DOES involve the White House, as the whole world knows except O'Reilly, if you can believe him. The CIA sent former Iraq ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger last year to find out if Iraq tried to buy uranium 'yellowcake' from that country. When Wilson returned to Washington, he told Cheney, the CIA, the National Security Council and the State Department that the yellowcake story was bogus.
Despite Wilson's report, which was later confirmed when the International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the allegations as based on crudely forged documents, Bush dramatically included the Niger uranium 'evidence' in his January 28 State of the Union address. Justifiably angered, Wilson went public with his protest in a July 6 op-ed column in the NY Times, criticizing Bush for using evidence he knew was false to support the war.
"This was a humiliating embarrassment for Bush. Now the White House had to admit that the famous '16 words' were false and should not have been included in the speech, blaming the CIA for the 'mistake.' One week later, right wing pundit Robert Novak, citing 'two senior administration officials,' reported that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative, and that Plame was the one who suggested her husband should go to Niger to verify the uranium allegations.
"In publicly revealing Plame's identity, Novak had 'outed' a CIA agent, which is a federal felony that violates two statutes: the National Agents' Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act. That's a major story, O'Reilly. And 'two senior administration officials' means it involves the White House.
You don't have to be a political scientist to figure out that the Bush cabal, severely embarrassed and incensed at Wilson for exposing their Niger uranium lie, retaliated by revealing the identity of Wilson's wife. The White House also intended to send a message to anyone else thinking of publicly crossing them.
"The Bush cabal is so drunk with power, so arrogant, and so vicious, they could not restrain themselves from breaking federal law and risking impeachment charges.
"O'Reilly's spin is so bankrupt it's almost laughable. He enlightens us with this comment: 'There's now no question in my mind that whoever exposed the ambassador's wife did so to get revenge, because Wilson wrote an article embarrassing Bush over the Africa uranium Iraq situation.'
"Oh Really O'Reilly? Tell us something we don't know. And just who has the motive to exact revenge on Wilson but the president who Wilson embarrassed?
"O'Reilly pathetically tried to throw dust in everyones eyes. It wasn't Bush, you see. It's the 'hate industry,' a less-than-scientific term that O'Reilly doesn't even attempt to define. Someone tried to hurt somebody for political reasons, and it backfired, you understand.
"O'Reilly's obfuscation continued unabated. O'Reilly: 'There's no question that the far left despises President Bush, just as the far right loathed Bill Clinton.'
"Oh Really? Far left, far right, leaves us with no option but to listen to O'Reilly, the voice of reason and moderation in the middle. Except that no one loathes Clinton as much as the far right does except--Bill O'Reilly.
"O'Reilly: 'The haters have power right now in America.'
"Yes, and you're living proof of that, O'Reilly.
"O'Reilly: 'Passionate debate and respect for opposing points of view are what this country is all about.'
"They may be what this country's all about, but they're not what O'Reilly is all about, as we saw when he told Jeremy Glick to shut up and threatened to smash his head into fucking pieces.
"In truth, this country is about violence and revolution: the violent subjugation and extermination of Native Americans, a bloody anti-colonial revolution, and a bloody civil war.
"And that was just to get the country started and unified.
"O'Reilly: 'Whoever tried to hurt Ambassador Wilson by leaking his wife's CIA connection, which is illegal, is now being hunted and has brought embarrassment to the Bush administration.'
"Notice how O'Reilly's point of departure is that Bush is innocent. Somebody must have wronged him. O'Reilly glosses over the obvious motive that inspired the leak--revenge against Wilson for embarrassing the White House over its manipulation of intelligence data to wage war.
"While O'Reilly babbles about the 'haters in power,' he fails to inform his viewers that it was the CIA that approached the Justice Department within a week of Novak's column and urged an investigation of the leak.
O'Reilly doesn't tell his audience that it was the CIA that drafted a 'crime report,' which is a formal notice that a crime had been committed.
"O'Reilly doesn't mention the September 27 Washington Post report that two Bush officials had cold-called six other journalists in July and told them it was Plame who volunteered Wilson to go to Africa to investigate the uranium allegation.
"O'Reilly doesn't tell his audience about the widely held belief that the source of the Washington Post story was Tenet or a high level CIA official.
"Of course, O'Reilly has a self interest in censoring this story, since more than any other media whore O'Reilly helped Bush lie to the American people about Iraq. He thinks that by throwing around meaningless but provocative phrases like 'hate industry' he can distract attention from his own culpability in these crimes, and his own responsibility for dead Americans and Iraqis."--
COSMOS LEFT, 10/01/03
O'Reilly's Hatemongering Toward Gays and Immigrants Paves Way for Fascist Pogroms Against Them
During a recent Factor segment, "High School Lesbians Voted 'Cutest Couple' for Yearbook," Northwestern University psychiatry professor Dr. Laura Berman destroyed O'Reilly while exposing his homophobia:
Berman: "...it's starting to become at least a small trend, if not a large one, that homosexuality is becoming, thankfully, more normalized..."
O'Reilly: "Now you realize that you said, thankfully, that I don't know 50 60 percent of the country is going to be angry with you for saying that...it is a valid point of view...we don't want to normalize homosexuality in a pu blic way in an academic setting,in high school, among minors. We don't think that reflects..."
Berman: "Why?"
O'Reilly: "...how we feel about it. Well, for a number of reasons. One, social. It's much more difficult to be a homsexual than a heterosexual in America. [Yeah, because of homophobic bigots like you] Two, religious. There are people who believe that kind of a lifestyle... is against their religion...Three, an expositionof sexuality in a minor...is inappropriate in an academic setting.
Berman: "...where you're getting stuck is assuming that validating or acknowledging homosexuality as a reality is somehow going to make homosexuality more likely to happen...And what we do know is that homosexual teens are four times more likely to be seriously bullied, [no doubt by kids who read The O'Reilly Factor for Kids]...two times more likely than heterosexual kids to be significantly involved in drugs and alcohol and abuse drugs and alcohol, and six times more likely than heterosexual teens to have suicidal attempts...And they have nowhere to turn. [They'd better run from O'Reilly[
O'Reilly, going down: "Well, I think."
Berman: "They have no support systems."
O'Reilly: "Look, I've been very consistent on this since my first book was written. I think private behavior belongs in private settings...I don't think it belongs in the high school yearbook."
Berman: "But you'd be OK with the cutest couple, heterosexual couple, though."
O'Reilly: "I would be, because that is the norm of society...[Get the "X" brands hot and ready.]Homosexuals ... are six percent of the population..."
Berman: "But since African-Americans are a minority, would you have a problem with an African-American heterosexual couple?"
O'Reilly: "No, because African--because race is no conduct. There is a difference between who you are and what you do ..."
Berman: "So you're judging homosexuality as..."
O'Reilly: "Not judging-I'm not judging anybody and anything..." [Telling people they're not normal and should stay hidden is not judging?]
Berman: "Right. This isn't about sexuality."
O'Reilly: "Sure it is."
Berman: "Just a couple."
O'Reilly: "This is a lesbian couple that was voted in there...because they're a lesbian couple." [emphasis added]
Berman: "But they're not flaunting their sexuality."
O'Reilly: "How do you know?"
Berman: "They're just in love."
O'Reilly: "...How do you know they're not? You don't know that."
Berman: "They're not flaunting their sexuality any more or any less than a heterosexual couple might."
O'Reilly: "Look...there's no reason why Brandy and Lupe had to declare themselves anything other vthan friends. They didn't have to do that. They chose to do that."
Berman: "If they're in love, but they're due--they hae the same right to do that as any heterosexual."
O'Reilly: "It's not about--it's a matter of appropriateness.That's what it's a matter of. And look."
O'Reilly: "You're dismissing all--look I'm not--look, I don't want any kid to be bullied. I wrote, "Kids are Americans, Too" for gay kids who are getting bullied. They should read the book, know their rights. I don't want anything like that to happen."
Got a guilty conscience, O'Reilly? This is classic O'Reilly demagoguery. He's forced to claim he doesn't wnat kids to be bullied, knowing that everything else he's pushing is inflaming hatred, intolerance and bigotry toward gays. It's the same when he peddles that "I'm not anti-immigrant" lie; he thinks his lip service sympathy for immigrant workers trying to eke out a living in the States negates the nightly xenophobic vitriol he spews at Mexican workers--they're invading hordes bent on turning America brown and Democratic; they're the equivalent of biological weapons; they're terrorists threatening national security; they're criminals, whether they have criminal records or not.
O'Reilly: But you're dismissing a very legitimate point. This is inappropriate. You don't define yourself in a high school yearbook."
Berman: "Only if you judge sexuality."
O'Reilly: "in a sexual way. Period. You don't do it."
Berman: "These kids--these kids need support. And they need to know that it's OK to be who they are."
O'Reilly: "Well, let them go to a support group run by you. It doesn't need to be..." [This from an individual who wrote a book telling gay kids their rights? I want to check out the passage in which Mr. Gay Rights Supporter gives advice to gay kids about not being bullied.]
Berman: "Here I am."
O'REilly: "You know, you don't have to take out posters and put them on your front lawn." [Yeah, I know if I were a gay kid, I'd run to O'Reilly for guidance.]
Berman: "Because they're supporting all the other kids that are stuck in hiding and now will feel safer."
O'Reilly: "That is your extrapolation. Somebody else would say you're encouraging that kind of experimentation..."
Berman: "...It happens anyway."
O'Reilly: "All right, doctor, that's the old argument. Let's legalize drugs because it happens anyway..."
Berman: "Drugs are not the same. Homosexuality is not illegal."
O'Reilly: "But it--you know what I'm talking about." [Translation: "Well maybe it should be."
Berman, exhibiting a touch of ESP: "And it shouldn't be illegal."
"Why did author J.K. Rowling out one of the 'Harry Potter' characters as gay?"
"Another Church Under Attack in San Francisco" "This [arrest of man wearing explosives on steps of church] comes on the heels of two gay militants invading a San Francisco Catholic Church defiling the Eucharest there" [emphasis added] --They "defiled" the church by receiving Holy Communion. O'Reilly is attempting to equate wearing explosives with receiving Holy Communion.
O'Reilly Blasts Carlin for Blaming California Fires on Selfish Consumers, While Ignoring Beck's "a handful of people who hate America...are losing their homes in a fire"
As we saw below in his kid gloves treatment of fascist commentator Ann Coulter's anti-Semitic remarks, Bill O'Reilly employs a double standard when it comes to his like-minded fascist allies. When Beck spewed his latest obscenity--clearly directed against the same Hollywood elite O'Reilly attacks daily--we heard nothing from O'Reilly. But he was quick to pounce on comedian George Carlin's rant on The View against that same liberal Hollywood elite, which he called "selfish" people who "just care about having a comfortable place...these people with the fires and the floods and everything, they overbuild, they put nature to the test and they get what they have coming to them."
After saying he "can't wait for the sea levels to rise... and for "some of these cities to disappear," Carlin went on:
"There are places that are going to go away. The map is going to change and that's because -- people think nature is outside of them. They don't take into them the idea that we are part of it. They say, 'oh, we're going for a nature walk. We're going to the country because we like nature.' Nature is in here. And if you're in tune with it, like the Indians, the Hopis, especially, the balance of life, the balance, the harmony of nature, if you understand that, you don't overbuild. You don’t do all this moron stuff. There are too many people-"
George Carlin is a brilliant comic and satirist who has blistered the Establishment for decades with his biting, iconoclastic razor sharp wit that has never shied from offending conventional sensibilities. While his politics are left of center, antiwar, and antiBush, Carlin's petty bourgeois perspective--evidenced in his romantic idealization of Hopi Indians--sometimes limits his understanding of class society. It's not the "people" who are to blame for testing nature by overbuilding in dangerous fire areas. Houses are built all over southern California because it's profitable for real estate moguls, large construction firms, and Wall Street investors to build them. The "people" are not to blame for and do not profit from the anarchy and chaos of the free market's private profit motive--the capitalists are.
But Carlin's politics are left of center. Beck's are very much to the right of center--close to Bill O'Reilly's. Thus, like Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck gets a pass. Those fascist types stick together.--October 27, 2007
O'Reilly Shills for Pentagon Again Echoes Pentagon Flunky's Denial that Iraq Diverts Firefighting Resources
Responding to California Lt. Governor John Garamendi's challenge to George W. Bush to send Californian National Guardsmen back from Iraq to help fight the disastrous wildfires, O'Reilly told his October 24 Factor viewers: "Well, a quick check with the Pentagon revaled this."
Video Clip: Paul McHale Asst. Defense Secretary: "I can tell you unequivocally that the ongoing war fighting activitites in Centcom have had no negative effect at all with our regard to our ability to assist sufficient forces to assist civilian authorities in fighting the wildfires."
There you have it. Run along, now. Nothing more for you here. The Pentagon has spoken. Given unequivocal assurance to boot. This from an institution that brought us Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and Falluja.
"The Factor has learned that about 17,000 National Guard are available right now, but not needed."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
Then how do you explain this May 11 San Francisco Chronicle report, as reported in the October 25 World Socialist Web Site article by Patrick Martin: "the California National Guard says equipment shortages could hinder the guard's response to a large-scale disaster. A dearth of equipment such as trucks and radios--caused in part by the war in Iraq--has state military officials worried they would be slow in providing help in the event of a major fire, earthquake or terrorist attack." [emphasis added]
Martin continues:
"This report was published only days after a tornado destroyed a west Kansas town, and Governor Kathleen Sibelius complained that so much Kansas National Guard equipment was in Iraq that the disaster response efforts were being undermined. Lt. Col. John Siepmann of the California National Guard told the Chronicle that similar issues would arise in a major disaster there. 'Our concern is a catastrophic event,' he said. 'You would see a less effective response.'
"Among the equipment shortages were diesel generators (zero instead of 39 required), GPS devices (zero instead of 1,410), and 209 vehicles of all types, including 110 humvees and 63 military trucks. All this equipment was in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and thus unavailable for use in California."
Yet O'Reilly lost no time this week spinning for Bush and his imperialist war in Iraq, lecturing his audience with total certainty that California had every resource it needed and Iraq had not diverted one dollar or piece of equipment.--October 27, 2007
Panicked and frustrated by America's turn to the left, O'Reilly answers with new book, "Kids Are Americans, Too" Translation: Your kids have to die in bloody imperialist wars for Wall Street's profits, too. It's driving O'Reilly nuts that American kids are not lining up for war with the jingoistic fervor he's been working overtime to generate.
O'Reilly Lies About Chicago Area High School Students Antiwar Protest
In his November 8 Talking Points Memo, "Freedom of Expression Comes with Responsibility," Bill O'Reilly lied about the facts surrounding the West Morton students' sit-in staged to protest the ongoing criminal occupation of Iraq. In so doing, he allied himself with the school board's attack on the students' constitutional right to free speech and protest. After plugging his book "Kids Are Americans Too" by saying how it "bluntly tells teenagers what their rights are and what they cannot do," O'Reilly continued:
"Enter some student protesters at Morton West High School in Chicago. A few dozen decicded to protest the Iraq War in the school cafeteria. Citing the disruption, school officials asked the kids to take it outside. Some of them refused, and they were suspended."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
That's not the way it was reported in the November 9 World Socialist Web Site, which is a far more scholarly, reputable news source than The Factor. Kristina Betinis wrote:
"
"The November 1 protest began with about 60 students in the cafeteria during lunch-hour. About 30 students left the protest after being threatened by school authorities. Students said they were told they would not face suspension if they moved the protest to a room adjacent to the principal’s office. They also said they were initially told that they would have to serve a Saturday detention for participating in the sit-in.
"Once the remaining students had moved to the new location, school officials cordoned off the protest with caution tape and barricaded the area with tables, in an effort to discourage other students from joining. By the end of the school day, the protesting students were told they would be suspended."
Coming up: Spitting Out O'Reilly
COSMOS LEFT will demolish and dissect O'Reilly's defense of cold-blooded murder by Green Berets and torture by Bush's "professionals" found in Talking Points Memos "Military Justice: Two Green Berets Are Exonerated" (Oct. 1, 2007), and "Telling the Truth About Torture" (Oct. 8, 2007).
"Military Justice: Two Green Berets Are Exonorated": O'Reilly: "As we reported last week, Captain David Staffel and Master Sergeant Troy Anderson shot and killed a wanted terrorist in Afghanistan and were hammered for doing so. Even though two separate investigations in the Afghan theatre clearly stated the Green Berets effectively did their duty, General Francis Kearney took the investigation back to Fort Bragg, where the men had to endure embarrassing allegations.
"Now the men have been found not guilty of anything by the commander of the special forces. So the case is closed. General Kearney, however, should publicly apologize to the men."
We'll also examine O'Reilly's criteria for acceptable dissent found in his rants on Bruce Springsteen, habeas corpus, Sean Penn and Hugo Chavez--and the corrupt, demagogic reporting that accompany those irrational ravings ("Legitimate Dissent vs. Anti-American Dishonesty," Oct. 3, 2007).
We'll take on O'Reilly's ugly xenophobic hysteria against Mexican immigrants and willed ignorance on the workings of the international capitalist system in "The 'Open Border' People Strike Back" (Oct. 4, 2007) and "The Trouble with Mexico" (Oct. 9, 2007).
"Is the Press Killing American Military People?" [Talking Points Memo, 10/15/07]
O'Reilly's spin on Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez's recent speech to military journalists is classic fascist demagogy, of a piece with the Nazis' propaganda in the 1930s that blamed Germany's World War I defeat on the bankrupt liberal elites back home who "stabbed our boys in the back."
O'Reilly begins by showing a video clip of Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez's speech to Washington journalists:
"What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war. For some of you just like some of our politicians, the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases, or agendas."
O'Reilly: "Wow. Now the general, I believe, is talking about liberal media outlets like The New York Times and NBC News, both of which trumpeted the general's criticism of the Bush war plan, but ignored his media attack."
A far more incisive analysis of Sanchez's words came from theWorld Socialist Web Site's Barry Grey in his October 15, 2007 article, "An antidemocratic tirade: Former US commander blames 'partisan' poilitics and 'agenda-driven' media for Iraq debacle":
"Media reports on the speech focused on Sanchez’s criticisms of the administration’s war tactics, while virtually ignoring its broader, authoritarian thrust....
"Sanchez was clearly speaking for a broader constituency. The failure of the US military adventure in Iraq has fuelled recriminations and conflicts within the military and between it and civilian authorities. Among sections of the officer corps, the commitment to the Constitution and its principle of the subordination of the military to civilian authority is growing increasingly tenuous.
"In his speech, Sanchez directed his fire against the Bush administration, the State Department, the National Security Council, Congress, the Democratic and Republican parties and the media, while sparing the Pentagon and brushing over the role of military commanders. [emphasis added]
"On Sunday, two days after Sanchez’s speech, the New York Times published an article based on interviews with officers attending the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas which made clear that the possibility of a military coup in the US is openly being discussed. The article described conflicting views among the mid-career officers at the school as to where the chief blame lies for the military disaster in Iraq, with the civilian authorities or the military commanders who refused to defy them....
"Sanchez concluded his remarks with an avowal of his evangelical Christian beliefs, saying, 'Praise be to the Lord, my rock who trains my fingers for battle and my hands for war.' This is significant, since an important ideological component of the increasingly politicized US military is the promotion of right-wing fundamentalist dogmas within its ranks."
Yes, while O'Reilly whines baselessly that Christians are a persecuted minority [the US imperialist empire is declining as Rome once did, but it's not feeding Christians to the lions], he says little if anything about the ongoing dismantling of church/state separation manifested in the fusion of right wing fundamentalism with the US imperialist military establishment.
While O'Reilly Wages Holy War Against Gay Nuns Receiving Communion,
He "doesn't even care, to tell you the truth" about Coulter's anti-Semitic remarks
That's because birds of a fascist feather flock together. O'Reilly has no problem with Coulter's "[we] Christians just want Jews to be perfected" because he's as much of an anti-Semite as Coulter.
O'Reilly and Coulter are bosom buddies. Ideological soul mates. Co-"thinkers". Political reactionaries and religious fanatics who are joined at the hip to serve the US capitalist class by insidiously mixing flag-waving jingoistic patriotism, militarism, and right wing Christian fundamentalism to hoodwink and disorient working people so we remain under the spell of the "free" market and private profit, willing to die in brutal colonial wars so O'Reilly, Coulter, and the rest of the capitalist swine can remain rich.--October 18, 2007
Maybe it's time to call it a day, O'Reilly. Pack it in. Go home. You've been humiliated before the entire world by a close political ally, the normally reliable Bernard Goldberg. COSMOS LEFT has no love for Goldberg; he is every bit as much an enemy of working people as Bill O'Reilly. But next to O'Reilly, Goldberg has a scintilla of principle and integrity. After hearing O'Reilly blast CNN's Wolf Blitzer for "sitting there like a mu mmy" and not challenging former President Jimmy Carter's statement that the US had been violating international norms of torture honored for 60 years, even Goldberg couldn't help but notice O'Reilly's hypocritical double standard revealed in the Coulter interview.
GOLDBERG: Bill, I say this as a friend and as a supporter of the show. And I watch it all the time and all that. But you got very passionate about the Catholic sacrilege in San Francisco, but when Ann Coulter made her comment about how everybody should be a Christian, including all the Jews, because they should be more perfected, man, I was waiting for you two to French kiss. I mean, it was -- you weren't the old Bill O'Reilly.
O'REILLY: "I ignored the controversy."
Oh Really O'Reilly? Why? You didn't ignore the controversy of Jimmy Carter's forthright comment that torture is very much a part of US policy.
O'REILLY: "Ann Coulter is a commentator. She says some crazy thing that I think is unjustifiable. But why do I want to debate it with her? She doesn't have any credibility in the area."
HALL: "But Bill, you said everybody should be challenged. I think Bernie's got a good point."
O'REILLY: "Well, I did challenge her in the interview, Jane. It wasn't a kissypoo interview. I mean -- but I wanted to --"
GOLDBERG: "Yes, it was."
O'REILLY: "I didn't want to get into that because I don't give it any credibility, Bernie." [Then why have her on the show, moron?]
HALL: "Yeah, but I think Bernie's got a point. There's certain people -- Ann Coulter is on the Today show. She is loved by the mainstream media. She says anti-Semitic things. [She says it on O'Reilly's show! He says nothing because he agrees with her!] She says anti-gay things. And no one seems to ever call her on it."
O'REILLY: "All right. Maybe I should have said it was anti-Semitic. I don't think it was anti-Semitic. I think it was just dumb."
This is torture, asshole Bush.
Bush, O'Reilly: Who? Us? Torture? Where?
At his October 5 press conference held the day after the NY Times disclosed the existence of two 2005 secret Justice Department memos that specifically authorized headslapping detainees, freezing detainees and waterboarding, George W. Bush declared: "This government does not torture people."
Bush is playing the same game with the American people as his chief media propagandist, Bill O'Reilly: use a euphemism for torture--like "enhanced interrogation techniques"--so you can deny you're torturing. Just like Richard Nixon wasn't bombing Cambodia illegally in 1970--he was just ordering "protective reaction strikes," you see. But people were dying--as people are being tortured now. The evidence is in the photographs. And while a picture is worth a thousand words, there is no shortage of printed materials proving that the horrors inflicted in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and CIA torture chambers around the world are directly linked to the White House.
In fact, Bush's legal henchmen (Yoo, Gonzalez, Addington) specifically crafted memos designed to immunize Bush from prosecution for torture because they knew they were practicing torture.
We will deal with O'Reilly's October 11 Talking Points Memo entitled, "The Truth Police and Jimmy Carter," in which he, among other things, insults the former president by implying he is senile. It's all part of his campaign to shape the character and moral fiber of America's youth.
This is torture, asshole O'Reilly.
Sleep deprivation is torture. Being left naked in cramped, freezing cells is torture. Beatings are torture.
This is torture, assholes O'Reilly and Bush
Terrorizing detainees with vicious dogs is torture. Simulated drowning, the hideous practice known as "waterboarding," is torture.
Mansur Gidfar defends his school and classmates against O'Reilly's insults, then shows O'Reilly how to be a true journalist by getting his facts straight.
The group that led the walkout on the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance is called Student Worker.
That's Student Worker. As in France, May 1968. Mansur is well on his way to having his own communist Web site one day. Once can pray to secular gods this gives O'Reilly a heart attack.
Jackson Schools O'Reilly on Jena
The combination of the furor sparked by Bill O'Reilly's racist remarks and the militant mass movement emerging in Louisiana to protest the racist prosecution of the Jena 6 forced O'Reilly to 1) finally recognize the importance of Jena as a news issue and 2) finally have Rev. Jesse Jackson on The Factor. The conversation soon revealed that either O'Reilly truly didn't know the facts of the Jena story--which makes him a worthless journalist--or that he's a liar.
O'Reilly Conspicuously Silent on Jena 6
He's too busy trying to sort out his surprise that "there was no difference" between Harlem restaurants and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship."
Yeah, and they even eat with knives and forks.
More evidence of the rank racism reeking from this repulsive, reptilian, reactionary right winger:
"...There was not one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'MF-er, I want more iced tea'...it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense that people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."
Nope, they didn't chuck spears, and they didn't offer a screaming blonde to King Kong. Nice to see they met with O'Reilly's standards of civilized behavior.
"They're just trying to figure it out: 'Look I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.'"
Here O'Reilly is really earning the money the ruling class pays him to spread capitalist propaganda and serve as an apologist for the white power structure that he admits he's a proud member of. It's not the system that's oppressing Black people. There's no more racism. It's all on the individual. Social oppression; the social relations permeating society; these are irrelevant. If you're not successful in America in 2007, it's your fault, the individual's fault; you're too lazy, or unskilled, or addicted, or rebellious. But don't blame the economic system that benefits Bill O'Reilly.
Reflecting on his attendance at an Anita Baker concert, O'Reilly stated: "The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedoes, and this is what white America doesn't know, particularly people who don't have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg."
The Black culture is not homogeneous. Rather, it is a reflection of the growing class differentiation and polarization within the Black community.
Sometimes O'Reilly actually makes an accurate statement, though not for the reason he believes.
"...I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves."
They are. That's why 50,000 of them from all around the country mobilized in Jena, Louisiana the other day to protest the racist prosecution of the Jena 6.
"They're getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture."
They are "getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons." As the World Socialist Web Site wrote: "The officially sanctioned leaders of the demonstration--Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and others--were largely bypassed in the initial plans for demonstrations against the prosecutions...
"The issues raised in the Jena Six prosecutions cannot be resolved within the framework of the Democratic Party, which is entirely complicit in perpetuating the social conditions that underlie the resurgence of racism in the United States. The layer of black businessmen and entrepreneurs represented by figures such as Jackson is indifferent to the enormous social problems confronting workers of all races."
The same layer that rubbed elbows with Bill O'Reilly at that Anita Baker concert, no doubt.--Sept. 21, 2007
Sept. 27 Update: O'Reilly's Defense: I'm a racial healer, not a racial divider; I'm not a racist, I fight racism
His "defense" illuminates that most of his fans are racists
O'Reilly claims he was only trying to ease the fears many whites have of African Americans by pointing out the latter are no different than whites. O'Reilly was talking to his fan base. His "defense" only illuminates the fact that much of his fan base, his grandmother, many fellow Irish-Americans [a remnant of the 1863 New York City draft riots], his entire milieu are racist. He was telling his fans, "Look guys, not all Blacks are gun-toting rapper thugs. There are civilized Blacks; acceptable Blacks; conservative Blacks; rich Blacks; cultured Blacks. Why, some of my best friends are Blacks. Like Juan Williams." More on him shortly.
O'Reilly's in essence telling his racist friends, "Don't be racist. Don't hate all Blacks. They're Americans too. We need them to die for Wall Street's profits and in Wall Street's wars. Because hey, that's capitalism."
In attempting to defuse the stereotypes held by whites regarding Blacks, O'Reilly ended up reinforcing many of the more common ones. Far from healing racial divisions, O'Reilly has deepened them with his arrogant, clueless, insensitive, ignorant bigoted remarks. If he were a better man, he'd at least recognize his statements were o ffensive and apologize for them. But he's not a better man; or even a good man. O'Reilly is, as we've been saying for six years, one of the most dangerous individuals in the United States.
When O'Reilly talks about cultured Blacks and Anita Baker, he's unconsciously, cluelessly touching on the class differentiation occurring among African Americans; the so-called "seven percenters" who have "made it" by attaining middle class, upper middle class and bourgeois status. Unfortunately for O'Reilly and his profits, the overwhelming majority of African Americans are proletarian, they are the most anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist Americans, and they will play a vanguard role in the coming US socialist revolution, as Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky predicted 70 years ago.
When confronted with hard evidence that many African Americans in Harlem and elsewhere were offended by his racially insensitive and ignorant remarks, O'Reilly's responding that he doesn't blame them, because they're believing what the corrupt, far-left smear merchant reporters are telling them. Talk about condescension; here O'Reilly is denying that African Americans can think for themselves. They're being manipulated by deceptive, dishonest reporters. This is cut from the same cloth as O'Reilly explaining the shift to the left among Americans on the war and Bush to the Bush-hating press. Again, Americans can't think for themselves; it's all the fault of the biased liberal press.
Similarly, over the years a phenomenon that's been chronicled on this site is O'Reilly refusing to recognize the capacity of young people to think for themselves and denying them the right to begin to form opinions about the world around them, that is, the right to be political.
FOX contributor Juan Williams on the March 27 Radio Factor, giving his opinion to O'Reilly on the legions of immigrant youth demonstrating for their rights and holding Mexican flags: "Well, these kids don't know anything....I mean, kids who are -- I mean they use kids during the civil rights era as demonstrators." O'Reilly: "So you think these kids are being used to some extent?" Williams: "There's no question. Without a doubt. They're kids. They don't know the intricacies." [Thanks to Media Matters]
Yes, please enlighten us on the intricacies, Mr. Williams.
Part of O'Reilly's counteroffensive has been to excoriate Syracuse professor Boyce Atkins, who blasted Juan Williams for defending O'Reilly with this remark: "Juan Williams sitting there, is sort of a 'Happy Negro' agreeing with Bill O'Reilly, doesn't impress me at all."
The above-cited exchange between O'Reilly and Williams is one of many examples cited by Media Matters that show just how much Juan Williams functions as O'Reilly's yes man, thinks like O'Reilly, and kisses O'Reilly's ass, as he did when he rushed to O'Reilly's defense after David Letterman slammed him on Late Night:
"I think there is a culture war in the country. I must say I was surprised, given his antagonism towards you, that he had you on the show. In some sense, it's like someone inviting you into their house and you find out you've been invited in by, you know, John Wayne Gacy, the clown killer. Because here he is saying, 'Oh, I'm just throwing spitballs.' Spitballs? He said he doesn't believe 60 percent of what you say, Bill. This was a knife fight, and I do believe it was over culture. When you think about him saying some of the, I think, horrible things that he said to you, I'm surprised you don't have a black eye this morning."
"Happy Negro," "Uncle Tom," "Oreo cookie," take your pick. They all apply to Juan Williams. These are not personal attacks against Williams. They are political attacks against a member of an oppressed national minority who has sold out his people by selling his soul to the same white power structure Bill O'Reilly belongs to, by giving credibility and ideological support to the very socio-economic system that exploits the vast majority of African Americans.
An overly fair-minded person might cut O'Reilly some slack if this was the first time he made a racist remark or rant. What makes this more egregious is that it follows a long-established pattern of bigoted hatemongering and race-baiting. Media Matters recently recalled just a few examples:
1) On the April 12, 2006 The Radio Factor, O'Reilly said that NYC councilman Charles Barron had revealed the immigration movement's "hidden agenda": "to wipe out 'white privilege and to have the browning of America."
That is clear-cut racism, hands down.
2) During a Feb. 27, 2006 phone call about the scarcity of jobs and contracts going to New Orleans residents, O'Reilly opined: "The homies, you know...I mean, they're just not going to get the job."
That is clear-cut racism, word up.
3) During the Katrina debacle in 2005, O'Reilly said that "many of the poor in New Orleans" did not leave the city before Katrina hit because "they were drug addicted" and "weren't going to get turned off from their source" as they were "thugs."
Which proves that MSNBC's military analyst William Arkin was a lot closer to the truth than Bill O'Reilly.
"[Blackwater] has close ties to the Bush administration and the Republican Party and the US intelligence apparatus. Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater USA, worked in the Directorate of Operations at the CIA for 28 years...Blackwater is only one of the network of corporations with close connections to the Bush administration that have profited from the destruction of Iraqi society, to the tune of billions of dollars...."
Black's also a bigshot in Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
Don't you think "the folks" should be aware of such facts, O'Reilly?
United Auto Workers on Strike Against GM
The striking auto workers are fighting for jobs, retirees' health care, pensions, and wages. I n other words, issues of importance to "the folks." With all of O'Reilly's anti-Big Oil demagoguery, you'd think some of that Factor "populism" would translate into a measure of sympathy for the striking auto workers and their struggle to defend their jobs, health care, pensions and wages against the greed of auto executives, speculators and large investors.
But the only thing we've heard from Mr. Friend of the Folks about this crucial working class fight is the following: "What are they striking for?"
Things a multimillionaire who identifies with the corporate elite could never understand.
Straight from the horse's mouth, indeed. Which proves even Greenspan is a lot closer to the truth than Bill O'Reilly, because the war is not about weapons of mass destruction, September 11, Al Qaeda, spreading democracy, stabilizing the Middle East, or any other lie Bill O'Reilly has helped George W. Bush tell to Americans.
O'Reilly Leads the Charge Against Ahmadinejad
From "Terror at Ground Zero" (Talking Points Memo, 9/20/07):
O'Reilly: "Here's what I don't like about the Iranian government:"
O'Reilly is attempting to make the case to prohibit Iranian president Ahmadinejad from visiting Ground Zero.
"It is giving bombs to Iraqi terrorists and American soldiers are dying."
There's no evidence Iran has given bombs to anyone in Iraq. There is irrefutable evidence that Washington has "given" thousands of bombs to the Iraqi people, causing many tens of thousands to die. American soldiers are dying because Iraqis are resisting Washington's illegal invasion and occupation, as is their right under international law. Iran didn't force Washington to send 160,000 US troops into Iraq.
"It funds Hezbollah, which started a war with Israel during which thousands of civilians were killed."
Hezbollah has been a popular Lebanese Shia resistance movement since the 1980s. It was formed in reaction to Israel's illegal occupation of southern Lebanese territory by Shia followers of Iranian revolutionary leader ayatollah Khomeini. In the face of massive US military aid to Israel, the Lebanese Shiites have a right to receive support from wherever they can get in order to defend themselves from Zionist aggression.
Hezbollah did not start the war with Israel in 2006 when it captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Rather, it was the pretext for an aggression that had long planned by Tel Aviv and Washington. The former's goal is to turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate. The latter's goal is to ruthlessly and violently reorganize the Middle East so as to eliminate all obstacles to US imperialism's control of the region's oil and gas reserves.
Spare us your crocodile tears for the deaths of Lebanese civilians. The vast majority were killed by Israeli weapons. Israel intentionally targeted the entire Lebanese civilian community, unleashing indiscriminate firepower that destroyed en tire villages and turned hundreds of thousands into refugees.
"It is providing sanctuary to Al Qaeda big shots, including bin Laden's son."
Iran's denied this, and Washington has shown no proof of this. This claim is coming from the same US intelligence community that lied through its teeth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Anyone who believes anything uttered by the US government is a fool.
In fact, Iran actually cooperated with Washington's efforts to crack down on Al Qaeda after 9/11. Tehran was rewarded by being included on the Axis of Evil and placed in the crosshairs of US imperialism's military might. The truth is there are far more links between Washington and Al Qaeda--and between the Bushes and bin Ladens--than ever existed between Tehran and Al Qaeda.
"It is a fascist state, where dissent is punished and women are denied many freedoms."
O'Reilly throws "fascist" around liberally only to distract us from his fascism. Iran is not a fascist state; it is a semi-colonial capitalist state ruled by a reactionary Islamic theocracy. Iran's workers and peasants will deal with their capitalist rulers as they join the worldwide struggle for socialism. Most of America's allies are brutal despots; Washington has overthrown democratically elected governments (like Iran in 1953) and installed bloody tyrants, like the Shah of Iran.
The United States is not a fascist state, yet as the capitalist crisis deepens, it is becoming increasingly authoritative and repressive, punishing dissent--like firing Ward Churchill, which O'Reilly supported--and denying women their rights, including the hard fought right to reproductive freedom, which is increasingly under attack and unavailable to working class women, much to the delight of Bill O'Reilly.
"It is actively trying to destroy Israel."
Tehran, reflecting the sentiments of its people, is strongly opposed to Israel actively trying to destroy Palestine. Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" quote has been deliberately mistranslated to distort what he really said--that the political entity of Israel--an exclusively Jewish state that has wiped Palestine off the map--is itself an illegitimate, apartheid-like, racist, colonial settler state that is guilty of monstrous atrocities against the Palestinian people. Israel should be dismantled and replaced by a democratic, secular state of Palestinians with equal rights for all believers and nonbelievers alike.
"It is actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon, which puts the world at risk."
No, it is actively trying to develop a nuclear power program, as is its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which, unlike Israel, Iran has signed. What puts the world at risk is Washington, which has 10,000 nuclear weapons and is the only government in the world that's actually dropped atomic bombs on human beings.
"...The cold truth is that Ahmadinejad is a terrorist himself. If Iran would stop funding killers, much of the killing in Iraq would stop. The USA has been talking to Iran for months about calming the violence in Iraq and is getting nowhere. Iran wants Iraq to be a cauldron of death."
Bush is a far more lethal terrorist than Ahmadinejad will ever be. The killing in Iraq would stop if the US invasion force--directly and indirectly responsible for the approximately 1 million Iraqi deaths--would leave that tortured country. Iran did not invade Iraq with 160,000 troops and the most sophisticated and lethal military firepower in history. Iran has not littered Iraq with depleted uranium. Iran did not destroy much of Iraq's infrastructure. Iran is not responsible for the cholera outbreaks now reaching Baghdad. Iran has not sent storm troopers on house to house searches, imprisoning thousands of Iraqis in torture chambers. Iran does not want Iraq to be a cauldron of death. Iran does not want a hostile American force on its borders. Iran does not want Iraq to be used as a launching pad for aggression that will slaughter many thousands of Iranians.
The American people have been pleading with Bush to "calm the violence" in Iraq and have gotten nowhere. No one wants Iraq to be a cauldron of death--except Bush, the capitalist class he represents, and all those fools in this diseased body politic who support him.
..."On 'The Radio Factor' today, I received just one call disagreeing with my analysis. And that caller said I oppose Ahmadinejad because I am 'a front for the News.' Nice to know the mentality of Americans who are sympathetic to Iran."
Nice to know the mentality of Americans who listen to "The Radio Factor."
And while O'Reilly may not be a front for the Jews, he is a front for the Zionists.
Calls SF student "biggest wimp in USA" who "wanted the cops to do it"
Andrew Meyer's had more balls when he was 15 than the cowardly punk O'Reilly has now.
And so do the University of Florida students who angrily marched the next day, shouting "Hey hey! Ho! Ho! Police brutality's got to go!" and "What do we want? Free speech! When do we want it?
O'Reilly's just mad that so many Americans agree with Meyer that Bush should be impeached.
O'Reilly has continued to show what a low-class, wretched piece of shit that he is by selling "Don't tase me, bro" bumper stickers on his Web site. This from an individual who writes books giving advice to kids on how to build their character.--Oct. 10, 2007
Fellow Reactionary Dennis Miller Gleefully Joins O'Reilly in Humiliating Meyer
Don't worry about it, Andrew. The graves of Miller and O'Reilly will be pissed on, and when this news is communicated to the world, most of humanity will have a good laugh and thoroughly enjoy the collective humiliation of this pair of miserable wretches.
Socialists condemn this brutal assault and outrageous violation of Meyer's constitutional right to free speech. As the International Students for Socialist Equality put it:
"Behind the attack on democratic rights lies the growing social polarization in America—a country where students are forced to take on huge debts, record numbers of working families are thrown out of their homes, and millions are driven into poverty as a result of corporate downsizing, while hedge fund managers rake in billions of dollars a year. The indifference of Kerry to the treatment of Meyer reflects the real attitude of the politicians of both parties—many of them millionaires like Kerry—to the people.
"As opposition to the war in Iraq and future wars escalates, combined with social anger over growing inequality and economic insecurity, the response of the political establishment will be repression. The apparatus has already been set up, with the support of both parties, in the vast expansion of domestic spying and the buildup of the police powers of the government."
To which we reply:
Drop All Charges Against Andrew Meyer! Jail the Thug Cops Who Tasered Him!
O'Reilly: "...He's the biggest wimp in the United States of America....And I don't say that with any bravado, but the overreaction to being tasered--it's not--it's an electrical shock is what it is."
Yeah, an electrical shock. Except an electrical shock can kill you, moron. That's why a 56-year-old woman is dead after being Tasered 10 times by 10 more thug cops, who also should be indicted and taken off the streets.
From "Reputation of U.S. Military Under Siege by Hollywood Hotshots" (Sep[tember 4, 2007):
"Now for the top story tonight, two brutal attacks on the U.S. military, not by terrorists, but by American citizens. The first grenade was thrown by actor Tim Robbins."
This is classic O'Reilly demagoguery employing an Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality--otherwise known as "spin." The Pentagon's leading propagandist and cheerleader accuses those trying to stop its brutal attacks against defenseless people of being the ones committing brutal attacks. Tim Robbins did not throw a grenade; he did not commit a brutal attack; he didn't kill anyone. He exercised his constitutional right to dissent from his government's illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign, defenseless nation.
Robbins: "We've invaded a country, we have created chaos and disorder, we've killed over 400,000 of their citizens, we've privatized their industries, and we plundered their oil resources. Do you really think they're going to be welcoming us there for the next five years?"
Robbins makes five claims regarding the US government's illegal aggression in Iraq. Four of them are factually accurate, which is why O'Reilly avoids them like the plague: "We've invaded a country"; we have created chaos and disorder"; "we've privatized their industries"; and"we plundered their oil resources."
The one Robbins claim that O'Reilly attempted to dispute--the number of Iraqis killed by the US invasion--is of course impossible to pinpoint given the chaos permeating Iraq, which is why estimates of Iraqi deaths ranges from the Iraq Body Count.org's 77,000 (cited by O'Reilly) to the 655,000 estimate (as of last year) by the prestigious British medical journal, Lancet. This discrepancy primarily results from different methodologies used by the two organizations. The IBC relies on reported deaths--a less than precise methodology in a country wracked by turmoil and upheaval, where the central government does not control much of the country and where the US occupiers don't do body counts. As the IBC admits in a disclaimer on their web site:
“We are not a news organization ourselves and like everyone else can only base our information on what has been reported so far. What we are attempting to provide is a credible compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources. Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths—which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war” (emphasis in the original). [As reported by James Conachy in his World Socialist Web Site August 5, 2004 article, "Survey claims 37,000 Iraqi civilians killed in first seven months of war".]
Lancet employed the scientifically accepted and rigorous practice of cluster surveys of Iraqi households. This study estimated direct US military operations caused about a third of this total. Robbins may have been referring to a portion of Lancet's estimate or to another estimate.
While the "far-left" IBC has characterized Lancet's findings as inflated and based on unrepresentative data, it would not endorse O'Reilly's belittling of Robbins' use of the higher estimate in order to justify the illegal and immoral aggression Washington has waged in Iraq. As they wrote in their October 16, 2006 press release, "...totals of the magnitude generated by this [Lancet] study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy."
O'Reilly: "...let's begin with Tim Robbins. We know what he says is crazy--400,000 and who is killing them, Michelle [Malkin]? I mean, obviously, it would have to be the U.S. military killing 400,000."
Considering the fact that in the first weeks of the invasion alone, about 800 cruise missiles, more than 18,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles, 9,000 "dumb" bombs, 300,000 rounds from A-10 "Warthog" ground support aircraft, tens of thousands of tank and ground artillery rounds, along with massive amounts of machine gun and small-arms fire, yes O'Reilly, that would be the US military behind all the killing. It wasn't Cuba, Russia, or China that invaded Iraq with that kind of firepower.
O'Reilly: "Now according to the far left, Iraqbodycount.org website, and this is a far-left website, 77,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Not 400,000, 77,000. And of course, most of them have been killed by jihadists and terrorists."
No, not of course. This last statement is O'Reilly's opinion, not the IRC's. All of the violence and death taking place in Iraq today is a direct result of the US invasion and occupation that began in 2003.
The IRC earns the "far left" label from O'Reilly because they are keeping track of civilian casualties, which makes it harder for Pentagon apologists like O'Reilly to sweep under the rug the horrible toll inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US aggression
The truth is the violence perpetrated on the Iraqi people by the US occupiers has killed about 1 million people, caused millions of refugees and essentially destroyed Iraq's society.
And Bill O'Reilly should be tried before an international war crimes tribunal for aiding and abetting these atrocities.
Which means Lancet and Tim Robbins are a lot closer to the truth than Bill O'Reilly, who, along with George W. Bush, will go down as one of the most vile and hated scoundrels in American history.
What do you expect? One went to Yale; the other went to Harvard.
Accountability is in the Eyes of the Spinner: Hypocrisy and Double Standard Rule the No-Spin Zone
"Even college professors have to be held accountable for their performance."--Bill O'Reilly on Colorado University's firing of Professor Ward Churchill, July 25, 2007
"There's not going to be any accountability for this president, except in the historical realm--history will judge him."--Bill O'Reilly to Bill Maher, August 21, 2007 [History's already judged him. So have the vast majority of the planet.]
Ultraleft formulations about 9/11 by a professor is constitutionally protected free speech. Churchill's "performance" had nothing to do with his firing. It was his controversial views regarding September 11--that US foreign policy had something to do with the attacks; that given Washington's criteria for justified military targets, the WTC could be regarded as a legitimate military target by those whose nations have been obliterated by US firepower; that those who worked in the higher echelons of the US corporate empire/war machine housed in the WTC were no different than Hitler's technocrats.
Whatever his flaws, not the least serious of which is his acceptance of Washington's official story that 9/11 was executed by Islamic warriors from Afghanistan caves totally beyond the pale of US and Israeli intelligence, Churchill was doing what good teachers should be doing--provoking his students to think for themselves and challenge society's conventional wisdom. Churchill told no lies that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Bush's "performance"--telling lies to wage illegal, barbaric military aggression that kills hundreds of thousands and destroys a defenseless country; attacking democratic rights; shredding the Constitution by committing torture; eliminating habeas corpus; gutting the Fourth Amendment by illegally spying on Americans, these crimes are not protected by the US Constitution.
The American people should not wait for "history" to judge this monster. We should arrest, try, convict and sentence this demented sadist NOW. Along with his leading media propagandist--Bill O'Reilly.--August 27, 2007
Readers should compare O'Reilly's "The Demise of Ward Churchill" with the World Socialist Web Site's Shannon Jones's: "The firing of Ward Churchill: Attack on academic freedom in US escalates."
From the article by Jones: "At the best of right-wing politicians and media types, behind which stands the Bush administration, the University of Colorado has fired a professor because of his political views." [emphasis added] The most prominent "media type"standing behind the Bush administration's assault on academic freedom and democratic rights is Bill O'Reilly.
Jones demolishes O'Reilly's claim that Churchill's firing was all about "performance," not free speech.
For weeks O'Reilly's been waving his own private jihad against the DailyKos Web site, ahistorically comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Benito Mussolini, and David Duke because it traffics in hate in the same manner as these reactionary, racist, white supremacist forces. "No difference," O'Reilly glibly pronounced.
First of all, the editors and contributing writers on the DailyKos are very much in the mainstream liberal wing of the Democratic Party. They are not fascists or white supremacists, and they don't advocate lynching Blacks as the Klan did. The Kos editors may hate Bush for waging an illegal war of aggression against Iraq by telling lies and breaking US and international law, but NOTHING on their site advocates gas chambers, illegally invading sovereign countries.
However, while Kos may not be fascists, they're not as democratic as their liberal allies crack them up to be. Witness the revelation that the Kos actually barred antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan from the site because she has the audacity and courage to attack the Democrats for their complicity in the monstrous aggression against the Iraqi people and the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, and challenge Nancy Pelosi for not trying to impeach Bush. No, this doesn't qualify Kos as fascist, but it does show how undemocratic the Democratic Party really is as US capitalism continues its inexorable turn to the right that sparks a concomitant collapse in bourgeois democracy and undermining of its basic principles--including free speech, habeas corpus, protection against cruel and unusual punishment, like torture.
In barring the courageous Sheehan from its site, the Kos editors are only aping their mentors in the Democratic Party who aggressively attempt to bar socialist parties from the ballot.
But that's not why O'Reilly calls the DailyKos hate-mongering fascists. You see, in O'Reilly's twisted world of the No-Spin Zone, "hate" means a number of different things. First, it includes those who hate George W. Bush. Bush is justifiably hated by broad layers of Americans and the majority of humanity because he instituted torture, gutted habeas corpus, illegally spied on Americans, and above all lied to Americans while breaking US and international law in launching a brutal, bloody, illegal war of aggression against the defenseless people of a sovereign country that posed no threat to the US but which possessed huge oil deposits and a strategic position in the Middle East.
Second, to O'Reilly, a "hater" is anyone who militantly and passionately articulates a fact-based argument that demolishes O'Reilly's blowhard demagoguery.
Third, a "hater" is anyone who steps outside the lines of what O'Reilly's considers "permissible dissent" by openly challenging the precepts and validity of US capitalist supremacy and its God-given right to enforce its hegemony worldwide.
Fourth, O'Reilly's use of "haters" refers to the broad layers of the US working people who've turned to the left and oppose Bush and the Iraq war, smell the stench of 9/11 and suspect governmental complicity or indifference, oppose attempts to dismantle Social Security, and support universal health care.
O'Reilly Attacks DailyKos for Racy Image--Then Plasters it on His Show
This is exactly O'Reilly's M.O. regarding pornography. While he rants and raves against porn's deleterious effects on society's moral fabric, O'Reilly is the biggest smut peddler on the airwaves.
The photo in question is a doctored depiction of a grinning Senator Joseph Lieberman on his knees before George W. Bush and on the verge of reaching into the latter's pants. Sexually suggestive satire, slightly inapproriate; but not as lewd as half the images O'Reilly shoves in his viewers' faces, and in fact is a clever political metaphor accurately describing Lieberman's slavish support of Bush's military aggression in Iraq.
O'Reilly omits the fact that his parent company, News Corp, owns myspace.com, former home to 29,000 convicted sexual offenders.
Meanwhile, O'Reilly's Web site was filled with postings threatening Hillary Clinton's life, even after O'Reilly lied to his audience that they had been removed.--August 5, 2007
More soon on Michael Moore and Sicko, Ward Churchill, Rage Against the Machine, and how calling for Bush and Cheney's execution AFTER being tried and convicted by an international war crimes tribunal is not the same as advocating their assassination, let alone taking steps toward that objective.
Traditionalist, God-fearing, Roman Catholic Bill O'Reilly Ignorant of Own Religion
During one of his recent McCarthyite-style attacks against Jet Blue and the Daily Kos, O'Reilly listed several observer comments from the latter that supposedly constituted evidence that the Web site spews hate just like the Nazis. One of these comments (which O'Reilly falsely attributed to the site's author) said this: "Yes, the Pope is a primate."
O'Reilly led his viewers to believe the source of this quote was calling the Pope an ape or monkey. The truth is that the first meaning of "primate" in Webster's Ninth Dictionary is "a bishop who has precedence in a province, group of provinces, or a nation."
Every night O'Reilly proves how intellectually bankrupt he really is, even regarding his own religion. His nuns must be turning over in their graves, or doing handstands in heaven, depending on one's perspective.--July 20, 2007
For weeks O'Reilly's been waving his own private jihad against the Daily Kos Web site, ahistorically comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Benito Mussolini, and David Duke because it traffics in hate in the same manner as these reactionary, racist, white supremacist forces. "No difference," O'Reilly glibly pronounced.
First of all, the editors and contributing writers on the Daily Kos are very much in the mainstream liberal wing of the Democratic Party. They are not fascists or white supremacists, and they don't advocate lynching Blacks as the Klan did. The Kos editors may hate Bush for waging an illegal war of aggression against Iraq by telling lies and breaking US and international law, but NOTHING on their site advocates gas chambers, illegally invading sovereign countries.
However, while Kos may not be fascists, they're not as democratic as their liberal allies crack them up to be. Witness the revelation that the Kos actually barred antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan from the site because she has the audacity and courage to attack the Democrats for their complicity in the monstrous aggression against the Iraqi people and the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, and challenge Nancy Pelosi for not trying to impeach Bush. No, this doesn't qualify Kos as fascist, but it does show how undemocratic the Democratic Party really is as US capitalism continues its inexorable turn to the right that sparks a concomitant collapse in bourgeois democracy and undermining of its basic principles--including free speech, habeas corpus, protection against cruel and unusual punishment, like torture.
In barring the courageous Sheehan from its site, the Kos editors are only aping their mentors in the Democratic Party who aggressively attempt to bar socialist parties from the ballot.
But that's not why O'Reilly calls the Daily Kos hate-mongering fascists. You see, in O'Reilly's twisted world of the No-Spin Zone, "hate" means a number of different things. First, it includes those who hate George W. Bush. Bush is justifiably hated by broad layers of Americans and the majority of humanity because he instituted torture, gutted habeas corpus, illegally spied on Americans, and above all lied to Americans while breaking US and international law in launching a brutal, bloody, illegal war of aggression against the defenseless people of a sovereign country that posed no threat to the US but which possessed huge oil deposits and a strategic position in the Middle East.
Second, to O'Reilly, a "hater" is anyone who militantly and passionately articulates a fact-based argument that demolishes O'Reilly's blowhard demagoguery.
Third, a "hater" is anyone who steps outside the lines of what O'Reilly's considers "permissible dissent" by openly challenging the precepts and validity of US capitalist supremacy and its God-given right to enforce its hegemony worldwide.
Fourth, O'Reilly's use of "haters" refers to the broad layers of the US working people who've turned to the left and oppose Bush and the Iraq war, smell the stench of 9/11 and suspect governmental complicity or indifference, oppose attempts to dismantle Social Security, and support universal health care.
More soon on Michael Moore and Sicko, Ward Churchill, Rage Against the Machine, and how calling for Bush and Cheney's execution AFTER being tried and convicted by an international war crimes tribunal is not the same as advocating their assassination, let alone taking actions toward that act.
Bush to Tillman Family: Go to Hell!
White House Coward Hides Behind Executive Privilege
Not much, because Bill O'Reilly helped Bush cover up and spin this tragic story by not covering it, preferring to spend a disproportionate amount of airtime shoving lewd and pornographic images in the faces of his viewers; generating hatred and intolerance of gays, immigrants and Muslims; and urging the slaughter of innocent civilians from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Appears Mother's Original Suspicions Were Accurate
It's all part of O'Reilly's "noble" US military. It looks like US imperialism's war command is so good at training bloodthirsty, psychotic killers they can't stop themselves from killing their own.
What say you, O'Reilly?
We know what he'd say, the same as the other rightist scum are already saying: that this is all part of the far-left conspiracy to make Bush and the military look bad. First, Bush and the military needed no help from any imaginary conspiracy to look bad here. As usual, they were caught lying through their teeth by governmental documents. Army lawyers congratulated themselves over the initial successful coverup; they took no direction from a left wing conspiracy. Second, I'd go with Tillman's mother before Bill O'Reilly, who was wrong on WMD, Iraq's connection to bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, NSA spying, Jessica Lynch, among other things.--July 30, 2007
O'Reilly: It's "insane" to "cluster" gays near kids
"Insensitive," "dumb," "a mistake," and "inappropriate" that "Thousands of gay adults showed up and commingled with straight families"
Proving Bill O'Reilly is a hate-mongering homophobe whose books and broadcasts are polluting the minds of American youth.
Blasts San Diego Padres' sponsorship of gay pride night and a kids' hat giveaway promotion as "social engineering"
Evoking images of a fascist O'Reilly regime rounding up gays who cluster too close to children. Think Pink here, not pinkos, but Pink Floyd, from their 1979 classic, "The Wall":
Are there any queers in the theater tonight? Get them up against the wall! There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me, Get him up against the wall! That one looks Jewish! And that one's a coon! Who let all of this riff-raff into the room? There's one smoking a joint, And another with spots! If I had my way, I'd have all of you shot! ["In the Flesh," Roger Waters]
"But you are focusing in on putting more homosexuals into an area. OK? See, that's the problem...You're putting it in the kid's face at a baseball game"
No, O'Reilly, YOU are focusing in on putting more homosexuals into an area. Got it, simple man? See, that's the problem...YOU are putting it in the kid's face on your program every night.
You sick fuck. If I had my way, I'd have all of YOU shot. [metaphorically speaking]--July 12, 2007
"[T]his guy who is charged has a child and a wife. You know, he's like white-bread guy. And we're all going, 'What is that?' "
Proving Bill O'Reilly is a flat-out racist.--July 12, 2007
O'Reilly to American People: You Can't Handle the Truth
Tells Col. Hunt He Doesn't Care if Americans are Dying, Let Alone Iraqis
June 24, 2007--Face to face with the reality that the US is facing defeat in Iraq, that despite his nonstop spin on behalf of Bush, the current White House occupant is the most loathed president in US history, that everything he has said about Iraq has been proven wrong, Bill O'Reilly is a very confused and demoralized individual, reduced to incoherent babbling such as in the following June 12th exchange on the Radio Factor with frequent FOX guest and military hack Col. David Hunt :
"No, if they Iraqis aren't going to help themselves in Baghdad, then we have to pull back and let them--whatever happens, happens. We can't abandon the region. We have to stay there to make sure the Iranians and the Al Qaeda don't run wild, but Baghdad is Baghdad, and they gotta sort it out."
Translation: If the Iraqis aren't going to pacify themselves in Baghdad, then the US has to tactically retreat and let Iraqis slaughter themselves, because the American public won't tolerate US casualties forever. Things are so bad for US imperialism that O'Reilly is reduced to echoing the views of Cong. John Murtha, Hillary Clinton, and other leading Democrats.
O'Reilly: "...is there any value to you, as an American, not as a military analyst to see the latest atrocity du jour. Do you want to see that?"
Hunt: "Yeah, we've got to disagree on this one Bill...I care about the bomb in Tikrit if it kills American so ldiers. That's why I think it's important, and I--we've got guys in combat--we seem as a nation--I'm not hitting the press, but as a nation, we've turned our back on this."
O'Reilly: "All right, now do you believe that the strategy of the terrorist is to have that happen so it will be shown on American television, just as the Vietnamese strategy was to break the will of the American people?"
Note how O'Reilly glibly and ahistorically equates the Vietnamese people with terrorists; an apt observation from a leading propagandist and mouthpiece for US imperialism, which views anyone who resists its military aggression as a terrorist.
The strategy of any occupied people is figuring out how to defend their sovereignty and repulse the aggression of a foreign invader, no matter what caliber of political leadership they are blessed or saddled with. It's true that the Vietnamese Communists, despite their Stalinist deformations and flaws, had a touch more internationalism and political awareness than the current Iraqi national liberation leadership, a hodge-podge of Baathists, nationalists, bourgeois Shiites and Sunnis and a sundry of Islamic fundamentalists. Ho Chi Minh was well aware that the international antiwar movement objectively helped his people's fight against the imperialist invaders. lIt's also true that in Vietnam there was a socialist revolution occurring alongside the armed resistance to the US invaders, a little tidbit that O'Reilly will never let his viewers in on, because after all, he is a simple man.
Hunt then agreed with O'Reilly that Vietnam's strategy of turning US public opinion against the war by causing unacceptable US casualties had worked. But Hunt suggested that the Pentagon should be able to rely on the massive resources available to the US rulers to employ enough propaganda and misinformation to keep hitching the American public to US imperialism's wars.
O'Reilly derisively dismissed that notion: "...No, I know. We disagree on this...I think Americans understand that soldiers and Marines are dying. I think they know they die in explosions."
Hunt: "It's too easy to forget, Bill. Look at the people in VA hospitals." {Shush, Col. You're not supposed to mention Washington's mistreatment of its own soldiers in the No-Spin Zone. You know how hard it is for Bill to spin away US imperialism's blatant failures, such as the criminal neglect of the soldiers used as cannon fodder for Wall Street's rule.}
O'Reilly: "Aah. Ya know. I don't --I'm not buying it."
Hunt: "It's too easy to forget."
O'Reilly: "I don't think so."
Hunt: "They're not our sons and daughters. They're somebody else's. Look at the treatment in VA hospitals. It took the Washington Post to bring that up....{O'Reilly is visibly wincing now, aware that The Factor and Fox News did their best to downplay the Walter Reed outrage}
O'Reilly: "Look, if you did that in World War II or even in Vietnam, the peole would have been so horrified that the wear would have been a different situation. People's capacity to absorb other people's pain is limited, and on a big thing, yes. But every day, the same thing; here's another explosion. There's no news value to it, Colonel. There's just no news value to it..."
July 30, 2007 Update:
Welcome to O'Reilly's school of journalism: if you don't like what's happening, if it undermines and contradicts everything you've been saying--then don't report it!
O'Reilly on Reports US Air Strikes Killed Afghan Civilians: Who cares? So what? It's an isolated occurrence
O'Reilly on Romney: "...that guy looks presidential. He's got the jaw going on, the little gray thing in there. And I think that means a lot in America."
You would expect this level of sophisticated political analysis from the same windbag who predicted that the US invasion of Iraq would bring peace to the Middle East.
Not to be undone, fellow rightist Dennis Miller chimed in with this illuminating observation:
"...Not only does he look good. He's good at what he does ["invented Staples...understands a step-by-step business plan"]
Just what working people need in the White House. Another greedy capitalist who knows how to run a business--ie, would use all the resources and power levers of the federal government to carry out a massive assault on the wages and living standards of workers. No thanks, Miller. And just what is your income bracket? No doubt up there with O'Reilly in the millions, and no more qualified than O'Reilly to speak on behalf of "the folks."
Indeed, O'Reilly and Miller were accurately articulating the perspective of the capitalist class they represent and fight for in the public arena. In a system of fraudulent, undemocratic elections designed to hoodwink workers into believing capitalist politicians represent workers, good looks and personality are all that matter. And Miller is only voicing the sentiments of most capitalists--they'd prefer a businessman, perhaps one shrewder than Bush, who knows how to most effectively exploit workers.--May 31, 20007
Proudly Admits His Membership in White, Christian Male Power Structure
"...On the other side, you have people who hate America, and they hate it because it's run primarily by white, Christian men. Let me repeat that. America is run primarily by white, Christian men, and there is a segment of our population who hates that...power structure. So they, under the guise of being compassionate, want to flood the country with foreign nationals, unlimited, unlimited to change the complexion--pardon the pun--of America..." [emphasis added]--May 31, 2007
In case anyone still has any doubts:
"But do you [John McCain] understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number."[The O'Reilly Factor, May 30, 2007]
"Family Values" O'Reilly Backs Senate Immigration Plan That Will Tear Families Apart
No surprise from someone who sees nothing wrong with separating infants from their mothers' breasts. [I dare O'Reilly supporters to take issue with this statement.]
This reactionary, onerous, undemocratic and bipartisan immigration "reform" will also establish the temporary guest worker programs designed to intensify the exploitation of immigrant workers that O'Reilly loves so much.--May 20, 2007
Losing the secular war and the war in Iraq is getting to Bill O'Reilly. In the midst of his McCarthyite attack on General Wesley Clark for accepting money from "the most radical man in America"--billionaire George Soros--O'Reilly allowed Clark to box him into a place he did not want to be. After O'Reilly promised he'd have his "guys" FedEx Clark all the dirt on Soros, Clark responded, "That's character assassination!"
To which O'Reilly replied in a rare burst of honesty, "You bet it is!"
O'Reilly backtracked as fast as he, Bush, and Cheney ran from Vietnam, but the damage was done--another manifestation of Bill O'Reilly's public unraveling, itself a reflection of the political decline and growing weakness of the US capitalist class.
Wesley Clark is no friend of working people from the US to Iraq. The squabbles between he and Soros on one side and Bill O'Reilly on the other represent differences within the American ruling class over how best to exploit labor. The best that can be said about Clark and Soros is that they represent the more enlightened faction of US capitalists. But we'll give Clark points for helping O'Reilly make a fool of himself.--May 20, 2007
O'Reilly Admits He's a White Supremacist
Laments "unintended consequences" of Senate Immigration Measure: Loss of White Majority in US
There he goes again, getting himself so lathered up in a xenophobic froth over the bipartisan Senate bill that he doesn't even realize the unintended consequence of spotlighting his own white supremacy.
"The new census report says America's now one third minority. And in four states -- California, New Mexico, Texas and Hawaii -- whites are the minority. So with the infusion of as many as 20-30 million new citizens in the next 10 years the landscape of America will absolutely change."
O'Reilly: US shift to Left result of Soros money
Once again the Factor host reveals his contempt for US workers by explaining their leftist turn is the result of the political influence bought by billionaire George Soros' money. It's not that US workers realize they were lied to; it's not that we are beginning to sort through this mess and confronting the great void in US politics waiting to be filled by independent political action. It's not that American workers are starting to figure things out on their own and turning off demagogues like Bill O'Reilly.
No, O'Reilly's explanation is that US workers are being brainwashed by the sinister propaganda machine orchestrated by "far left" billionaire George Soros.
"I bet you the best dinner in the gas-light district of San Diego that military action [in Iraq] will not last more than a week." --Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03
This from the same genius who predicted that America's invasion of Iraq would bring peace to the Middle East. [Thanks to cartoonist Tom Tomorrow and Crooks and Liars.]
O'Reilly: "I went on facts and facts alone" in my support of Iraq war
Oh Really O'Reilly?
Not according to the meticulously recorded transcripts of your own words by Media Matters, along with the five years' worth of discussion on the Oh Really O'Reilly page of this Web site.
O'Reilly pushes "lone nut" take on Virginia Tech massacre to cover up responsibility of US militarism and the rotting of class society's foundations
"Those at the top of society are instinctively hostile to any in-depth examination of why this terrible incident took place. The same politicians and editorialists who insist that 'how we got into Iraq is not the issue any more, but only how America can be successful now we’re there' are also opposed to dwelling on the roots of the Blacksburg, Virginia, mass murder. For a simple reason: American society is responsible for those deaths." ["The malignant resentments that erupted into mass murder in Virginia", World Socialist Web Site, 4/20/07]
Choir Boy O'Reilly Revels in Imus's Downfall: Spew hate? Racist? Who Me? Never! I'm not like Imus; I'm morally uplifting
Bill O'Reilly's ugly xenophobic hysteria against Mexican immigrants--illuminated so vividly during his meltdown with Geraldo Rivera--was greeted with widespread revulsion in the bourgeois press. Denver Post journalist Joanne Ostrow accurately accused O'Reilly of "spewing racist bile" when he exploited the tragic deaths of two Virginia girls apparently caused by drunk driving to push his tirade against undocumented Mexican immigrant workers.
When O'Reilly sicced his flunky producer on Ostrow in a Denver parking lot to ask why she called him a racist, Ostrow replied she did so because O'Reilly characterized Mexicans as "illegal aliens" instead of "undocumented immigrants."
O'Reilly glibly dismissed Ostrow's answer, claiming the video clip proved Ostrow was unable to prove O'Reilly was a racist, unlike his MSNBC competitor, Don Imus.
The fact that O'Reilly's sweeping categorization of Mexican immigrants as criminal could be interpreted as racist by reasonable people escapes the dull-witted O'Reilly.
Ostrow could have pointed to O'Reilly's professed concern that the influx of immigrant from south of the border will result in "the browning of America."
That is racist.
Ostrow also could have reminded O'Reilly's obnoxious, stalking producer that his boss once referred to Mexican immigrants as "wetbacks."
"You know in a sane world, every country would unite against Iran and blow it off the face of the earth. That would be the sane thing to do." That's spewing hatred, moron.
"The homies, you know-- I mean, they're not going to get the job [reconstruction employment in post-Katrina New Orleans] That's racist hate mongering, a**hole.
"Many, many, many of the poor in New Orleans are in that condition. They weren't going to leave no matter what you did. They were drug-addicted. They weren't going to get turned off from their source. They were thugs, whatever." That's racist hate mongering, too.
See, O'Reilly's slicker than Imus. He didn't say Blacks or nappy headed hos. He said "poor in New Orleans." Translation: Blacks. And that too, is racist and hate mongering.
O'Reilly on the "permanent underclass"" ...three reasons, really, why people can't make a living. ...First reason: They are stupid, ill-educated, have never, ever taken an interest in acquiring knowledge about anything. So these are the people who are so staggeringly dumb, you can't hire them. Uncharitable? Yes. True? Absolutely.
"Two, the addicted. These are the homeless people you see scarfing money from you, OK? ...Can't hold a job because they have to be in a constant state of intoxication. And three, those with mental problems that society doesn't know what to do?"
That's more hate mongering: classic fascist demagoguery carefully crafted to turn workers against the most downtrodden layers of our class--the lumpenproletariat, as Karl Marx called them.
O'Reilly on Arab Sunnis uniting against Iran: "I want -- let them kill each other." That's hate mongering.
O'Reilly on Iraqi Sunnis and Shiia: "[They] want to kill each other. ...They have fun. This is, they like this. This is what Allah tells them to do, and that's what they do." That's hate mongering.
O'Reilly on Fellow Racist Hate Mongerer Michael Savage: "I like Savage. I think he's very entertaining."
Savage: "When you hear 'human rights.' think gays....[T]hink only one thing: someone who wants to rape your son." Hate mongering; homophobia. O'Reilly likes Savage and thinks he's entertaining. Kind of like Ann Coulter. Birds of a feather...
Savage on lesbians: "[They're ] jealous that they don't have an AIDS epidemic that they can cash in on ." Hate mongering; homophobia.
Savage on historic 1954 desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education: "Everything's about Brown v. Board of Education. It's sickening. I am so tired of the race thing, leave me alone already. In fact, [minorities are given priority treatment everywhere." Racist hate mongering. O'Reilly likes him.
Savage on Islam: "There's no difference between 'radical Islam and the rest of Islam over there.' " Racist hate mongering. O'Reilly likes him.
O'Reilly Agreeing with Caller that Each Mexican Immigrant Crossing Border "is a biological weapon": "I think you could probably make an absolutely airtight case that more than 3,000 Americans have been either killed or injured, based upon the 11 million legals who are here."
Racist hate mongering.
Imus Fired for Calling Rutgers Women Basketball Players "nappy headed hos"
O'Reilly to Co-Host Lis Wiehl: "it might be worth learning how " to dance for a $10,000 tip, ..."you're a good-looking girl. I mean, if you haven't seen Liz on TV, she's a good-looking blonde."
O'Reilly on New York cops' searching subway bags: ""Would you please--would you please bring in some security to do a full-body search on ...Lis Wiehl...Full-body search on Lis Wiehl right this minute. She asked for it."
[Thanks to Media Matters for the above O'Reilly quotations]
Wait until O'Reilly sees Oh Really O'Reilly--he'll have a heart attack. That sound you hear is humanity cheering.
O'Reilly's nervous breakdowns reflect unease among US capitalist class
What's freaking out O'Reilly and his bourgeois masters is not this or that Mexican national who commits a crime on this side of the border; it's the millions of Mexican campaneros mobilizing in US streets in defense of their rights--thereby strengthening the US working class as a whole.
Not content with exploiting the tragic deaths of nine kids and a mother in a recent Bronx fire to advance his reactionary anti-immigrant crusade, or the pain of a young boy kidnapped by a predator to further the concomitant attack on democratic rights, now O'Reilly is cynically using the deaths of two girls killed by drunk driving to intensify his vicious xenophobic campaign against immigrant workers. When Geraldo Rivera called O'Reilly on this "cheap political point," the latter exploded in uncontrollable rage.
It is this mentally unstable hatemonger--directly responsible for the imprisonment of political prisoner Sami Al-Arian and indirectly culpable for slaughter of innocent civilians from Iraq to Afghanistan--who should be removed from the airwaves immediately. At least Don Imus has a streak of humanity and decency beneath his veneer of racist buffoonery. His executive producer, Bernard McGuirk, is far more offensive, with his Ku Klux Klan hood, demeaning parodies of New Orlean mayor Ray Nagin, and comments like "bitch" Clinton will have "cornrows and gold teeth before this fight with Obama is over."--April 9, 2007
Read your Bible, O'Reilly:
When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
The proletarians of all countries have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!
Bonaduce, O'Reilly Play Hard Cop, Soft Cop on Rosie's 9/11, Brits' Detention Views
April 2, 2007--While O'Reilly only insinuated that ABC fire O'Donnell, former child actor-turned radio host Danny Bonadouche, called for Rose to be hung for treason.
What's causing O'Reilly, Bonaduce, John Gibson, Michelle Malkin, Popular Mechanics and other shameless apologists for the US government to melt down is the fact that a) Rosie expresses the views of the majority of Americans (70% in NYC, according to one poll) that 9/11 was an inside job, was allowed to happen, or was covered up by a phony whitewash 9/11 commission; and b) Rose is injecting these sentiments into the mainstream mass media, despite all the efforts of O'Reilly and the rest of these overpaid stooges of US imperialism to block the truth from the people by pushing the mother of all conspiracy theories--the myth that 9/11 was hatched from an Afghanistan cave by 19 Muslim terrorists who somehow escaped the radar of the intelligence agencies tracking them, carried out the operation with impunity despite the specific warnings it was going to happen, with the help of a US military standdown.
Ever get the feeling, O'Reilly, Bonaduce, Gibson, Malkin and Popular Mechanics, that you're plugging up holes in a dam, but that there are just too many holes to hold back the flood of evidence pouring out, even on The View?
O'Reilly on Rosie's British Sailor False Flag Theory:
"So according to Rosie O'Donnell the British set up their own people to be kidnapped to incite another war. This nutty theory..."
Nutty? Oh Really O'Reilly?
Then, explain, if you will, the following analysis from Stratfor, the US-based think tank that you have described as the most reliable intelligence source around:
“With this in mind, there have been recent indications from US and Israeli intelligence sources that the British MI6 was engaged in an operation to extract one of its agents from Iran, but a leak tipped MOIS [Iranian intelligence] off to the plan. According to an unconfirmed source, the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] nabbed the British [MI6] personnel, as well as the agent, to use as a bargaining chip to secure the release of the five detained Iranians. If these negotiations go poorly for Iran, the Britons could very well be tried for espionage.” [as reported by the World Socialist Web Site's Peter Symonds, March 29, 2007]
O'Reilly is either ignorant of or consciously suppressing from his audience any information about Operation Northwoods, the false flag operation proposed by the US Joint Chief of Staffs that involved wide-scale acts of domestic terrorism that would have resulted in civilian deaths in order to justify an invasion of Cuba.
World Can't Wait's Taylor Destroys O'Reilly on Torture
O'Reilly: "Give me one person who's been tortured by the US"
March 24, 2007--One day before Sunsara Taylor knocked out O'Reilly on the issue of US-inflicted torture, O'Reilly tried to discredit Reverend Bob Edgar from the National Council of the Churches of Christ for daring to suggest that torture is immoral. When O'Reilly badgered the unprepared Edgar into a corner by hounding him to "produce one person tortured by the United States," the Reverend could not think of a name but generally referred to the multiple images of torture by US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. O'Reilly gloated as if he'd scored points during the exchange.
First, O'Reilly's introduction of Edgar, which deserves commentary.
"The third group [of Americans on the war] believes the USA is immoral and the war in Iraq evil. These are usually far left fanatics like the socialists, who sponsored Sunday's peace rally in D. C."
Here O'Reilly, like all rabidly prowar imperialist ideologues, distorts the views of the vast majority of the third group, which believes the policies of the US government are immoral, not the "USA." And yes, the war is evil--an unprovoked act of aggression based on lies that has turned that country into a nightmarish hell, slaughtering hundreds of thousands, destroying the country's infrastructure, tortured and illegally jailed many thousands of its citizens, obliterated and poisoned social services like electricity and water, shooting Iraqi families at illegal checkpoints in their own country, etc. is evil. And most Americans want it stopped. They're not drinking O'Reilly's Kool Aid.
O'Reilly and the capitalist rulers he's looking out for are justifiably worried about the mass opposition to this war. What worries them is that most of the participants in the recent antiwar mobilizations--and the far larger protests that preceded the war--are ordinary, everyday Americans--working people, who responded to calls to demonstrate by socialists. Socialists. In the United States. Everyday folks are becoming "far left"--the real far left, not the fake far left O'Reilly's talking about when he describes The New York Times, a prowar capitalist newspaper that has helped Bush tell his lies that sold the war.
O'Reilly: "You can't produce one person who's been tortured by the United States. You cannot produce one. And neither can NBC News and neither can..."
Edgar: "Oh yes, they can."
O'Reilly: "No--well, where are they?"
Edgar: "...There are many examples..."
O'Reilly: Then give me one!"
Edgar: "I can give you hundreds..."
O'Reilly: "Give me one."
Edgar: "Human rights community all over the world has."
O'Reilly: "Reverend, here you're on coast to coast radio. Give me one person tortured by the United States. Go."
Edgar: "Bill, you're playing games..."
O'Reilly: "No games here, just facts. The far left opposes every measure instituted to fight terror."
Far leftists like COSMOS LEFT and other communists, along with millions of working people, students, farmers, progressives, civil liberties advocates, oppose torture because it is a form of terror that has nothing to do with preventing terror and will only cause more terror. And we don't like scoundrels like O'Reilly who employ euphemisms like "measure instituted to fight terror" to rationalize torture.
Iraqis in photo: Hey O'Reilly, we were tortured at Abu Ghraib by these grinning sadists who probably love you
O'Reilly: "But the truth is that Guantanamo is not a torture chamber."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
How about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? The person alleged to be him was waterboarded and tortured there. Asef Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul, Tarek Dergoul, Mamdouh Habib, and David Hicks?
Rasul and Iqbal have demanded the release of video tapes they claim captured the "interrogation techniques" they endured at the hands of US personnel.
Even FBI agents stated they had witnessed torture at Guantanamo.
O'Reilly: "The rights of Americans are firmly intact."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
As their phone calls and emails are tapped and opened illegally? With habeas corpus gone? With the 1st Amendment under severe attack, complete with "free speech zones"? With the Fourth Amendment gutted? When the President gives himself the right to lock up any American, declare him an enemy combatant, deny him counsel or a chance to see evidence and defend himself?
O'Reilly: "And while there have been cases of criminal abuse like Abu Ghraib, the USA is waging a war on terror that is honorable?"
Quit peddling the "few rotten apples" myth, O'Reilly, it's been long discredited. The widespread torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib was a cancer consciously brought to Iraq from Guantanamo, "Gitmoized" is how the torturers themselves characterized it. US forces tortured detainees from Abu Ghraib to Camp Cropper in Iraq to Camp Bagram in Afghanistan. Torture may be honorable to a moral degenerate and thug like Bill O'Reilly, but it offends the sensibilities of broad layers of US working people, who see through Bush and O'Reilly's phony "war on terror" for what it is--"a propaganda tool for justifying unprovoked wars of aggressopm abroad and terrorizing the American people and attacking their democratic rights at home"--as the World Socialist Web Site put it in "A tale of two cases in US 'war on terror': Jose Padilla and Chiquita Brands."
O'Reilly: "To slander this country is unacceptable to me and I believe to most Americans."
Moral outrage to torture is not "to slander this country." What is dishonorable and unacceptable is to swallow O'Reilly's pitiful apology for the torture being committed in the name of "most Americans."
I have a name. I was tortured.
O'Reilly tried to intimidate Sunsara Taylor with the same badgering tactic he used successfully on Rev. Edgar, but the politically sophisticated activist stopped him in his tracks. When he tried tripping her up with "What torture?" and "Give me names," Taylor obliged with Maher Arara, the Canadian who was seized by US authorities at Kennedy International Airport, chained, shackled and interrogated for 11 days before being turned over to Syria, where he was tortured into coerced confessions and released after 10 months. A Canadian investigation declared that Arar was tortured.
Washington, DC, 3/17/07
O'Reilly to Taylor: Why is no one in the streets protesting?
March 15, 2007--As Washington is ravaged by one scandal after another, from Walter Reed to the Bush/Rove/Gonzalez purge of US attorneys to the FBI's illegal spying courtesy of the Patriot Act, as stocks plunged on Wall Street due to fears that the entire mortgage industry and housing market could collapse, as Iraqis and Americans continue to die amidst the "surge," what was on Bill O'Reilly's mind last night after another Talking Points hackneyed right-wing assault on public schools?
Why, it was the fact that high school girls uttered the word "vagina" during a production of "The Vagina Monologues," of course.
This is not the work of a serious journalist "looking out for the folks." This is the "work" of a tabloid gossip monger seeking to drag working people's minds into the gutter with his.
But wait, O'Reilly did mention the US attorney purge last night--in the "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day," where he tried to blunt the damage to Bush by claiming Clinton's firing of attorneys in 1993 proved that a double standard was being orchestrated here by the "liberal press."
Except that as the World Socialist Web Site's Bill Van Auken pointed out, "While such wholesale replacements at the outset of a new administration are indeed normal, the selective firing of a group of US attorneys in the middle of a presidency is without precedent..."
And that, "...the firing of the federal prosecutors and the subsequent attempt at covering up the political motives involved are part and parcel of the Bush administration's attempt to erect the structure of a presidential dictatorship, subordinating all legal and constitutional matters to its own political aims and assuming ever more sweeping police state powers."
Yes, that surely merits consideration for the Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.
To paraphrase Oakland Raiders' owner Al Davis, "Just spin, baby."
Watch O'Reilly Crumble From the Weight of His Own Inhumanity
"O'Reilly, it was despicable to hear you question the status of those children. I was a big fan of yours but I'll never watch you again and I urge others who feel compassion for immigrants not to watch you as well."
Kudos to this clear-thinking American who never drank O'Reilly's Kool Aid, or if he did, he threw it up after seeing this latest manifestation of O'Reilly's barbarism.
O'Reilly had the balls to blame viewer Abraham's compassion for the tragic deaths of those nine kids, accusing his former supporter of "looking the other way while poor workers and children are exploited by greedy landlords and businesses, because you don't like the immigration laws."
Greedy landlords and businesses? But that's capitalism, O'Reilly, the system of private profit that you defend every night; the same system that you lecture workers is the American way that's here to stay.
O'Reilly: "...But for decades, our government has allowed people from all over the world to walk in here without supervision. That's why these children are dead, because their chaotic situation was ignored by New York City authorities."
Here the clueless O'Reilly indicts the very capitalist government he's always telling workers to give the benefit of the doubt when it comes to waging war, committing torture, violating civil liberties. But he says not a word about the city regulations that fail to mandate a fire escape or sprinklers in one- and two-family homes. And ask the tightwad O'Reilly if he's willing to pay higher taxes for public funding to help low-income homeowners make these life and death improvements.
As the March 12 World Socialist Web Site stated: "The causes of the deaths of nine children and a mother in a house fire are all too easy to understand. The growing social inequality in New York City, the overcrowding, lack of education, good jobs, adequate health care and astronomical rents are to blame.
"...There is a common political thread that runs through the Times' sins of omission--the Iraqi death toll, Walter Reed, Haditha. In every case, the refusal to seriously cover these developments served to shield the Bush administration and the war in Iraq itself from political exposure.
"Four years after the launching of the Iraq war, which the Times played no small role in facilitating, the newspaper continues to play the role of a loyal partner in defending the interests of the US ruling elite and in acting as a political gatekeeper in concealing or distorting facts to suit the needs of those in power."
That is an accurate description of The O'Reilly Factor.
The Times handled Haditha much like O'Reilly has the Walter Reed scandal--silence. They ignored it, hoping the massacre of innocents would go away.
As far as working people are concerned, the squabbles between O'Reilly and the NY Times are tactical differences on how best to defend capitalist profits and screw us.--March 25, 2007
If Wiehl has an ounce of self respect, she'll tell O'Reilly to go f*** himself after an ongoing series of degrading, sexist comments and now attacks on her professional integrity.
Classic O'Reilly Spin: Coulter's "faggot" slur against John Edwards equals Bill Maher's fact-based observation that Iraqis and Americans are dead because of Cheney
Maher was stating an objective fact. But like most lying war propagandists, Bill O'Reilly can't handle the truth. Cheney and his murderous posse from the think tank Project for a New American Century are directly responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq that has resulted in the deaths of at least 655,000 Iraqis and over 3,000 Americans. That fact comes from a reputable study by Johns Hopkins University, not some far-left Web site as O'Reilly falsely claims.
While O'Reilly loudly and repeatedly demanded that John Edwards fire two bloggers for anti-Christian comments on their Web sites, he refuses to condemn Coulter for her vile homophobic slur. In fact, he continues to post an "Ann Coulter's Column Free" advertisement on his O'Reilly Factor site! ("Get Ann's scathing commentary by email every week--Free!")
COSMOS LEFT doesn't exist to defend bloggers for bourgeois politicians, but only one of them wrote anything offensive to the Christian religion. The remark by Melissa McEwan was somewhat rhetorical, but it expressed a legitimate politicial point: "What don't you lousy motherf------ understand about keeping your noses out of our britches, our beds, and our families?"
That includes religious bigots like you, O'Reilly.
The other Edwards blogger, Amanda Marcotte ("What if Mary had taken Plan B [birth control] after the Lord filled her with his white, hot sticky Holy Spirit"), could learn a thing or two about the right way to combat religious prejudices from Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who wrote way back in 1919:
"The Party's object is to completely destroy the connection between the exploiting classes and organized religious propaganda and really liberate the working people from religious prejudices. For this purpose it must organize the most widespread scientific education and anti-religious propaganda. It is necessary, however, to take care to avoid hurting the religious sentiments of believers, for this only serves to increase religious fanaticism." [emphasis added]
Got that, Amanda? Spend less time fawning over a capitalist politician and more time studying one of the giants of the revolutionary workers movement and you'll do a better job "liberat[ing] the working people from religious prejudices."--March 10, 2007
March 15, 2007: Working people should not view Coulter as some kind of entertainment novelty act who has found her "schtick" and figured out how to market herself to fame and fortune. Coulter isn't some sideshow act who will go away if she's ignored. She's a deadly enemy of workers; an incipient fascist force reflecting the deepening class polarization in the US with millions of ultrarightists standing behind her.
This scum will be met and crushed at the barricades by the American version of the Red Guard--battalions of workers organized to defend ourselves against the kind of fascist terror already being advocated by Coulter and her ilk in an embryonic form.--March 15, 2007
O'Reilly's Hysteria Over Arkin's "Anti-military" Comments Reveal Crisis in Ruling Class
We'll have more to say about Arkin's remarks and O'Reilly's fascist-based tirade against Arkin, the Washington Post and NBC News.
But Arkin was right about mercenaries in Iraq--he just named the wrong culprits. It's not the volunteer soldiers. It's the 100,000 private contractors from companies like Blackwater USA and Dyncorp who are running amok in Iraq armed to the teeth, involved in torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, murdering civilians and corruption.
February 9, 2007--MSNBC military analyst William Arkin posted an article on the Jan. 30 Washington Post Internet site entitled, "The Troops Also Need to Support the American People" that took issue with several US soldiers in Iraq who recently criticized domestic opposition to the war.
Before analyzing how O'Reilly is distorting and spinning the above-mentioned article to simultaneously advance his fascist agenda and bash the competition at MSNBC, a word about Arkin. He is neither a "hater of the US military" nor a "far left loon," as O'Reilly falsely asserts. Unlike O'Reilly, he served in the US Army for four years. He has been a military analyst for over 20 years. He wrote for the Defense Daily. He was a professor at the US Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies. He authored or co-authored the Encyclopedia of the US Military; the US Military Online, the Nuclear Weapons Databook. Arkin was also an intelligence analyst for the West Berlin command. [Thanks to Chrish from Newshounds and thememoryhole.org]
That's some resume for a far left loon. In truth, Arkin is one of the more enlightened members of the bourgeois military intelligentsia. He criticizes aspects of US foreign policy when he believes its course is threatening the long-term interests of US imperialism. Arkin is not alone. A significant number of military, intelligence, and political figures well entrenched in the US political establishment feel the same way Arkin does, which is driving O'Reilly crazy.
It follows that Arkin is no friend of the working class, and COSMOS LEFT is no apologist for him. But his provocative article was flawed by sloppy formulations stemming from his political limitations, it nevertheless raised important issues that deserve serious analysis, not self-serving spin designed to advance a militaristic agenda that will condemn thousands more Americans and many more Iraqis to die.
Socialists reject the notion of German “collective guilt” for Nazism and we are no more tempted to subscribe to the theory of the “bad American”—in other words, that a broad swath of the US population has been so infected by the imperialist-chauvinist zeal of the human trash in the White House and Pentagon that it can only respond with unrestrained violence, particularly when confronted with oppressed peoples.
Quite specific social and economic processes have been at work, creating a layer of people who would find it difficult to resist carrying out the sort of horrific abuse inflicted on thousands of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers.
One must confront, in the first place, the role played by the “volunteer” character of the armed forces. The US ruling elite requires a fighting force that will not balk at criminal, bloody interventions around the globe. A precondition is the immunization, to the greatest extent possible, of the troops against progressive social ideas or even the feelings and critical opinions of the average citizen. The recruit is deliberately removed from his or her milieu, isolated and indoctrinated.
Moreover, viewed objectively, the soldiers as a group must reflect changes in American society, the general moral and cultural deterioration, the lumpenization of certain sections of the population in large and small cities alike. How many come from communities whose long-standing economic and social roots have been torn up? How many come from dysfunctional families and face dead-end lives?
The entire war in Iraq is an atrocity, a war crime, launched on the basis of lies. A definite environment has been created of blind patriotism and chauvinism. At one point polls indicated that 70 percent of the US population believed that Iraqis were responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks. No doubt a substantial section of the US military force in Iraq bought into the idea that they were battling “terrorists.” Entirely unprepared for what they face, thrown into a strange and hostile environment, American troops are likely to commit any number of crimes out of fear, exhaustion or demoralization.
Within that overall fighting force, furthermore, a certain selection is made. Not everyone is suited to be a military policeman or stand guard over detainees. Some have the background for it; some have what their commanders consider to be the right mentality.
In the end, whoever they are and whatever accidental elements may come into play, the perpetrators of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib are the product of American society and culture—or rather, the wholesale failure of American society and culture.
Given nothing
The specifically “porno-sadistic” character of the attacks on the Iraqi prisoners captured in the published photographs speaks to a level of cultural deprivation and backwardness that has reached alarming levels. Whatever their military objective may be, the acts committed suggest that their perpetrators have failed to pass through some critical phase in human development, that they suffer from arrested development.
What are we to make of men and women who sodomize defenseless prisoners with phosphoric lights and night-sticks?
[In progress]
O'Reilly: No friend of US soldiers
While O'Reilly is polluting the screen on a nightly basis with nonstop graphic talk of child predators and molestation, interspersed between a steady stream of lewd, soft porn images of scantily clad writhing women and leather-clad homosexual men, this so-called champion of US soldiers hasn't had much to say--if anything at all--about the squalid conditions facing hundreds of Iraq amputee veterans at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
O'Reilly is such a friend of US soldiers he couldn't bring himself to mention the plight of these vets in his March 1 Talking Points Memo that he had the balls to entitle, "Honoring Wounded American Veterans." Another Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of reality brought to you by the No-Spin Zone.
Beck May Be Next
If CNN"s resident fascist Glenn Beck keeps spewing this kind of racist vitriol, COSMOS LEFT may have a new right wing yokel to kick around.
Bill O'Reilly has been arguably the most influential media cheerleader for both George W. Bush and US imperialism's conquest of Iraq. As public support for George W. Bush and the Iraq war collapses, as it becomes clearer the former will go down as America's worst and most despised president and the latter as America's most humiliating strategic defeat, Bill O'Reilly seems increasingly frustrated, depressed, demoralized, discredited, pathetic and irrelevant. He's not even interesting any more. Indeed, he's almost boring--one reason why his ratings are falling. Make no mistake, however, he's still a mortal threat to working people, because along with Rush Limbaugh he has assembled a lunatic fascist base chomping at the bit to violent attack the working class and its allies.
But if we see any evidence that CNN's resident fascist Glenn Beck makes inroads among O'Reilly's working class supporters, "Oh Really O'Reilly" may give way to "Buck Beck" or "Beck the Bigot."--December 6, 2006
It didn't take long for Beck to reveal he's as intellectually empty and historically bankrupt as his fascist brethren Bill O'Reilly.
"Political correctness has its roots in the old Soviet Union. I don't know if you know this. Back then, in the beginning of the Soviet Union, if someone was caught saying something that was out of line with Lenin's thinking, according to Trotsky, they'd be taken away for re-education until they were politically correct. Political correctness has its roots in the old Soviet Union. I don't know if you know this. Back then, in the beginning of the Soviet Union, if someone was caught saying something that was out of line with Lenin's thinking, according to Trotsky, they'd be taken away for re-education until they were politically correct."--Glenn Beck, CNN Headline News, December 14, 2006
"The blood of our troops will be on the hands of Congress soon."--Glenn Beck, 3/08/07, commenting on the Democrats proposal to withdraw from Iraq by 2008.
Hey genius, the blood of US soldiers is already on the hands of Congress--and has been since they authorized Bush to wage this illegal, immoral monstrous aggression in 2002.
Here's another revelation, you repulsive ignoramus. The blood of US soldiers dead in Iraq is on your hands, Beck. Every limb lost and brain damaged is on your hands as well. And O'Reilly's, Coulter's, Hannity's, Savages, and every other flag-waving bigot who has blindly supported this war of imperialist aggression and helped peddled the lies that condemned those soldiers to kill and die there.
Beck: "How do these people [Congress] sleep at night? . . . If your bill goes through, I hope you can't go to bed any single night without the images of body bags of our American soldiers coming off those planes. I hope they dance in your head every single night . . . "
The question asked by most people on this planet is, How do you sleep at night, knowing your lies are directly responsible for the hell these soldiers are going through?
Know this, Beck: millions of people go to bed every night with images of your tombstone dancing in our heads. Yours, O'Reilly's, Coulter's, Hannity's, Savage's. We wish you death every night. Your deaths will be greeted with great rejoicing all over the globe.--March 9, 2007
O'Reilly: Anna Nicole More Important Than Iraq
On a day dominated by news from the Libby trial that he lied to protect Bush and Cheney's role in outing Joseph Wilson's CIA wife in retaliation for Wilson exposing their lies about Iraq buying uranium from Niger, the same day the Department of Defense Inspector General released a report accusing Rumsfeld stooge Doug Feith of pushing the line Iraq had WMD and ties to 9/11 when he knew this was "inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community," Bill O'Reilly devoted much of his show to the death of model Anna Nicole Smith.
And while his producers splashed lurid images of the blonde bombshell across the screen, O'Reilly had the balls and hypocrisy to whine about the media's obsession with Smith while US soldiers are dying in Iraq.
Report Suggests DC Mobilization was Gathering of Hollywood Celebs
Jan. 31, 2007--O'Reilly's spin didn't just distort the size and national scope of the protests. Judging from he and his producer's obsession with Hollywood celebs Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, one would think the only people at the DC protest flew in from Los Angeles on charter jets. If O'Reilly were a real journalist, he would have directed his producer to interview the workers, students, veterans and soldiers who constituted the vast majority of the crowd--as the reporter from the World Socialist Web Site did.
From "Behind the Get-Out-of-Iraq Movement" (Talking Points Memo, 1/29/07)
O'Reilly: "Over the weekend, tens of thousands of anti-Iraqi war people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. Not a huge showing, but a very intense, dedicated one."
It wasn't "tens of thousands." It was hundreds of thousands. Here O'Reilly parrots the mantra of the mainstream media of which he is a key player. It was a very intense, dedicated mobilization consisting of Americans from all over the country; that intensity and dedication is a reflection of the sentiment of a majority of Americans who want the US out of Iraq. O'Reilly failed to mention that in addition to the national character of the DC demonstration, local protests occurred in San Francisco, Austin and other cities in the US. He also left out that there have been huge antiwar showings beginning in February 2003 before the aggression began and continuing for several years after. It's true that the failure to stop the war fueled a degree of cynicism and despair, along with a sense that something more is needed than protests that only pressure the war criminals in power. What is needed is a mass socialist movement that challenges capitalism and fights for a workers and farmers government.
O'Reilly: "The gathering was sponsored by a group called United for Peace and Justice, made up of primarily far left Americans, who believe the USA is doing a bad thing in Iraq."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
The truth is the forces behind United Peace and Justice are not "far leftists" but reformists consciously trying to pass off the Democrats as a legitimate opposition party and vehicle for antiwar activism. UP&J attempts to keep the antiwar movement within the safe confines of the capitalist two-party monopoly in order to stave off the development of a anti-imperialist antiwar movement from the left that challenges the two-party shell game and proposes a socialist program that fights for US and international workers.
One doesn't have to be "far-left," or a member of UP&J, or a reformist, to believe that the US invasion and occupation has been a bad thing. You just have to be a human being with eyes, ears, brains, and a heart to grasp that when the most powerful military juggernaut in the world invades a defenseless country based on lies, an endeavor that has turned that country into a hellish nightmare complete with a devastated infrastructure and economy, mass joblessness, food and electricity shortages, 650,000 dead civilians, a nation littered with depleted uranium shells, shattered health care and educational systems,
Conversely, you have to be a coarse, insensitive thug to spin the above reality into a "noble thing," particularly when that "noble thing" has been sold on a pack of lies.
O'Reilly: "Now many of the protesters say the Iraq war is illegal and immoral. Of course, they are absolutely wrong about the illegal part. After the first Gulf war, Saddam signed a cease-fire, which among other things, allowed the United Nations to inspect his military operations. Saddam violated that part of the cease-fire 17 times."
"The suppression of this damning critique of the Iraq war, the conspiratorial methods of the Bush administration, and its drive to an even wider war in the Middle East is one more demonstration of the corrupt and reactionary character of the American mass media. It indicates that the establishment media is preparing once again, as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, to serve as a sounding board for the administration’s war propaganda and lies."
That includes you, Bill O'Reilly, along with the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Nice company you keep.--Feb. 3, 2007
"Unless the White House is involved, this isn't a major story."
So said Bill O'Reilly on September 30, 2003, commenting on the then-breaking story about the vengeful outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose July 2003 NY Times article criticized Bush for stating in his State of the Union speech that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger--after Wilson told the White House his CIA-sponsored trek to Niger found no evidence that was true.
Every day brings new evidence that a whole lot more than Cheney's scribbling implicates Bush in the Plame scandal.
If readers are awe-struck by O'Reilly's visionary sagacity, remember this is the same individual who predicted America's invasion of Iraq would bring peace to the Middle East.--February 1, 2007
O'Reilly's Justification for More US Casualties in Iraq: Another 3,000 Americans must die so that the first 3,000 didn't die in vain
O'Reilly: If US pulls out of there, "tens of thousands will die"
650,000 have already died because the US went in, you stupid moron.--January 24, 2007
At last, public opinion mobilizes against the venomous, contemptible Bill O'Reilly. Looks like O'Reilly's blame the victim tirade against Hornbeck pissed off a whole lotta people.
What a humiliating defeat for the author of The O'Reilly Factor for Kids--rejection by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.--Feb. 9, 2007
Not a peep of concern from Bill O'Reilly over the barbaric snuff video of Hussein's lynching by a sectarian mob. And not a word from the author of The O'Reilly Factor for Kids about the tragic news that the television broadcast caused four children to hang themselves, including the 10-year-old child of Guatemalan immigrants.
And this hypocritical thug has the nerve to blast rap music for corrupting kids.
Detailed analysis of O'Reilly's "The Execution of Saddam Hussein" and "Blaming America for Hussein's Execution" will follow.
The Execution of Saddam Hussein (Dec. 28, 2006)
O'Reilly: "...We learned while we were in Iraq a couple of weeks ago that Saddam was being held near Camp Victory on the outskirts of Baghdad by U.S. forces. But, since the Iraqi justice system has condemned Hussein to death, the Iraqis themselves will execute him. And that's good because the people Saddam brutalized should take care of him."
That would be you, Bill O'Reilly. Governments don't send 150,000 troops halfway around the globe for sentimental or lofty reasons. They don't do it to spread democracy, overthrow dictators, liberate peoples, or find weapons of mass destruction that aren't there.
They do it for power. They do it to dominate strategic regions rich in the most valuable natural resource to the world economy.
They do it for oil, stupid.--January 15, 2007
O'Reilly in Iraq: He's Looking for More Than a Few Fascists
Dukakis be proud: O'Reilly's version of Gidget goes to Baghdad
You can go to all the "Camp Victories" you want, O'Reilly. No amount of publicity stunt photo-ops with the troops will reverse the fact that US imperialism is suffering a humiliating strategic defeat in Iraq.
Hitler's stock-in-trade was to blame Germany's bankrupt liberal elites for its military defeat in World War I by stabbing in the soldiers in the back. This is emerging as a lynchpin in Bill O'Reilly's strategy to build a 21st century fascist movement in the US. The liberal elites and Bush haters are selling out our brave troops who are under great stress trying to kill the Islamic terrorist bad guys, according to O'Reilly. As the consummate American national chauvinist, O'Reilly leaves out the fact that it may be stressful for Iraqis to watch a foreign occupying force of 150,000 troops accompanied by the most devastating firepower in history invade your country, slaughter hundreds of thousands of your countrymen, destroy your infrastructure and economy, contaminate your land with depleted uranium, break down doors in the middle of the night, terrorizing your women and children while dragging the men off to be held indefinitely in torture chambers.
Of course, it is stressful to be part of an occupation force that has illegally invaded a defenseless sovereign nation and which faces a hostile population that doesn't appreciate being the recipient of murderous aggression.
Faced with plummeting support for the war and the embarrassing collapse of George W. Bush's presidency, Bill O'Reilly decided it was time to head for a friendlier audience that may be more receptive to his unrestrained militarism--the rank and file of US imperialism's armed forces.
O'Reilly Adds to War Crimes Dossier; Admits he's no mere journalist expressing First Amendment views but an integral cog in Washington's murderous military juggernaut
"If Iraq, something dramatic happens there—which may, by the way. I can’t tell you. A lot of the stuff that was told to me when I was in Iraq last week was off the record. But I got to tell you they gave me enormous access. I was stunned at how much access they gave me. I mean, I sat in at the highest- level briefings. I think they liked me. [Of course they did, Bill; the imperialist brass recognizes what a boot-licking media propagandist/stooge you are] I don’t think they would have let most journalists do that. But it was all off the record and I agreed to that. But it was fascinating to see it. So I think there’s going to be in the next—not before Christmas but shortly after the New Year there’s going to be some dramatic action in Iraq. I believe that’s going to happen." --Bill O'Reilly, 12/20/06 [emphasis added]
And as if we needed more confirmation that Bill O'Reilly is headed for the dock at a war crimes tribunal, O'Reilly provided it on his December 5 Radio Factor program:
O'Reilly: Let's slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians for their oil
"The United States will never be conquered by Muslims--ever." [Revealing the extent of O'Reilly's virulent racism and chauvinism against Muslims. He should have said that Iraq will never be conquered by the US. But that truth has no place in the No-Spin Zone.]
"But you don't want it to reach the point where, we have to, example you know, level cities like Tehran kill hundreds of thousands of people, which we may have to do--which we have already done in Germany and Japan. OK? [NO, it's not OK.] We have already killed hundreds of thousands of people on one day. Now do we want to do that again? Of course not, but we may have to.
And then he admits these atrocities would be committed for oil--not WMD, not 9/11, not spreading democracy, not stabilizing the region, but for OIL:
"Example: If Iran takes over Iraq and then fosters a revolution inside Saudi Arabia, which Iran wants to do, and overthrows that kingdom and gets control of all the oil and says we're not selling to the USA, we are going to level that country, because you...need gasoline to live..."
The fact that O'Reilly has no problem with Hussein's snuff video reveals he is a bloodthirsty thug lacking all moral fiber and a liar for claiming he's against the death penalty. O'Reilly must have forgotten what he learned in Catholic school from his nuns, who must be turning over in their graves and proud of the fact their student reacted to Hussein's execution with less dignity and humanity than the dictator himself.
January 4, 2007--O'Reilly's got a tough job--hoodwinking US workers into supporting criminal wars of aggression that only fatten the coffers of US capitalists who own Raytheon, Bectel and Halliburton while sending young workers home in coffins. Central to this sordid, reactionary agenda is convincing American workers that the US was founded as a Christian nation. Thus, in order to spin contemporary history, O'Reilly must falsify American history. Some patriot. This makes it easier for the US ruling class to send us off to kill Middle East and Central Asian Muslims in order to steal their oil.
This is why O'Reilly wrote in his December 14th column that "the separation of church and state argument" is "bogus" due to the fact that it "does not appear anywhere in the Constitution."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
Is that why the Founding Fathers placed the Establishment Clause--which prohibited the establishment of religion--in the First Amendment? Is that why Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1802 letter that the very purpose of the Establishment Clause was to build "a wall of separation between Church and State?"
Indeed, as the World Socialist Web Site pointed out in a September 200 article, the "wall of separation" was at the center of the political revolution that accompanied the armed struggle for independence from England. As the WSWS explained in a 2001 article:
"The American Revolution is a landmark, not only in the struggle for democratic rights, but in the struggle to liberate the minds of men from the oppression and backwardness of religious dogma. There is no mention of Jesus in any of the 'fundamental documents' of the Revolution, and religion itself is discussed only in the prohibition of its establishment, in the First Amendment."
As for O'Reilly's claim that "if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would mock these secular fools and then retire to his Virginia estate for dinner," consider these two quotes from Jefferson himself:
1) "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own"; and
2) "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Jefferson, like many of the Founding Fathers, was a deist, but all of them were imbued and motivated by the underlying principles of the European Enlightenment that opposed religious tyranny and clerical domination of the state, which is why the revolutionary American republic was founded on a secularist legal code.
How Sweet it Is
Jefferson may have been a deist, but he was far more tolerant of religious diversity than Bill O'Reilly. It seems that the first Muslim ever elected to the US Congress, Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, was sworn into office on the very Koran owned by none other than Thomas Jefferson.
This has further confused an already disoriented O'Reilly, reduced to increasingly irrational ravings and relying on body language experts as he pathetically tries to grapple with the fact that most Americans oppose the Bush policies so rigorously defended by O'Reilly--the Iraq invasion and occupation, torture, illegal detentions, illegal spying, and the gutting of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, illustrated by Bush and Company's elimination of habeas corpus.
"This is a secular society!" --Bill O'Reilly, Jan. 5, 2007
This from an individual who wages a nightly crusade against "Secular Progressives" (SPs) he claims are destroying the moral fabric of traditional American values that are based on Judeo-Christian values. It seems that when it comes to respecting the traditional religious beliefs of Muslims, O'Reilly finds secularism isn'g so bad after all. The inspiration for this born-again secularist? Well, when O'Reilly heard about the Minneapolis Muslim cab drivers who objected to passengers with open liquor bottles or dogs, O'Reilly discovered secular sensibilities inside him he never knew he possessed.
Lenin on Religion
As we watch George W. Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and the Christian Right attempt to strip the US of its secular progressive foundation and violate the 1st Amendment by imposing a nonexistent Christian basis to the Constitution, it is illuminating to reflect on what Russian revolutionary leader Lenin had to say on the subject of the separation of church and state and its relevance to the class struggle:
"As regards religion, the policy of the R.C.P. [Russian Communist Party] is not to be confined to decreeing the separation of the church from the state and the school from the church, that is, to measures promised by bourgeois democrats but never fully carried out anywhere in the world because of the many and varied connections actually existing between capital and religious propaganda.
"The Party's object is to completely destroy the connection between the exploiting classes and organized religious propaganda and really liberate the working people from religious prejudices. For this purpose it must organize the most widespread scientific education and anti-religious propaganda. It is necessary, however, to take care to avoid hurting the religious sentiments of believers, for this only serves to increase religious fanaticism."
--From the 1919 Draft Programme of the R.C.P. (B) [Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)], "Section of the Programme Dealing with Religion," as quoted in Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 134.
Unhinged over the news that Vermont just elected "socialist" Bernie Sanders to the US Senate, the Harvard-educated O'Reilly couldn't resist teaching his students his version of what socialism is all about:
"...They [Vermont voters] elect a socialist...Bernie Sanders, our pal. OK, now, Bernie Sanders, in case you don't know what socialism is, advocates seizing private property, yours, Wendy, mine, everybody's and giving it to whoever the government deems it should be given to. That's what socialism is. No private property...."
In one brief paragraph, O'Reilly manages to a) express his contempt for Vermont's working people and democracy; b) lie about Bernard Sanders' politics and c) distort socialism's position on private property.
Bernard Sanders is an "independent" who caucuses with the Democrats and is considered a Democrat for committee assignments. He is firmly entrenched in the left wing of the Democratic Party. Sanders' "democratic socialism" is the Social Democracy of the Second International, which died a painful death in 1914, when Europe's Socialist Parties voted for war credits that endorsed the first world imperialist slaughter, a treacherous act that condemned tens of millions of workers to die for capitalist profits.
From that point on, the Second International was no longer a revolutionary and internationalist workers organization. It was now "democratic socialist," that is, a treacherous reformist and national chauvinist perspective that tells workers socialism can be peaceably and gradually achieved through bourgeois elections; The "democratic socialism" of Bernard Sanders represents a political corpse as far as the proletariat is concerned, but a vibrant and useful instrument of capitalist rule. Sanders' job is to keep workers safely within the confines of bourgeois politics and prevent them from turning to independent working class political action. Sanders' message to workers is that revolution is not necessary; just elect enough Bernie Sanders and we can vote in socialism. This disarms workers politically by denying the class struggle and the necessity for workers to take the reins of power away from the capitalist class and putting them in the hands of working people. In other words, Sanders miseducates workers on the importance of state power, and which class wields it.
O'Reilly's statement that socialists will seize all private property is a blatant, conscious deliberate lie also designed to prevent workers from embracing socialism. Here O'Reilly is conjuring up nightmarish visions of Pol Pot-style "communists" marching into workers homes to take all their private property, like televisions and other consumer items.
O'Reilly: "We had a report on the Iraq situation on the rundown this evening. But when President Bush postponed his meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, we postponed the segment, as well." [Most Ridiculous Item of the Day, 11/29/06] [emphasis added]
Oh Really O'Reilly?
"Maliki canceled a meeting with Bush and King Abdullah II of Jordan, planned for Wednesday, at least in part to appease his Shiite critics at home.The prime minister was also clearly angered by the White House leak of a memo, summarizing the results of a visit to Baghdad last month by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, suggesting that the Iraqi leader was either incompetent or dishonest because of his opposition to a military assault on the Mahdi army, the Shiite militia that controls Sadr City." [Patrick Martin, "Bush-Maliki summit: White House rejects any withdrawal from Iraq," World Socialist Web Site, 12/1/06] [emphasis added]
O'Reilly Favorites Malkin, Ingraham Join His Fascist Media Brigade
November 17, 2006--For more than 5 years, Oh Really O'Reilly has warned US workers that Bill O'Reilly is one of the most dangerous individuals in the US and a mortal political threat to our class, not just because he spreads hate, fear, bigotry, chauvinism, sadism, and unbridled militarism on a nightly basis; not only because he defends torture and urged the slaughter of Iraqi and Afghani civilians; not just because he called for the destruction of the United Nations and San Francisco; not because he whips his legions of deranged followers into a hate-filled frenzy before his phony wink-wink plea not to commit violence; but because he has used his media position to assemble a fascist cadre itching to physically liquidate political opposition to US imperialism's war drive.
Now two of his favorite guests and political allies, ultraright pundits Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham are in hot water for engaging in O'Reilly-like extralegal activities. Malkin, obviously inspired by O'Reilly, published the phone numbers of Santa Cruz University students who had organized protests against military recruiters. Death threats against the students predictably followed. Malkin, a particularly odious specimen posing as an intellectual heavyweight, authored a book that defended the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II to pave the way for rounding up Muslims in a similar manner today.
Laura Ingraham is another right wing cretin who will go down in history with blood on her hands for her passionate cheerleading for Washington's criminal aggression in Iraq. Ingraham's in trouble for urging her radio listeners to jam the phone lines of a Democratic Party voter assistance hotline. Ingraham has as much respect for democracy in the United States as she does in Iraq.
The fascist storm threat is brewing. All types of reactionary bile are rising to the surface. They know that the sea change in the masses' consciousness reflected in the Democrats November 7 triumph is but a portent of the working class resistance to come. They know that a mass base of fascist cadres willing to use themselves as a battering ram against labor, communists, antiwar activists and all opponents of US capitalism.
Right wing blogger Pam Atlas (Atlas Shrugs) advocated killing all State Department diplomats before they kill us by not killing enough Palestinians, a clumsy attempt to impress readers with her paraphrase of William Shakespeare's famous quote from King Henry VI. Except Pam only reveals her literary ignorance--Shakespeare, in giving that line to anarchist follower Dick the Butcher, was making the point that the first thing a dictator must do to end freedoms is to kill all the lawyers. Perhaps Pam sat alongside Bill O'Reilly at Harvard.
Now we learn that the California man who allegedly sent threatening letters containing phony anthrax to Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, David Letterman and Nancy Pelosi is a proud member of the ultrarightist Free Republic website, where his bio reads, "I am a lifelong Conservative Republican. I have an Associates Degree in the Science of Electronics. Ann Coulter is a Goddess and I worship Laura Ingraham and Michele Malkin.
My, my. It all comes around again. What a tangled web they weave. Let's see: Olbermann, Stewart, Letterman and Pelosi are regular targets of O'Reilly. Coulter and Ingraham are two Factor regulars and co-thinkers of O'Reilly. Like Gore Vidal says, "There are no conspiracies. Only coincidences."
Americans Repudiate Bush, Media Whores like O'Reilly Who Helped Sell Iraq War With Lies
Looks like Cindy Sheehan is closer to the folks than right-wing loon O'Reilly
Voters reject South Dakota abortion ban; mininum wages raised in several states; Missouri approves stem cell research, rejects Limbaugh and O'Reilly's crude, classless attempt to smear Michael J. Fox and referendum sponsors Jim and Virginia Stowers
Or, as the World Socialist Web Site put it in their November 9 article, "Rumsfeld's firing: first casualty of post-election crisis in US, "The elections are an indication that the right-wing political and media apparatus that the establishment has utilized to manipulate public opinion has broken down..."
That includes you, Bill O'Reilly.
From "Donald Rumsfeld Out After the Votes Are Counted" (Talking Points Memo, Wednsday, November 8, 2006)
"The secretary of defense was the latest casualty of the IRaq war, which gravely wounded the Republican Party in Tuesday's vote...."
What a revealing choice of words from a mouth dripping with Iraqi and American blood--"casualty" and "gravely wounded"--given that Bush, Rumsfeld and O'Reilly's monstrous aggression in Iraq has gravely wounded close to a million Iraqis and Americans.
"Talking Points believes most Americans revere the U.S. military."
The US military is not a church to be revered or worshipped, O'Reilly. COSMOS LEFT believes most Americans don't view "the military" as a monolothic, homogenous institution. They recognize the difference between the rank and file soldiers and the military brass lording over them--a distinction recognized by the ranks as well. In other words, the "U.S. military" is divided by class--like every other institution in contempotary capitalist society.
The ruling class and its media do glorify military service in order to hoodwink working class Americans into dying for corporate profits. To the extent American workers buy into this mythology, they are motivated by well intentioned if misguided support for the notion that the US military exists to protect America. Americans do not appreciate when their soldiers are sent off to kill and die in wars based on lies. And despite 10 years of O'Reilly's sometimes effective propaganda, Americans do not cotton to the idea of US soldiers torturing prisoners or shooting entire families dead in their homes.
O'Reilly: "Most of us feel terrible when Americans are killed or wounded on the battlefield..."
We don't just feel terrible--we are outraged that more than 20,000 Americans have been killed or wounded for lies that O'Reilly helped peddle. And many of us have still have enough humanity left to care about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or wounded in this imperialist slaughter.
"...but the Iraq situation isn't about ideology."
Oh, but it is about ideology--the ideology of capitalist profits; the ideology of imperialist domination of an oil-rich semi-colonial nation; an ideology put into murderous practice by the most ideological faction of the US capitalist class today--the so-called "neoconservatives." In fact, a leading neoconservative and central architect of the Iraq war, former US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, admitted in 2003 that the US invaded North Korea instead of Iraq because the latter "swims on a sea of oil"--an admission that in recent days has been echoed by George W. Bush and none other than Bill O'Reilly himself, when he told David Letterman that "the whole world is about oil."
O'Reilly: "Most Americans don't want to cut and run..."
You don't speak for most Americans, O'Reilly, despite your delusions of grandeur that you do. Most Americans. Most Americans don't want a crime to be perpetuated. Most Americans don't want Washington lying to them to win support for an illegal and immoral invasion of a defenseless country, and then committing war crimes in the name of the American people. More Americans are realizing that it's the criminals who launched this aggression who will be doing the cutting and running. The American people will be standing up for what is right by putting an immediate, unconditional halt to a wrong.
"...They understand that would put America in great jeopardy."
False. Americans are understanding that it's Bush and O'Reilly who have put America in great jeopardy.
"But after three and a half years, Americans are still dying every day and many voters believe there's no strategy for victory in Iraq..."
On what basis does O'Reilly make this claim? Once again, he falsely speaks for voters. Once again, he illegitimately attempts to narrow the debate on behalf of the capitalists he works for. How does he know that many voters weren't repudiating the Bush/O'Reilly notion of "victory in Iraq." This is not a Super Bowl game. The invasion and occupation of Iraq are war crimes that violate international and US law. Many voters have a problem with the very concept of conquering Iraq on behalf of US big business. They don't want Halliburton, Bechtel, and Exxon/Mobil to win in Iraq.
"...If visible progress had been made in Iraq, [the overwhelming Republican defeat] would never have happened."
And if my aunt had whiskers, she'd be my uncle.
O'Reilly: "Now the unintended consequence of the power shift in D.C. is that some Democrats will try to impose a secular-progressive agenda on the country."
Unintended consequence? Earth to O'Reilly: On November 7, the American electorate intentionally voted out the radical right agenda that the Republican/Christian fundamentalist axis of evil tried to impose on agenda. This fact escapes O'Reilly's No-Spin Zone because it contradicts his false thesis that most Americans are "traditionalists" who share his revulsion for secular progressives. Wrong. Most Americans are secular progressives who are fed up with Bush trampling on the bedrock Constitutional principle of separation of church and state.
"First, there will be an attempt to raise taxes--Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel will lead that."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
Then why did Rangel tell reporters recently that the Democrats would not "retroactively roll back the tax cut" [World Socialist Web Site, "Election campaign reveals Democrats' lurch to the right," Nov. 1, 2006]
"Second, new speaker Nancy Pelosi will encourage investigations of the Bush administration, seeking to create a scandal which would help the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008." [emphasis added]
Oh Really O'Reilly? Is that why Pelosi assured 60 Minutes that impeachment was "off the table" and "a waste of time"? And Pelosi doesn't have to seek "to create a scandal," given 9/11, Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, illegal spying, Enron, Abramhoff, Foley, etc.
"But that could backfire on the Democrats as most Americans do not want Mr. Bush attacked."
Oh Really O'Reilly? Then why do recent polls show most Americans want Bush impeached for warrantless wiretapping and invading Iraq on the basis of lies? This includes an MSNBC online poll which showed 87% of Americans support impeaching Bush for these and other crimes against the American people.
Fascist Demagogue O'Reilly Stumps Pathetic Liberals With 1 Question:
"Do you want the US to win in Iraq?"
David Letterman: "First of all, I don't...It's not easy for me because I'm thoughtful...No, but uh-I, uh, What I would like would be uh, for uh, uh Americans to stop dying in that part of the world. Now if that means an American victory, ok..." In other words, Letterman couldn't answer O'Reilly's simple question, and to the extent he mustered a mealy-mouthed reply, he ended up endorsing a victory for Washington in Iraq--O'Reilly and Bush's position. So if you can't educate yourself to articulate a cogent alternative viewpoint to O'Reilly, then put a lid on it, because you're only letting O'Reilly score points. On your show.
Rosie O'Donnell: "I don't think it's possible...I think it's an ill-thought-outplan and I think we should get out of that situation before Americans are killed. Out. Out of Iraq." [Before Americans are killed, Rosie. Where the fuck have you been?--CL]
O'Reilly tries again: "Do you want America to win in Iraq?"
Joy Behar (View co-host): "What does it mean to win?"
O'Reilly: "I want America to be what the founding fathers wanted it to be, a democracy, where we the people--" [That's wonderful, Rosie, but what does that have to do with the question?--CL] O'Reilly: "So you don't want America to win in Iraq."
Barbara Walters (View co-host): "No, no, no. don't put words in her mouth." O'Reilly: "She won't answer the question, Barbara. She won't answer the question. Do you want America to win there?"
O'Donnell: "Listen, it's like saying do you believe in God or the devil. If you're not with us, you're against us. That's antiquated thinking, Bill. Peace and harmony --"
Peace and harmony? Hey Rosie, lose the '60s rhetoric. And quit stealing Jack Nicholson's "antiquated thinking" line from Easy Rider. Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of liberalism than O'Donnell's pathetic attempt to sound intellectual. Rosie, you're so clueless, you make O'Reilly look like an intellectual heavyweight. Just like John Kerry makes George Bush look smart. There's a connection here. O'Donnell and Kerry are embarrassingly contradictory and incoherent on the subject of Iraq because they face the identical political dilemma--they can't intelligently distance themselves from Bush because they are with Bush on subjugating Iraq for US capital!
The above exchanges demonstrate how liberals are incapable of opposing imperialist wars, defending democratic rights, and politically defeating the growing ultrarightist movement in the US--which also explains why they can't answer Bill O'Reilly's fascist demagoguery. Since only revolutionary Marxists can cut through the double talk of liberals and explain the real reasons the US invaded Iraq, only we can take on O'Reilly and expose the underlying fascist dynamic of his politics. Thus, when O'Reilly asks Marxists if we want the US to win in Iraq, we answer forthrightly and without hesitation: No!
Because there's not ONE United States. There are two: capitalist America and working class America. And it was the capitalists who invaded Iraq--to control its oil and use it as a beachhead to dominate the oil rich Middle East. This is a capitalist war, an imperialist war, in which only capitalists profit from. Workers--Americans and Iraqis--die for capitalist profits. A defeat for the US capitalists in Iraq is a victory for working people everywhere. A victory for the US exploiters would make it easier for them to launch murderous wars of colonial aggression against Syria, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.--November 6, 2006
Anything to say, O'Reilly? You were quick to lead the rest of the prowar, ruling class media jackals in seeking to exploit Pat Tillman's death to bolster Washington's war drive. Care to bring in Colonel David Hunt to help spin this for Bush and his brutal colonial wars?--October 28, 2006
Shocking Levels of Ignorance, Deceit and Incompetence--Even for O'Reilly
O'Reilly on Iraq: "Isn't it interesting that Iraq now -- this Muslim country that 10 years ago nobody even heard of...is now impacting how we live in America"
Yes, it's positively fascinating that this "Muslim country"--which was the most secular Arab/Muslim country until Bush invaded in 2003--has impacted how we live in America. Even more fascinating is how that illegal invasion of a defenseless country has impacted how Iraqis live in Iraq, especially since it's slaughtered over 600,000 of them, destroyed their infrastructure, contaminated their land, among other accomplishments.
But even more interesting--and revealing of O'Reilly's ignorance and incompetence--is his contention that nobody had even heard of Iraq 10 years ago. That might apply to persons born 10 years ago--unless their daddies had been one of the 268 Americans killed 5 years before in a little tidbit of history known as Desert Storm. You know, the first Gulf war, the one that killed another 200,000 or so Iraqis.--October 28, 2006
Oct. 28, 2006--A key component of that left-wing myth must include the testimony of General David Richards, NATO's commanding officer in Afghanistan, who recently warned that the country was at a "tipping point" in that 70% of its citizens could switch their allegiance to the Taliban if their lives don't improve under the US-led occupation that has caused a social and humanitarian disaster.
The Voice of America (VOA) must be part of this left-wing conspiracy as well, evidenced by their August 2006 report that said in part: "Throughout the country, every type of attack is on the rise--from roadside bombs and suicide attacks, to massive raids on government outposts involving up to several hundred well-armed insurgents". (James Cogan, World Socialist Web Site, 8/30/06)
The title of Cogan's article tells it all: "Alarm in Washington over deepening disaster in Afghanistan." And if you think that's because Cogan is just another left-wing myth maker, consider his reference to a statement in the British Financial Times that the headlines coming out of Afghanistan have never been so bleak."
Cogan wrote: "Afghan officials told VOA that there could now be as many as 40,000 guerrillas fighting against the occupation forces and the Afghan army. Extensive US and Pakistani military operations have failed to prevent insurgent groups using them ountainous regions along the Afghan-Pakistan border as a safe haven to rest, resupply, train and recruit. Large areas of the predominantly ethnic Pashtun provinces of southern and eastern Afghanistan are outside the Kabul government's authority and regularly fall under the sway of Taliban forces."
O'Reilly likes to quote from authoritative imperialist thinktanks like Stratfor. No doubt he missed this one from the European-based Senlis, quoted by Cogan in his September 11, 2006 piece, "NATO in disarray over deepening military crisis in Afghanistan":
“Afghanistan’s security situation is unravelling. The international military coalitions have failed to realise the expectations they created in 2001. Both US-led Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (NATO-ISAF) have missed the opportunity to bridge the gap between the Western and the Muslim worlds. On the contrary, they are currently fuelling frustration and resentment among the Afghan population who increasingly distrust the US and NATO-ISAF forces they first welcomed with hope.”
O'Reilly Lies, Distorts Carter's Criticism of Bush on North Korea
Carter's Right from Perspective of
Class He Represents
O'Reilly Guilty of His Accusation Against Carter--Deceitful Omission of Facts
From "Deceit or Delusion: What Say You, Jimmy Carter?" (Talking Points Memo, Oct. 11, 2006):
O'Reilly: "As we've been telling you, it's been getting harder and harder for Americans to get the truth about anything because of ideology. You can't rely on the media anymore for truthful in formation. And that's dangerous for the country. You can't make intelligent voting decisions without facts."
Translation: Since every lie I helped Bush tell about Iraq has been exposed, Americans aren't listening to me any more, which means stupid voters are going to elect Democrats this fall.
Alternative translation: After 9/11, Americans were bombarded with so much ideologically driven jingoistic propaganda by spinmeisters like Bill O'Reilly that a majority wrongly believed WMDs were found in Iraq Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks.
O'Reilly: "Enter Jimmy Carter. Today, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about North Korea. According to Carter, who helped negotiate a deal with the North Koreans in 1994, the bargain was swell. No problems.
"The former president writes: 'The summit talks resulted in South Korean President Kim Dae-jung earning the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful efforts to ease tensions on the peninsula. But beginninning in 2002, the United States branded North Korea as part of an axis of evil, threatened military action, ended the shipments of fuel oil...and refused to consider further bilateral talks.'
"So according to Carter, the North Korean problem today is because of the Bush administration was mean to North Korea without reason.
"What Carter leaves out is that the deal he made under President Clinton's banner, fell apart. Simply put, the North Koreans cheated. They took our money and food and developed nukes anyway. Carter leaves that out of his article. Incredible."
What O'Reilly leaves out is that the US has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests to North Korea's one. What O'Reilly leaves out is the US has over 10,000 nuclear warheads poised to launch from jet bombers, missile silos and submarines, while North Korea has at most a handful of primitive atomic warheads with no delivery systems. What O'Reilly leaves out is that the US invaded Korea to prevent the latter's reunification, killing millions of its citizens. During that criminal war, American generals and two Amerian presidents, Truman and Eisenhower, favored using nuclear weapons against the Korean people. What O'Reilly leaves out is that four years after the armistice, the US endangered the entire Korean peninsula by placing thousands of nuclear weapons on its soil and in its seas for 35 years until Seoul demanded they be withdrawn. What O'Reilly leaves out is that a 2002 media leak of the Pentatgon's "Nuclear Posture Review"showed that Washington was ready to use nuclear bombs against North Korea.
Given the fact that the US never formally ended its war with North Korea and continued to blockade it, Pyongyang refused to renounce its right to seek nuclear weapons to deter further aggression against their country by US imperialism. What O'Reilly also left out is that in 1994, Bill Clinton almost "wiped North Korea off the map" with a tactical nuclear strike against Pyongyang. Clinton was restrained by more enlightened capitalist circles, led by former president Carter, who believed that such a reckless course would harm US imperialism's long-term strategic interests. Carter convinced Clinton that American interests would be better served by stabilizing the Korean peninsula in a deal that would defuse the nuclear powderkeg--the Agreed Framework. Under the terms of the 1994 agreement, North Korea would halt its graphic nuclear reactor program and place the plutonium rods from the reactors' waste in ponds to be guarded by the International Atomic Energy Association. In turn, Washington was to build two power-generating light water reactors by 2003, provide North Korea with 3.3 million barrels of oil, agree to move toward full diplomatic and economic relations and assure Pyongyang that Washington would never attack it with nuclear weapons.
North Korea didn't cheat on anything. The only side that cheated was the United States, which failed to build the two light water reactors and reneged on the 3.3 million barrels of oil.
Carter's right--from the moment Bush took office he terminated negotiations with North Korea, placed it in the "Axis of Evil," refused to agree to normalize relations, and announced it would never rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Pynongyang responded by formally ending the Agreed Framework, quitting the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, evicting international inspectors and resuming its nuclear program.
Bush provoked the crisis back in 2003 when he claimed Pyongyang's uranium enrichment program violated the Agreed Framework, even though uranium enrichment was not prohibited under the terms of the deal. Washington coerced its allies into terminating supplies of fuel to North Korea, which responded by renouncing the Agreed Framework. As the World Socialist Web Site quoted British academic David Kang in the Financial Times:"[B]oth Clinton and Bush violated the letter and the spirit of the agreement. For example, the US promised under the framework to help North Korea build light water reactors that could not be used to make nuclear bombs. The first of these was due to come into operation this year but it was clear in 1998 that it could be at least three years behind schedule because of US reservations and hesitancy.”
The North Koreans didn't cheat. And they didn't take "our money and food," because Washington didn't give any money, and the food that's been doled out has also been used as a weapon against the people of North Korea, a practice Washington has employed with lethal cynicism the world over.
So it's Bill O'Reilly, not Jimmy Carter, who left out the facts. Deceit or delusion, O'Reilly? Inquiring minds already know.--October 22, 2006
And Bill O'Reilly is doing everything he can to blunt the political damage inflicted on the GOP by Foley's indiscretion while covering up Rice's criminal negligence and/or conscious complicity in the September 11 terrorist attacks.
While O'Reilly perfunctorily criticized Foley's "inappropriate behavior" and says the FBI should investigate him to the full extent of the law, it didn't take long for O'Reilly to trivialize the scandal as "partisan nonsense" and use it as an opportunity to bash gays, and allow the Factor to be used as a primary conduit for Republican Talking Points propaganda that the scandal was all the result of a vast left wing Democratic conspiracy to embarrass the Republicans a month before the elections.
O'Reilly next let Rice off the hook when he interviewed Bob Woodward for his book "State of Denial," and failed to ask a single question concerning its most damning revelations--that two months before September 11, Rice received specific warnings about the coming attack from CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black--and that Rice brushed them off, then later lied about ever hearing the warning.
Which leads us to O'Reilly's near-psychotic reaction to the growing legitimacy of the 9/11 truth movement; specifically, his hysterical response to University of Wisconsin professor Kevin Barret' prominent role in that movement, his rude treatment of Barrett student Molly Sessler, and his equally rude demeanor toward 9/11 activist and Barrett supporter James Fetzler, a former professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth who also happens to be a former Marine Corps officer.
O'Reilly Belittles, Patronizes Wisconsin Student of Kevin Barrett
Thinks He Refutes Barrett Because Student Didn't Know German Reichstag building
Oct. 23, 2006--Bill O'Reilly's freaking out. He's well aware that most polls show growing numbers of Americans reject the government's official version of what happened September 11 and believe the terrorist attacks were an inside job. They may not be able to recite every nook and cranny detail on how the operation was executed, but they know a stench when they smell it.
One NY Times/CBS survey found that 16% think Bush has told the truth about 9/11. The fantasy tale that he's helped peddle is falling apart. The facts are getting out, despite his futile attempts to dismiss or ignore them. O'Reilly's desperate, because he's got only deceit and ignorance in his intellectual arsenal. So he resorts to his usual method of operation--name calling, intimidation and suppression of debate.
Kevin Barrett, a University of Wisconsin professor who teaches an introductory course on Islam, became a target of O'Reilly's McCarthyite ire when his view that 9/11 was an inside job started gaining notoriety in the mainstream media. While COSMOS LEFT is not a mouthpiece for Barrett and does not endorse every his every utterance, his rejection of the government's fairy tale is much closer to reality than O'Reilly's blind, knee-jerk, dogmatic endorsement of that fantasy.
After Barrett's July 11th appearance on The Factor, O'Rielly had this to say: "This guy would have been gone at Boston University, my alma mater, in a heartbeat. The Chancellor there, John Silber, would have-would have-this guy'd be in the Charles River floating down, you know, toward the harbor."
Those are the not the words of a democratic. That is the language of a fascist thug. Just as fascist as O'Reilly's desire to kick Barrett out of the classroom. While O'Reilly tries to marginalize Barrett as just another Ward Churchill-style "nutcase," he knows that Barrett is far more threatening to the US rulers. Churchill accepts the government's story that 19 Arab terrorists carried out the plot masterminded by bin Laden from an Afghanistan cave completely beyond the pale of US intelligence. Barrett is onto something far more threatening to the US capitalist power structure.
O'Reilly began his October 11 hatchet job on Barrett by both ridiculing and misrepresenting the latter's "inside job" perspective. According to O'Reilly, Barrett "thinks the US attacked itself." We haven't read every Barrett quote on the subject, but thus far we haven't come across that formulation attributed to him. I did hear him say that US military intelligence orchestrated a false flag operation that could be manipulated to win public support for long-planned wars of colonial conquest in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Further, it's inaccurate to say the "US attacked itself." The US government of the exploiting rich, the layer of billionaire parasites who live off and exploit the wage labor of the working class, attacked or allowed the American people to be attacked in order to whip up a a jingoistic hysteria among the people enabling Washington to launch long-planned wars of aggression to control the resource rich area of Central Asia and the Middle East.
Just like the US Joint Chief of Staffs in 1962 proposed attacking the people of the United States with a sophisticated plan of widespread domestic terrorism that involved hijacking commercial airliners and sinking ships of Cuban emigres--a terrorist operation that would have resulted in substantial casualties. The plan was dubbed "Operation Northwoods" and would have been blamed on Cuba to justify launching an invasion of the island.
Just like FDR provoked and allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. As FDR's administrative assistant Jonathan Daniels said, "The blow was heavier than he had hoped it would necessarily be ...But the risks paid off; even the loss was worth the price."
In October 1940, Navy intelligence analyst McCollum wrote an 8-point memo outlining how to provoke Japan into a war. FDR promptly ordered all 8 points to be carried out. The US cracked every Japanese code, learning the details of the Pearl Harbor attack in the process. Daniels was proven right; the loss of 2,400 American sailors that day of infamy generated the kind of public support the US capitalists needed to challenge Nazi Germany for world domination.
What Barrett and most inside job theorists have said is that some section of US military intelligence either orchestrated the attacks or looked the other way to allow them to occur in order to win public support for long-planned wars of colonial conquest in Central Asia and the Middle East, particularly Iraq. It's not that Bush sat there in the White House and masterminded 9/11, ordering the deaths of 3,000 Americans in the process. To be blunt, he's not smart enough to plan such a sophisticated operation.
Because, contrary to O'Reilly's lie that the Times is anti-Bush and rips his heart out every day, the Times, like FOX News and the rest of the corporate owned media, have "buried this story because they do not want the American people to know the truth of what is happening in Iraq.
"They want to conceal this this truth--as they have done consistently since the war began--because they are complicit in a massive war crime in Iraq..."
This "far-left, anti-Bush paper that wants to rip his throat out is the same New York Times that is "deeply implicated in the drive to condition the American people to accept the war in Iraq. It played the leading role, through the activities of reporters like Judith Miller, in peddling and validating Bush administration lies about weapons of mass destruction, Al Qaeda ties to Iraq, and the supposed Iraqi threat to the United States."
This is the same "anti-Bush" paper that deliberately suppressed its article on Bush's illegal domestic spying program until after the 2004 election--virtually ensuring his victory over Kerry.
Whatever tactical disagreements that exist between O'Reilly and the NY Times over how to conquer Iraq for US imperialism, they agree that it is of utmost importance strategically to the interests of the capitalist class they speak for and identify with.--Oct. 17, 2006
O'Reilly Lies About Columbian Students Rout of Minutemen
Fascist Minutemen Thugs Attack ANSWER Protesters at Columbia University, NYC, 10/4/06 (ANSWER)
October 4, 2006--Bill O'Reilly can't handle the truth. Confronted with the reality that last night's militant mobilization of Columbia students against the appearance on their campus by the ultrarightist Minutemen handed these fascist thugs a resounding p olitical defeat, the Factor host did what he does best--lie and distort the truth to fit his reactionary, antilabor political agenda. O'Reilly accused the students of violently attacking the Minutemen to suppress their free speech. As the photo on the left shows, the truth is exactly the opposite.
As usual, O'Reilly consciously deceived his viewers by presenting them an Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of reality. As the accompanying photo demonstrates, it was the Minutemen thugs who violently attacked Columbia students for exercising their Constitutional right to protest the provocative appearance by this fascist outfit, which was invited by a campus Republican group. But the students held their ground and repulsed the attack, and Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist could not finish his talk.
The Minutemen's right to free speech is not the issue here. Their chauvinist filth pollutes the nation's airwaves nightly with the eager help of flag-waving right wing bigots like Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs. The issue is the 1st Amendment right of the Columbia students to militantly mobilize against the provocative appearance by a pack of vigilantes whose existence pose a deadly threat to all working people. O'Reilly and the Minutemen are learning that wherever they bring their chauvinist filth, they will be confronted by anti-racist, anti-imperialist, revolutionary socialist and other forces.
Columbian students exercising 1st Amendment right to protest Minutemen's racist vigilantism (ANSWER)
From "The Far Left Becomes Dangerous" (Talking Points Memo, 10/5/06):
O'Reilly: "Some leaders of the Minuteman Project, the border protest group, were invited to speak at Columbia University, an ultra-left institution. Well, last night, they got this welcome from Columbian students and faculty:
(Video clip):
Unidentified Male: "The Minuteman Project..."
Crowd: (Jeers, shouting, screaming, loud noise) [But no violence, except when Minutemen assaulted protesters unfurling an ANSWER banner]
(End video clip)
O'Reilly: "Things were obviously out of control. And Columbia police stood by and did nothing."
Translation: A large, militant, anti-imperialist protest inflicted a political defeat on a reactionary, racist outfit. Students exercised their constitutional right to countermobilize against an incipient fascist group that poses a mortal threat to working people. O'Reilly's pissed that the cops didn't crack heads and commit a police riot against the demonstrators. What is true, however, is that Columbia police stood by and did nothing to prevent the Minutemen thugs from assaulting the protesters!
Further, to describe the Minutemen as merely a "border protest group" is pure spin designed to camouflage the fact that this group consists of armed, racist vigilantes who now constitute the front lines of a budding US fascist movement. Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist also belongs to the California Coalition for Immigiration Reform, known for referring to Mexicans as "savages." Another Minuteman luminary, Chris Simcox, once referred to Mexican immigrants this way: "They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughter and they are evil people."
O'Reilly: "OK, no spin: Columbia University is a disgrace. It is not interested in free speech or learning, it is a place of indoctrination. Let us call it the 'University of Havana, North.' "
That's a complement in the eyes of most of humanity. But when O'Reilly attacks Columbia in this manner, he's directing his fire against Columbia's left-wing students--from 1968 to today. Columbia can accurately be called University of Havana because so many of its students are wearing the image of Che Guevara on their shirts--as do many African American kids in the Harlem community surrounding Columbia.
That O'Reilly characterizes Columbia as an "ultra-left," disgraceful institution only confirms how close he is to the Minutemen's far right politics. Columbia University has been a ruling class institution from its pre-Revolutionary War Loyalist roots to its membership in the Pentagon think tank Institute for Defense Analyses to its heavy investments in apartheid South Africa. Columbia--the same ultra-left university whose "ultra-left" president, Lee Bollinger, is now denouncing the anti-Minutemen protesters; the same Bollinger who two years ago claimed Columbia was powerless to defend the democratic rights of faculty supporters of Palestinian rights because it was a "private institution." (Alan Maass, "A Wake Up Call to the Passive Left: Standing Up Against Racism in Columbia," Counterpunch, Oct. 20, 2006)
O'Reilly: "All over the country these kind of fascist tactics are being used by fanatical secular progressives who seek to impose their views on others, and silence and/or harm people who oppose them.
"This is becoming increasingly dangerous. People like Bill Kristol, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, have been physically assaulted during speaking engagements. Attorney General Gonzales was disrespected at Georgetown University. Even Hillary Clinton has been shouted down by far-left loons. This kind of anti-American behavior must be condemned by all Americans."
The free speech of right wing, antilabor groups like the Minutemen are not threatened by anyone. This ilk is given a platform to spew their filth to millions on a daily basis by the likes of Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly's rightfully feels threatened by successful mobilizations like the one at Columbia the other night because he knows they are a reflection of the growing anger in this country against Iraq, Bush, Katrina, and the avalanche of lies told by hate merchants like O'Reilly. It is O'Reilly and the government he shills for that represent a mortal threat to democratic rights and civil liberties. It is O'Reilly who supports Washington's illegal wiretapping and spying against tens of millions of Americans. It is O'Reilly and his legions of fascist goons who are trying to impose their views on others through intimidation, threats and violence.
Leftists wage militant protests against militarism, genocide, torture, and illegal detentions. Rightists murder their political opponents. As Patrick Martin's April 25, 2005 World Socialist Web Site pointed out, "Fascist, racist and anti-abortion groups are responsible for nearly all the terroirst attacks in the United States--with the exception of September 11, 2001--over the past two decades. [And Washington either sponsored or let that happen!] These include the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which killed 168 people, as well as bombings of abortion clinics and assassination of abortion providers, and multiple cases of individual rampages, like that of Benjamin Smith, who went on a killing spree directed at blacks, Jews and immigrants in 1999.
"In several of the mass shootings at US high schools, including the two worst cases, at Columbine High School in 2000 and at Red Lake High School in rural Minnesota last month, the youth who carried out the murder-suicides were influenced by neo-Nazi propaganda which they accessed on the Internet.
"A right-wing terrorist is also believed responsible for the 2001 anthrax mailings which killed five people and terrorized the US capital for several months. No one has been arrested, but the choice of targets—several media outlets and two leading Senate Democrats—and the method of attack strongly suggest an ultra-rightist. Only a relative handful of biological warfare specialists, closely tied to military and intelligence circles, could have had both the skills and the access to anthrax required for those attacks."
"Anthrax mailings—all of them spurious so far—have been used frequently as terror threats against abortion clinics. A Pennsylvania anti-abortion activist was convicted of making hundreds of such fake mailings in 2003.
"Also in 2003, a Texas white supremacist, William J. Krar, was arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of possessing chemical weapons of mass destruction—sodium cyanide bombs, which could have killed hundreds—as well as a huge stockpile of conventional arms."
O'Reilly has never said a word about these manifestations of right wing violence. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration excludes these extreme right wing groups from their list of terrorist threats.
It's the right wing, that is, the fascist wing of the capitalist class, that is increasingly dangerous. Fascists of all types, many of them hard-core O'Reilly partisans are beginning to flex their muscles, flex their muscles, and feel the waters, in anticipation of the coming class confrontations. What they can't handle is the fact that the beginnings of a class struggle left wing of the coming revolutionary workers movement is beginning to take steps to fight back. O'Reilly, you ain't seen nothing yet. One day the battalions of the US working class will organize ourselves into modern day versions of the Red Guard, and we will meet your kind at the barricades and kick your asses.
Bill Kristol, Pat Buchanan, and Ann Coulter are three of the most dangerous bourgeois personalities confronting US working people today. When they exercise free speech, working people die. Kristol is one of the chief ideological architects and proponents of the criminal war on Iraq. During the last four years, he has deliberately lied to the American people daily in print and on television, usually on FOX News. His hands are drenched with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans. Now he's lying about Iran in the same manner to justify the coming aggression against that country by US imperialism.
Pat Buchanan's incipient faccism predates Bill O'Reilly's. This racist, sexist homophobic hate merchant should be confronted by militant protests wherever he goes.
Ann Coulter has publicly called for the murder or assassination of Iraqi civilians, Muslims, Bill Clinton, Senator Lincoln Chafee, and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Throwing a pie in her face is not a felonious assault but is an act of political theater that falls under the purview of constitutionally protected freedom of expression.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is another deadly enemy of the working class even more threatening than commentators Kristol, Buchanan and Coulter. Gonzales is Attorney General of the United States, which means he can and has wielded the full force of the US state power to authorize torture, illegal detention, illegal spying, and other crimes against workers here and abroad. Did Georgetown University's law students commit violence or assault Gonzalez or threaten him in any way? No. They "disrespected" him, a perfectly legitimate, constitutionally protected way to protest Gonzalez's disrespect for the Bill of Rights and the rule of law.
Hillary Clinton is even more dangerous than George W. Bush. Her main problem with Bush is that he's not killing more Iraqis. She's so eager to demonstrate to the US capitalist class that her administration would wage imperialist wars more effectively than Bush she's chomping at the bit for the chance to kill more workers worldwide. Even O'Reilly, no friend of the Clintons, gives Clinton her due for supporting the occupation of Iraq. "Far left loons" who shout her down are exercising their constitutional right to tell Clinton in no uncertain terms that they oppose her support for this barbaric aggression.
O'Reilly: "Finally, the reason all of this is happening is the S.P.s are losing, so they are angry and frustrated. Most Americans are not buying the radical agenda. Air America is tottering on bankruptcy and other far-left people are only accepted by a lunatic fringe. Nevertheless, the far-left smear Web sites continued to fan hatred and it has now even spilled over into the mainstream media."
Once again, the truth is just the opposite. O'Reilly is angry, frustrated, and increasingly shrill and strident because he knows secular progressives are winning the culture war and his side is losing. He also knows that most Americans are not buying his bogus apologies and rationales for Bush's imperialist aggression because it's finally sinking in that O'Reilly and Bush lied through their rotten teeth. And still are. Air America--like FOX News and most of the capitalist media--is grappling with fewer subscribers and declining profit rates in part precisely because Americans know the mainstream media helped Bush lie and they are increasingly turning to "far-left smear Web sites" for the truth. That's what's driving O'Reilly up the wall. One can only hope it'll send him to his grave.
O'Reilly: "There is no place for that kind of garbage in a country that prides itself on free-speech and responsible dissent."
Yes, we saw O'Reilly's pride in free speech and "responsible" dissent in action when he cut off Jeremy Glick's mic and threatened to smash his head into "f***ing pieces."
There is no place for O'Reilly's kind of garbage in a country that truly prides itself on free speech and dissent. There is also no place in a true democracy for allowing a totalitarian thug like O'Reilly to determine what dissent is "responsible" and what isn't. That is a prescription for censorship.
O'Reilly: "It is time to confront these merchants of venom and let their masters know you will not buy their stuff, or donate to their causes, because if this kind of thing continues, it is only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." [emphasis added]
This is a not so veiled threat and deliberate incitement of his fanatical followers to be prepared to use violence against the growing number of antiwar and antifascist protesters constituting the embyronic communist movement in the United States.--October 8, 2006
No, it's not all right. In truth, O'Reilly's pretty close to a religious fundamentalist. He debases US history by falsely asserting the US is a "Christian nation"; he opposes abortion and gay rights; he ridicules the bedrock Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state; he rails against "secular progressivism" and ignores the dangers posed to democratic rights by the ascension of right wing Christian fundamentalists in the US power structure. These are all hallmark characteristics of religious fundamentalism.
"So, there is no intrusion on the media by fundamentalists. None. OK? They have no influence in the media at all, zero. Among the congressmen and senators, I don't know of one religious fundamentalist in Congress, not one. I don't know one governor who's a religious fundamentalist."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
Senator George F. Allen, Governor Mike Huckabee, White House press secretary Tony Snow, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Ann Coulter, Bill Bennett, and Sean Hannity attended the recent Values Voters Summit 2006, an ultraright gathering sponsored by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Focus on The Family Action--all right-wing Christian fundamentalist organizations. (Media Matters)
The fact that O'Reilly denies the pervasive influence of the Christian right in the government and media is proof positive that it exists. As John Burton, the Socialist Equality Party's Congressional candidate from California said in a recent statement:
"Right-wing Christian fundamentalists exercise an effective veto power over government policy on such issues as stem cell research, abortion and gay rights. Bush repeatedly invokes God as a justification for his policies, including the war in Iraq. The administration funnels millions of dollars to right-wing religious organizations in the name of Bush’s program of 'faith-based' initiatives.
"Networks headed by professional Christian fundamentalist demagogues such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson use their tax-exempt ministries to campaign relentlessly for right-wing politicians of the Republican Party. They are given platforms to spew their backward views by the American media and regularly meet in private with top officials of the Bush administration."--Sept. 30, 2006
Hussein Rebuffed bin Laden, Tried to Capture Zarqawi, Never Trained Al Qaeda Terrorists at Salman Pak
Republican-dominated panel refutes every lie O'Reilly peddled for 5 years
This is nothing new. For 5 years, COSMOS LEFT and many others have been exposing this lie. But O'Reilly's in trouble when a collection of bipartisan war criminals, and that includes Republicans, is forced to admit the obvious by the sheer weight of the evidence.
And after all Bill O'Reilly's done to push this lie for five years. But Bush knows the biggest mouth in cable news will continue to do everything in his power to disorient and deceive the US public on behalf of the ruling rich that pays him handsomely to do precisely that.--September 10, 2006
"Put up some evidence [of torture, as in Abu Ghraib], if you have it sir. If not, go down to a New York fire station and see what happens to you." [O'Reilly commenting on CBS's Dick Meyer's charge that Bush is lying when he claims the US hasn't tortured prisoners]
O'Reilly should be careful before assuming New York's firefighters will act as thugs on behalf of US imperialism's torturers, given that in November 2001 firefighters fought cops at Ground Zero when then-Mayor Giuliani tried to cut back attempts to recover remains of 9/11 victims buried in the WTC's rubble; given that many firefighters were inadequately equipped and trained to cope with 9/11 and its aftermath. Early estimates that almost 4,000 firefighters suffered from chronic coughs--a figure buttressed by findings from a Mt.Sinai study that showed about 700 have had to retire early because of disabling respiratory conditions, and that over 34000 fire fighters and emergency medical workers suffer from lung-related problems.
From "The 9/11 Movie and the Torture Allegations" (Talking Points Memo, Thursday, September 7, 2006):
After spinning away from ABC's propaganda movie, "The Path to 9/11" which purports to place the lion's share of the blame for the attacks on Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush. O'Reilly proclaims, "I do, however, really object to real life people putting us all in danger. And that's what's going on over this torture issue."
Meyer responded to Bush's denial that Washington hasn't been torturing by saying "the president's statement here is beyond doublespeak and above spin. It's untrue. We've been lied to and we are still being lied to by the president."
O'Reilly: "Meyer fails to provide evidence of this charge. What's he talking about? Is keeping people awake for long periods of time torture? Has the USA gouged anybody's eyes out?"
The world's seen enough evidence of US-inflicted torture to make any human being sick, which obviously excludes Bill O'Reilly. The evidence was from a place called Abu Ghraib, which is why O'Reilly prevented his viewers from seeing the photographic evidence of this torture. Bashing people to death with baseball bats--torture; pouring phosphorus on rectums--torture; hanging people upside down--torture; suffocating people to death and wrapping them in ice--torture; rape--torture; terrorizing prisoners with vicious dogs until they defacate on themselves--torture; strapping electrodes to genitals; naked prisoners chained to the floor--torture; sexual humiliation at the hands of demented female guards--torture; leaving naked detainees in freezing rooms for long periods--torture; pepper spray in eyes--torture; forcing heads into toilets--torture; sensory and sleep deprivation--torture.
O'Reilly's upset that a September 10 NY Times article described the graphic details of the CIA's torture of alleged Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah: "At times Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds [the result of deliberate neglect on the part of his torturers] was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or layo nt he bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that...[he] seemed to turn blue. At other times, the interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers..."
The demented O'Reilly thinks this is funny. He revealed his own moral degeneracy by trivializing this torture. So what if Zubaydah was forced to freeze and listen to loud music. Big deal. He's lucky Zubaydah wasn't renditioned to a US ally like Egypt or Pakistan, where he'd experience what real torture is like.
Fuck you, Bill O'Reilly. And fuck the Red Hot Chile Peppers. Never liked those clowns anyway.
O'Reilly then turned for help from his fellow ultraright i mperialist warmongers at the Wall Street J ournal, who wrote:
"... It appears a substantial number of plots were foiled because of the CIA interrogation program. They included attacks not only in the U.S. but on targets such as a U.S. Marine camp in [Africa] and the U.S. consulate in Karachi [Pakistan]. Mr. Bush said that information from the [interrogation] program played a role in the arrest of 'nearly every' senior Al Qaeda member in U.S. custody."
Here O'Reilly and the Journal are doing what media whores for the US capitalists are paid to do--obediently pass along the government's fairy tale as fact. "It appears a substantial number of plots were foiled...Mr. Bush said that information...played a role in the arrest of 'nearly every' senior Al Qaeda member in U.S. custody." [emphasis added]
O'Reilly: "Now the Bush haters simply will not accept that, but the fact is that the US has captured a number of terror killers. And tough interrogation is the reason why."
"Bush haters" hate him because he's a lying, sadistic war criminal who shows no remorse for his crimes and every intent to commit many more of them. "Bush haters" don't believe him because every day brings revelations of new Bush lies, as opposed to Bush lovers like O'Reilly, who continue to help Bush tell lies that result in more deaths. And no matter how many euphemisms like "alternative techniques" and "tough in terrogation" that Bush and O'Reilly use to put lipstick on the pig of torture, it's still torture, it's still violates US and international law, it still makes Bush and O'Reilly war criminals.
That's why a coterie of lawyers--Cheney's counsel David Addington, then White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales, and Assistant General Jay Bybee--advised Bush that one way to avoid being prosecuted under the 1996 War Crimes Act would be to simply change the definition of torture to exclude anything that doesn't cause death and claim inherent executive powers to do whatever he wants.
While Bush stooge O'Reilly obediently parrots the White House line that "tough interrogation" prevented terrorist attacks, he fails to inform his viewers about the Times' report that "Several officials said the belief that Mr. Zubaydah might have possessed critical information about a com i ng terrorist operation figured significantly in the decision to employ tougher tactics, even though it later became apparent he had no such knowledge. [emphasis added]
"Is there a danger of a backlash against Muslim-Americans?"
"Do you think there should be racial profiling at the airports?"
"Will this help Bush?"
"I believe the country's going to turn to the right, now, at least for a little while"
Fair and balanced. No agenda. No hint of spin.
Just when things couldn't get any worse for O'Reilly. Sixty percent of Americans oppose the Iraq war. Thirty-six percent think 9/11 was an inside job. Pro-war Zionist hack Lieberman loses the Connecticut primary. Americans are finally realizing that they were sold a bill of goods on Iraq, and that the stench from 9/11 is getting worse as time goes by. In the days preceding the terror plot's revelation, he was reduced to whining incessantly about how Americans aren't getting it. Translation: they aren't drinking his Kool-Aid.
One day before this bombshell, I was going to write that like Bush, O'Reilly needed another terrorist attack to reverse the political landscape for the US ruling class, the better to go to war with public support. And then along came Bojinka II, which O'Reilly is squeezing for all its worth.--August 10, 2006
"Islamo-fascists": Bush Joins O'Reilly in Demonizing and Slandering Muslim Workers
"Islamo-fascists" is a fraudulent, meaningless, loaded, unscientific term designed to disorient and divide working people. For many months, Bill O'Reilly has slandered Muslims with this fraudulent label, obviously regurgitating the vomit he lapped up from a slightly more intellectual ultrarightist scoundrel. Now Bush is choking on the same reactionary phlegm. O'Reilly and Bush seek to brand all Islamic working people as fascists in the eyes of non-Islamic US workers. In attempting to instill ignorance among American workers, they reveal their own ignorance of and contempt for history.
Islam has nothing to do with fascism, and vice versa. Islam is a monotheistic religion. Like Judaism and Christianity, it has moderate, conservative and fundamentalist strands. Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary ideology that was backed by Washington and Tel Aviv for decades as a counterweight to the more secular PLO and Iraqi Communist Party.
Fascism is a political ideology and movement of the bourgeoisie that has thus far surfaced in advanced capitalist countries like Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan. Its mass base and shock troops are layers of demoralized middle classes and backward workers. Fascism is the last weapon in the arsenal of the capitalists to save their profit system by smashing the trade unions and other organizations of the working class. A defining characteristic is the merging of the state and the corporations. Elsewhere on this page we discussed 14 defining characteristics of fascism as defined by Professor Andrew Britt. A brief recap here shows that the politics of Bill O'Reilly are far closer to fascism than Osama bin Laden's.
1) Powerful and continuing nationalism, with a heavy emphasis on jingoism and flag-waving--Bill O'Reilly.
2) Disdain for the recognition of human rights. "[They] tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarceration of prisoners. etc."--Bill O'Reilly
3) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause.--Mexican immigrants, gays, Muslims--Bill O'Reilly, Bill O'Reilly, Bill O'Reilly.
4) Supremacy of the Military. "Soldiers and military service are glamorized." As well as defended, even when they commit atrocities, like cold-bloodedly executing a wounded prisoner.--Bill O'Reilly
5) Rampant sexism. "Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy." O'Reilly on Radio Factor co-host Liz Wiehl: "a good-looking blonde" who could learn to dance for a tip, who should have "a full-body search" because "she asked for it"; "eye candy" who should protest in a bikini; "every time I want to [denigrate her], I just go over to her and whack her around. So--figurateively speaking of course..."
6) Controlled mass media. Either directly by the government, or indirect control by governmental regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. [O'Reilly and Murdoch]
7) Obsession with National Security. "Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government" [and media stooges like Bill O'Reilly.]
8) Religion and government are intertwined. "[Fascists] tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion.--Bill O'Reilly, almost every single night.
9) Corporate power is protected. Despite all of his anti-oil company demagoguery, O'Reilly opposes n ationalization, opening the books, workers control, even a windfall profits tax, in short, any effective measure with teeth in it that puts social needs before corporate profits.
10) Labor power is suppressed. Again, despite his phony working class posturing, O'Reilly is bitterly opposed to labor unions and any "entitlements" that help alleviate the deleterious consequences of the profit sy stem on workers' living standards.
11) Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.--Every night on The Factor.
12) Obsession with crime and punishment. O'Reilly's crusade for Jessica's law, his jihad against permissive judges, his desire to throw everyone he can behind bars and sentence them to life with hard labor, all of which a cover for attacking constitutional rights and eroding civil liberties.
13) Rampant cronyism and corruption. O'Reilly remains blind to the corruption and profiteering of corporations such as Halliburton, preferring to focus his fire on an antiwar activist selling T-shirts bearing the names of American soldiers killed in the illegal, preemptive war against Iraq.
14) Fraudulent elections. O'Reilly helped Bush steal the 2000 election in Florida and has said nothing about the mounting evidence indicating the Republicans repeated the crime four years later in Ohio.
If anything, the religion that historically enjoys closer links with fascism is Christianity, not Islam. Hitler and Nazi Germany--Christian. Franco and Fascist Spain--Christian. 1930s radio personality Father Coughlin--Christian. Senator Joseph McCarthy--Christian. Bill O'Reilly--Christian.--August 21, 2006
"...Fund first responders in the U.S.A. That means after you're dead, have enough ambulances to carry your corpse to the funeral home" (O'Reilly on point 3 of Dennis Kucinich's 4-point "anti-terror" plan)
Nothing could better express millionaire Bill O'Reilly's contempt for working people than his opposition to increasing first-responder funding while belittling those in the "front line of emergency response."
People died on September 11 because one group of first-line responders could not communicate to another group due to malfunctioning, underfunded radio equipment.
So much for O'Reilly's "looking out for the folks."--August 21, 2006
"Do they have any kind of traditional value system at all, vis-a vis what America used to be? Or are they taking their Mexican values, because most of them are Mexicans, and, you know, basically setting up Acapulco North?..."
Oh yes, please tell us how America used to be, Professor O'Reilly, who continues to misinform his viewers that the US was founded as a Christian nation, when in truth it was established as a secular republic guided by a bedrock constitutional principle known as the separation of church and state.
O'Reilly's in no position to judge others' adherence to "American values." If anything, Mexican immigrants are more American than O'Reilly. They are moving from one part of "America" to another, since much of the US used to be Mexico, and both countries are part of the North American continent. O'Reilly's ancestors emigrated from Ireland, on another continent in another part of the world.
Of course, we all share the same working class values--a concept alien to O'Reilly despite all his plebian rhetoric. When O'Reilly counterposes a "traditional value system" to "Acapulco North" he is playing the divide and conquer game of the capitalist class he represents, specifically, the fascist wing of this capitalist class, which seeks to scapegoat and demonize Mexican workers in the eyes of America's English-speaking toilers.
What O'Reilly and fellow incipient US fascist Patrick Buchanan object to is the changing face of the US working class, the increasing internationalization of American workers, which in large part consists of the "browning of America." When these two talk about a "traditional value system" and the way American "used to be," they're longing for the days of lily-white, English-speaking communities safely insulated from "them." But since the very workings of international capitalism are driving even more Spanish-speaking workers to flee their imperialist-ravaged countries for the Yankee paradise's gold-lined streets, they're even showing up in the neighborhoods of O'Reilly and Buchanan, who are revealing just how democratic and freedom loving they truly are.--August 21, 2006
"She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. [No, there YOU go] So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at 2 in the morning..."
And O'Reilly will be on line five minutes before 2, because he's already drooling all over himself in the studio, sick, demented motherfucker that he is.
US Army Officer Faces 7 Years Imprisonment for Refusing Iraq Deployment
The pre-trial proceeding of First Lieutenant Ehren Watada's court martial begins this week. An international defense campaign that includes a Web site and his mother's plea for help is gaining momentum, evidenced by growing solidarity from Iraq veterans as Lt. Watada's case gains notoriety.
To my knowledge, Bill O'Reilly has said little or nothing about Lt. Watada or the growing support from the folks.
From a recent speech to the Veterans for Peace convention:
..."The idea is this: that to stop an illegal and unjust war, the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it.
"Now it is not an easy task for the soldier. They must hold themselves responsible for individual action. They must remember duty to the Constitution and the people supersedes the ideologies of their leadership....They must know that resisting an authoritarian government at home is equally important to fighting a foreign aggressor on the battlefield....
"The American soldier must rise above the socialization that tells them authority should always be obeyed without question. Rank should be respected but never blindly followed. Awareness of the history of atrocities and destruction committed in the name of America--either through direct military intervention or by proxy war--is crucial. They must realize that this is a war not out of self-defense but by choice, for profit and imperialistic domination. WMD, ties to Al Qaeda, and ties to 9/11 never exiswted and never will. The soldier must know that our narrowly and questionably elected officials intentionally manipulated the evidence presented to Congress, the public, and the world to make the case for war. They must know that neither Congress nor this administration has the authority to violate the prohibition against preemptive war...This same administration uses us for rampant violations of time-tested laws banning torture and degradation of prisoners of war. Though the American soldier wants to do right, the illegitimacy of the occupation itself, the policies of this administration, and rules of engagement of desperate field commanders will utlimately force them to be party to war crimes....
"The Nuremburg Trials showed America and the world that citizenry as well as soldiers have the unrelinquishable obligation to refuse complicity in war crimes perpetrated by their government. Widespread torture and inhumane treatment of detainees is a war crime. A war of aggression born through an unofficial policy of prevention is a crime against the peace. An occupation violating the very essence of international humanitarian law and sovereignty is a crime against humanity. These crimes are funded by our tax dollars. Should citizens choose to remain silent through self-imposed ignorance or choice, it makes them as culpable as the soldier in these crimes...."
What's that you say, Bill O'Reilly? Not much, apparently. Because these aren't the words of Michael Moore, George Soros, Ward Churchill, or even a grieving mother. These are the words of the highest ranking military office to refuse deployment to Iraq.--August 17, 2006
Injured Gaza child fine with O'Reilly: "Israel had to do this"
Still think Washington's invasion of Iraq will bring peace to the Middle East, O'Reilly?
Palestinian infant funeral: future terrorist to O'Reilly
July 16-30, 2006--O'Reilly thinks this all began with the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian "terrorists," ignoring the preceding Israeli offensive that included the shelling of a Gaza beach that wiped out an entire family. The capture of Corporal Shalit was a military operation by Palestinian commandos against the occupying Israeli army, particularly when over 9,000 Palestinians are in Israeli jails, many of them children.
Whatever political differences we have with Hamas and Hezbollah, they have a right to defend their people against Israeli aggression by waging armed struggle against Israeli military forces. And when thousands of Palestinian civilians are being slaughtered by a US-funded Israeli military machine, Palestinians have the sovereign and moral right to obtain material assistance from wherever they can get it.
O'Reilly's trying to convince American workers that current Middle East history, and the unfolding crisis began the day Corporal Shalit was captured. The innocent Israeli Defense Forces, which had never killed Palestinians with US-made F-16 bombers, which were only minding their own business on land they never stole from anyone, were besieged by the big, bad Palestinian terrorists who had the nerve to capture an Israeli soldier. Syria and Iran ordered this terrorist act to provoke Israel to do things that make them look bad, like killing and starving innocent civilians. Therefore, Israel had to do something, including bombing Lebanon.
We'll take up tonight's Talking Points Memo dealing with this issue in more detail below, but for now it's worth noting that O'Reilly said nothing about Israel's long-held territorial ambitions in both Syria and Lebanon, having seized the Golan Heights from the former in 1967 and occupied southern Lebanon for decades until it was forced to partially withdraw by the heroic resistance of Hezbollah.--July 13, 2006
From "Why You Should Care About Violence in Israel and Lebanon" (Talking Points Memo, 7/13/06)
O'Reilly: "The answer to that question is because it affects your life. Every time stuff like this happens, the price of oil goes up and the worldwide economy totters."
Yes, "stuff" like this affects the lives of every US worker, particularly when the "stuff" involves Israel bombing Palestinian and Lebanese villages and slaughtering entire families with missiles and fighter jets supplied by American tax dollars. Yes, whenever the instability of capitalism produces this kind of crisis, bourgeois governments make sure that workers bear the brunt of the costs with skyrocketing gas prices, lower wages, unsafe conditions on the job, inadequate health care, and working people drowning in New Orleans or homeless after being evicted.
O'Reilly: "Iran is behind the terror attacks on Israeli forces. The whole thing is part of World War III, ladies and gentlemen. Islamic fascism against the West. That global conflict, unfortunately, is here for the foreseeable future."
First, the capture of Israeli soldiers by Palestinian and then Hezbollah fighters by definition were not terror attacks. They were legitimate military operations by armed national liberation organizations against military targets from an occupying army that had been waging a military and economic offensive against Palestinians in Gaza. And O'Reilly fails to offer a shred of proof substantiating his baseless assertion that Iran was behind the attacks on Israeli forces.
Second, O'Reilly's right--this "whole thing" is part of World War III, and it is a global conflict that unfortunately is here for the foreseeable future. But it's not "Islamic fascism against the West." Like the first two world wars in the last century, this 21st century world war is several wars in one. It's US imperialism against the workers of the world--from Iraq to Afghanistan to North Korea to Iran to Colombia to the Philippines--a class war to plunder these workers' countries by controlling their natural resources in order to superexploit their labor power. It's an inter-imperialist war in which US imperialism uses its military supremacy to beat out its imperialist rivals for control of the world's markets and energy resources.
O'Reilly: "But it doesn't have to be that way. Iran is the world's most dangerous country. Any serious analyst will tell you that. And Iran is protected by China and Russia. It knows it can finance and train terrorists. It knows it can order Hezbollah to attack Israel any time it wants."
Iran's the world's most dangerous country? Oh Really O'Reilly? What serious analysts will tell us that? Neocons geniuses like Pearle and Wolfowitz? Heritage Foundation flunkys? Wall Street Journal hacks? Iran doesn't have over 700 bases ringing the world's surface. Iran isn't on an international war drive. Iran isn't threatening the world with nuclear weapons like the US and it hasn't used nuclear weapons like the US because it doesn't have any. Iran didn't overthrow America's legally elected government in 1954 and install a brutal dictator.
Israel is the region's most dangerous country. Any serious objective observer with a brain will tell you that. And Israel is protected by the US. Israel knows it can unleash savage barbarism and carnage against Palestinians and Lebanese with impunity. And Washington doesn't have to "order" Israel to attack Palestine or Lebanon any time it wants. Its apartheid client state is quite reliable in that regard.
O'Reilly: "That's because, according to a variety of intelligence sources, Iran gives Hezbollah about $100 million a year, but Russia and China don't care. China wants Iranian oil. Russia want the USA on the defensive in the War on Terror."
First of all, if we've learned anything over the years, it's not to accept anything at face value uttered by "intelligence sources." Second, given the fact Washington gives Tel Aviv billions of do llars every year to finance the state-sponsored terrorism needed to enforce the theft of Palestine, Hezbollah has a right to get aid from wherever it can. Third, it's the US that wants Iranian oil. Fourth, if anyone's defensive it's Russia, given the fact that Washington has encircled it with military bases.
O'Reilly: "So we have a terror nation -- Iran -- developing nuclear weapons and provoking war in the Middle East. And no one is doing much about it. How dangerous is this? How foolish?"
The terror nation with nuclear weapons that's provoking war in the Middle East is Israel. And no one is doing much about it. How dangerous is this? How foolish indeed?
O'Reilly: "Iran understands that violence is a good thing for the jihad. Having Israel attack Lebanon and Hamas means more Muslims will become terrorists. More Arabs will hate Jews, but what's Israel supposed to do?"
Iran doesn't want a war. Its bourgeoisie wants stability so that it can flex it economic muscles and be a maj or capitalist player in the region and the world. It is Israel that understands that vi olence is a good thing for Zionist expansionism. As Zionist military leader David Ben-Gurion told his staff in May 1948, when it really all began:
"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."
A more updated version of this strategic perspective can be found in the 1996 white paper that Israel asked leading neoconservative Bush supporters Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith to author, "A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Israeli Realm":
"Securing the Northern Border;
"Syria challenges Israel on Lebaese soil An effectiveapproach, and one which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seize the strategi in itiative (preemption) along its northern borders by engaging Hezbollah, Syria and Iran as the principle agents of aggression in Lebanon including...striking military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove in sufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper."
O'Reilly: "Imagine terrorists sneaking across the Mexican border killing eight American soldiers and kidnapping two more. The USA would attack any country harboring those terrorists."
My, my, how politics makes strange bedfellows. Compare O'Reilly's trip to Oz with the following words from his good friend, Senator Hillary Clinton:
“I want us here in New York to imagine, if extremist terrorists were launching rocket attacks across the Mexican or Canadian border, would we stand by or would we defend America against these attacks from extremists?”
The following response from Bill Van Auken, Socialist Equality Party candidate for Clinton's Senate seat, applies with equal force to O'Reilly's historically flawed analogy:
“Wouldn’t we bomb apartment buildings in Montreal, demolish Toronto’s international airport, incinerate entire Canadian families in their homes and on the highways, and turn the population of southern Ontario into refugees?
“...Imagine if members of the right-wing Minutemen group opened fire on Mexican migrants preparing to cross the border and the government of Mexico responded with massive air raids against San Diego, Dallas and Houston, blew up the runways at New York’s JFK airport and sent hundreds of thousands of Americans fleeing north.”
The socialist candidate continued:
"Of course Mexico has no military means of carrying out such a response against its neighbor to the north, any more than the Palestinians in Gaza can launch such an assault on Israel every time IDF forces storm into their territory, killing civilians and abducting people who disappear into Israel’s prison system without ever being charged, much less tried. Nor has Lebanon the wherewithal to mount such an exercise in 'self-defense' every time Israeli troops have crossed its border. Such self-righteous acts of massive military violence are reserved only for the most powerful gangsters in the region, Washington and Tel Aviv."
A more updated version of this strategic perspective can be found in the 1996 white paper that Israel asked leading neoconservative Bush supporters Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith to author, "A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Israeli Realm":
"Securing the Northern Border:
"Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which Americans can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran, the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by ..."striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper." [emphasis added]
Yes, we all see just who are the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, as Israeli tanks and warplanes have just slaughtered hundreds of civilians while bombing schools, roads, power stations, and homes.
The destruction we are witnessing in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon is the result of Israeli expansionism and US imperialism. The former needs war to consolidate its theft and occupation of Palestine dating from the 1948 war; the latter needs war to dominate the oil-rich Middle East. The aggression flowing from this Axis of Evil results from the crisis of capitalist rule. The only answer Washington and Tel Aviv has for this crisis is permanent war.
O'Reilly: "Imagine terrorists sneaking across the border killing eight American soldiers and kidnapping two more. The USA would attack any country harboring those terrorists."
My, my, how politics makes strange bedfellows. Compare O'Reilly's trip to Oz with the following words from his good friend, Senator Hillary Clinton:
"I want us here in New York to imagine, if extremist terrorists were launching rocket attacks across the Mexican or Canadian border, would we stand by or would we defend America against these attacks from extremists?"
The following response from Bill Van Auken, Socialist Equality party candidate for Clinton's Senate seat, applies with equal force to O'Reilly's historically flawed analogy:
"Wouldn't we bomb apartment buildings in Montreal, demolish Toronto's international airport, incinerate entire Canadian families in their homes and on the highways, and turn the population of southern Ontario into refugees?
"...Imagine if members of the right-wing Minutemen group opened fire on Mexican migrants preparing to cross the border and the government of Mexico responded with massive air raids against San Diego, Dallas, and Houston, blew up the runways at New York's JFK airport and sent hundreds of thousands of Americans fleeing North."
The socialist candidate continued:
"Of course Mexico has no military means of carrying out such a response against its neighbor to the north, no more than the Palestinians in Gaza can launch such an assault on Israel every time IDF forces storm into their territory, killing civilians and abducting people who disappear into Israel's prison system without ever being charged, much less tried. Nor has Lebanon the wherewithal to mount such an exercise in 'self-defense' every time Israeli troops have crossed its border. Such self-righteous acts of massive military violence are reserved only for the most powerful gangsters in the region, Washington and Tel Aviv."
O'Reilly's kind of people.
"When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves--that is only half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves . . . But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves."--David Ben-Gurion, Zionist leader, Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense [emphasis added]
"Like most things in life, in order to understand what's going on tonight in the Middle East, you must simplify the situation."
O'Reilly may be a simple man, but he's about to do what he's paid millions to do--throw dust in working people's eyes with obfuscation, double talk, deception and an Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality designed to hoodwink us into supporting imperialist war.
"Israel wants peace. Most sane people understand that. They've withdrawn from Gaza, dismantled Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and like the folks in Northern Ireland, most Israelis simply want the violence to stop."
Most sane people in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and the entire world want peace. Israel and Washington want war--the former to crush all Arab resistance to the Arab land Tel Aviv began stealing in 1948; the latter to crush all resistance to US imperialism's desire to dominate the Middle East and its vast supplies of oil.
The World Socialist Web Site has written a number of times on the July 21 San Francisco Chronicle report that said in part: "Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago...[when] a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.
The WSWS also reminded us of an article by the Jersualem Posts's David Horovitz that reported: "The battle plan the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] has been following for the past nine days was finalized four or five months ago..."
As for Israel's "withdrawal" from Gaza and its dismantling of West Bank settlements, these were tactical and symbolic concessions designed to strengthen Tel Aviv's strategic objective of consolidating and tightening its iron-fisted occupation of both territories. Sharon shut down a few meaningless Gaza settlements only to "draw down an international border with 1.5 million Palestinians on the other side, insuring a Jewish majority in Israel and the remaining occupied territories for at least another decade," as the Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site wrote on July 15 ("Israeli attack on Lebanon threatens to engulf entire Middle East in war").
Similarly, the present Olmert regime intends to dismantle several West Bank settlements while remapping the new border "to give the best land to the Israelis, including all of Jerusalem, while the Palestinians are relegated to a rump state on barely 60 percent of the occupied territory" (WSWS, July 15).
Further, Tel Aviv linguisitics professor and Counterpunch contributor Tanya Reinhart correctly notes that even after Tel Avivi's "disengagement" from Gaza, it "remained under complete Israeli military control, operating from outside. Israel prevented any possibility of economic independence from the Strip and ... did not implement a single one of the clauses of the agreement on border-crossings of November 2005. Israel simply substituted the expensive occupation of Gaza with a cheap occupation, one which in Israel's view exempts it from the occupier's responsibility to maintain the Strip, and from concern for the welfare and the lives of its million and a half residents, as determined in the fourth Geneva convention."
This little tidbit of information apparently didn't make it into O'Reilly's fair and balanced treatment of the crisis.
O'Reilly: "But the Islamic terrorists do not want peace. Both Hamas and Hezbollah continue to say Israel must be destroyed, Jews must die."
Actually, it's the Zionist terrorists who don't want peace, who continue to deny Palestine's existence and whose policies clearly say Arabs must die.
O'Reilly: "Therefore, you're not gonna have peace in the Middle East and when terrorists kidnap Israeli soldiers--or kill Israeli civilians--Israel is going to fight back."
No, you're not going to have peace in the Middle East as along as an exclusively Jewish state in the middle of Arab land continues to slaughter Arabs in order to hold onto that stolen real estate formerly known as Palestine. And as long as that slaughter of Arab men, women and children continue--on a scale that dwarfs Israeli civilians killed by retaliatory missiles--the Palestinian and Lebanese masses are going to fight back.
"The Democrats' 'Talking Points' go this way: The Bush administration is disengaged from the Middle East because of the Iraq debacle, therefore the violence between the terror groups and Israel is partly the president's fault.
"The Republicans' 'Talking Points' say that the violence demonstrates how wicked the terrorists really are and they must be fought on the battlefield like we're doing in Iraq."
O'Reilly's a simple fascist demagogue whose capacity to analyze politics is limited to discussing the two capitalist parties. Politics consists of partisan bickering between Democrats and Republicans; anyone challenging the legitimacy of the two-party shell game is derisively dismissed as a "loony." The notion that there could be a socialist perspective on the crisis is anathema to O'Reilly because it would give socialists the credibility that O'Reilly dare not bestow on them. But at the risk of paraphrasing Rumsfeld, we demolish the fascist demagogues we have to work with.
In accurately describing the Democrats' disengagement criticism of Bush, O'Reilly only illuminates the bankrupt and fraudulent character of the bipartisan capitalist "debate" over Israel's military offensive. Bush isn't partly responsible for the violence because he is "disengaged" from the crisis, he shares responsibility with Israel for the slaughter because he is engaged in the violence--by giving Tel Aviv the green light to attack Lebanon, adequate time to kill as many Lebanese as it takes to break their will to resist, and rushing 5,000-lb bunker busters to Israel for use against Hezbollah positions.
A true "No-Spin" analysis would tell the American people that both capitalist parties are fully behind Israel in its aggression against Lebanon and its attempt to turn it into an Israeli protectorate. Both parties are lining up to to support Israel's war crimes, as Joe Kay wrote in his July 24 World Socialist Web Site article. Both parties support the war drive being executed by US imperialism to achieve hegemony in the Middle East by controlling its oil.
Two points about O'Reilly's discussion of the Republican's message that the violence shows how wicked the terrorists are and how they must be fought on the battlefield like we're doing in Iraq. First, the violence and Israel is inflicting on Lebanon shows how vicious and barbaric Tel Aviv's state terrorists truly are. Second, O'Reilly's "they must be fought on the battlefield..." remark only confirms the common denominator marking the Israeli and US occupations of Palestine and Iraq, respectively--that the "battlefield" is not between two armies but between a technologically superior imperialist army and a civilian population defended only by popular militias.
Late July-August 28, 2006:
In focusing on the partisan posturing between the Democrats and Republicans over Iraq, O'Reilly doesn't disguise the fact he's squarely on the side of the Republicans, who want to fight the terrorists while the Democrats just want to talk. Once again he's misleading and disorienting his viewers by ignoring a truth well captured in a recent World Socialist Web Site article, "Democrats, Republicans line up to back Israeli war crimes": the Democrats support Israel's aggression in Lebanon and Gaza just as fervently as they support Bush's war crimes in Iraq. If anything, the Democrats want to send more troops to Iraq and are to the right of Bush on Israel.
O'Reilly: "So what's the truth? Well, negotiations with terrorists usually fail. That's number one. The question is, should the USA even try? To do so empowers the terrorists and puts us in a position to offer these killers something. That is not a good position."
Here O'Reilly succinctly articulates the perspective of US imperialism and its junior partner in the Middle East-Zionist Israel. The Palestinian people are terrorists; the Lebanese people are terrorists; the Syrian people are terrorists; the Iranian people are terrorists. They all stand in the way of US and Israeli domination of the energy-rich Middle East; thus they all must be terrorized into submission and coerced into accepting this hegemony--which means accepting the peace of the grave. In Washington and Tel Aviv's eyes, why should we negotiate? We've got all the guns; we have the deadliest arsenal of weapons. Why give away at the table what we take on the "battlefield?" Who's going to challenge our position that Lebanon's infrastructure is the battlefield?
Except things are going so badly in Lebanon for the supposedly invincible Israeli military that an article by Leslie Gelb in the Wall Street Journal--understandably one of O'Reilly's favorite papers because it's a reliable mouthpiece for the rich--called precisely for Bush to engage in new and wide-ranging talks with Syria and Iran, and, if necessary, indirectly with Hamas and Hezbollah."
Continuing to represent that faction of the US bourgeoisie who still feel a Republican White House is their best shot at waging the kind of wars needed to defend capitalist profits, O'Reilly argued: "North Korea already mocked the Clinton administration by breaking the negotiated agreement on nukes. Do we give them another shot on it? The Bush administration says no and wants a coalition of countries to confront North Korea and other terrorist states."
Oh Really O'Reilly? It was Washington that broke the 1994 agreement by failing to build the promised two light water nuclear reactors, consistently being late on the promised oil deliveries, and refusing to sign a nonaggression treaty with North Korea. O'Reilly is once again calling for death and destruction on the impoverished people of North Korea, because, like the capitalist class he represents, war is the only thing they know, the only solution for the deepening and unsolvable crisis of bourgeois rule.
O'Reilly: "Unfortunately much of the world looks at terrorism as an American problem or Israeli problem. And some misguided people, including a number of Americans, believe the USA and Israel are the cause of terrorism, that the actual terror killers are victims. Don't get me started on those people. They are foolish and in some cases dangerous."
The world is literally closing in on O'Reilly and all apologists for US and Israeli imperialist wars. It is O'Reilly who's been living in Oz. He actually thought the US-funded outlaw Zionist regime could commit the scale of atrocities unfolding without the world reacting in outrage. Notice how O'Reilly parrots the Zionist line identifying the entire Lebanese people as terrorists : "...that the actual terror killers are victims." Approximately 1,000 Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israeli fire--not Hezbollah fighters.
O'Reilly: "If I were President Bush, I would urge restraint on Israel publicly, but privately encourage them to kill as many terrorists they could without harming civilians."
Bush doesn't need O'Reilly's advice here. This is exactly the course Bush has been following. It is precisely the position articulated by Laura Ingraham (Coulter Lite) on O'Reilly's show a few weeks back, when she urged Israel to "get as much done as possible," that is, kill as many Lebanese civilians as possible, before international pressure forced a cease-fire on Tel Aviv's state terrorists. This is why O'Reilly and Ingraham are not simply journalists exercising their 1st Amendment right to freedom of the press--they are integrally part of the murderous war machine that is consciously murdering civilians and should be indicted as war criminals alongside Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and the rest of these scoundrels.
O'Reilly: "That, of course, is exceedingly difficult, as Hezbollah and Hamas hide behind women and children."
This pathetic apology for Israel's atrocities against civilians is getting harder to take with every new deliberate, cold-blooded attack against homes, schools, hospitals, roads, ambulances, bridges and people. The truth is Israel is deliberately avoiding, indeed, running from Hezbollah's fighters who are ready to fight them in southern Lebanon and who indeed have kicked the IDF's ass right out of Bint Jbail. Instead, the punk Zionists are consciously targeting Lebanese civilians in an attempt to coerce, intimidate, and terrorize them to accept the destiny Israel has planned for them--Tel Aviv's client state.
O'Reilly has yet to mention that 10 times more Lebanese civilians have died than Israeli civilians. But the people of Lebanon don't count in O'Reilly's twisted world. Last week he specifically denied what the en tire world is witnessing--that Israel is unleashing carnage and devastation on Lebanon's infrastructure and civilian population. Instead, O'Reilly echoes Zionist propaganda that Israel is only hitting "command and control" targets in Lebanon's towns and villages.
Tell that to the families and friends of the 56 civilians who were murdered by Israeli missiles while sleeping in that apartment building in Qana, particularly when Spanish journalists are reporting no evidence of Hezbollah fighters in the area.
In truth, if any side is using civilians as shields in this war it's the Israelis. Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook wrote in the July 19 Counterpunch that "Several Israeli armaments factories and storage depots have been built close by Arab communities in the north of Israel, possibly in the hope that by locating them there Arab regimes will be deterred from attacking Israel's enormous armory. In other words, the inhabitants of several of Israel's Arab towns and villages have been turned into collective human shields--protection for Israeli's war machine."
Recall also that during the spring 2002 vicious Israeli offensive against the West Bank and Gaza, credible reports surface that Israeli soldiers would conduct their house to house raids holding Palestinian prisoners as human shields to deter their comrades from firing at them.
O'Reilly: "The terrorists do not care how many innocent people are killed and they believe any and all destruction helps them."
Another Orwellian inversion of reality instantly solved by substituting Israel or Washington for "terrorists":
"Israel and Washington do not care how many innocent people are killed and they believe any and all destruction helps them."
O'Reilly closed this Talking Points with another Orwellian gem:
"The terrorists want worldwide chaos and will not stop their killing to chat. War is hell, but that's what we are facing and we should all face it together."
Translation: "Washington and Tel Aviv's state terrorists want worldwide chaos and will not stop their killing to chat. [Literally!] War is hell, but that's the agenda capitalism has in store for workers everywhere, and our only chance to stop this madness is for workers to face it together--organized and mobilized as a class to oppose imperialist wars and unite to replace capitalist rule with workers and farmers governments worldwide.
"There are some Americans who see Israel as a villain, just as there are some who believe the USA has brought the War on Terror on itself. That kind of thinking is important to understand so it can be defeated in debate."
This used to be a slam-dunk in Israel's favor, given the pervasive Zionist influence in the US media and political establishment. The fact that O'Reilly's forced to concede a growing perception exists that Israel is a villain and 9/11 was an i nside job illustrates how badly Tel Aviv and Washington are losing the battle for hearts and minds.
O'Reilly: "As we mentioned, the committed left-wing newspapers in America have been largely silent about the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, largely for economic reasons. Many American Jews are liberal. Many of them love The New York Times, for example. The Times cannot afford to alienate its liberal base."
First, most true left-wing newspapers and Web sites have been anything but silent in condemning Israel's aggression in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories. Second, the New York Times is anything but a "committed left-wing newspaper. The Times' politics represents what now passes for liberalism in this country--decaying, impotent, procapitalist, proimperialist, prowar, and most of all, proZionist, as the World Socialist Web Site's David Walsh noted in his July 31 article, "US media alibis for Qana massacre":
"...the American media simply deludes itself and the public. This is from the New York Times: 'Israel said the Qana strike was aimed at Hezbollah fighters firing rockets into Israel from the area, but an explosion caused a residential apartment building to collapse, crushing Lebanese civilians who were spending the night in the basement, where they believed they were safe. The Israelis raised the possibility that munitions stored in the building blew up hours after the air strike, destroying the building.'
"In other words, the Lebanese blew themselves up. This scurrilous claim was not repeated elsewhere, as far as this writer could make out."
"Liberals" are among the most rabidly militant Zionists. O'Reilly's comments reek from the stench of his own noxious brand of fascistic Catholicism and anti-Semitism he's been carefully cultivating on the airwaves for a decade.
O'Reilly: "But the liberal Los Angeles Times printed an op-ed by UCLA professor Saree Makdisi that said, 'Israel's blanket bombardment of Lebanon was sparked not by rockets ... but by a guerilla operation against a military target, the aim of which was to capture soldiers as leverage for the release of some of the Lebanese prisoners Israel stubbornly refuses to free.'
"Professor Makdisi apparently believes Hezbollah is a legitimate fighting force that should be given moral equivalency with Israel. Never mind that Hezbollah wear no uniforms and routinely attack civilian targets. Never mind that the terrorists killed eight Israeli soldiers in their raid to get hostages. And never mind that the prisoners Israel is holding are terror killer suspects."
Given the tenacity, skill and firepower exhibited by Hezbollah's fighters in their defense of Lebanon's sovereignty, Bill O'Reilly might be the only person on the planet who would disagree with the Israelis that Hezbollah is indeed a legitimate fighting force. Moral equivalency? There is none, because Hezbollah has the moral high ground in defending their people and land against Israeli's murderous offensive. Hezbollah's violence is the violence of the oppressed. Israel's is the violence of the oppressor. Marxists will never place an equal mark, a "moral equivalency" between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressor.
Further, who is "routinely attacking civilian targets" here and who is engaging in legitimate warfare? The Israelis have killed close to 1,000 Lebanese, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Hezbollah has killed roughly 50 Israelis--about half of them were soldiers. There's no comparison between the number of civilians being killed in Lebanon by Israeli precision firepower and the number of civilians felled by Katyusha rockets in Haifa. Israel is the aggressor here. Israel's been invading and occupying Lebanon for decades, killing tens of thousands of its people. Hezbollah grew out of the resistance to Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982. The arrogant imperialists from Washington to Tel Aviv cannot understand how and why these impoverished Lebanese Shiites and Palestinians can fight so hard. And O'Reilly--he's totally clueless.
So clueless he doesn't realize his own words undermine the very point he's trying to make. Hezbollah attacked Israeli military personnel--that's not terrorism. Israelis are routinely slaughtering Lebanese civilians in their homes, hospitals, roads, bridges, schools--that's terrorism.
As for wearing uniforms, oh yes, O'Reilly and all Zionist stooges, please tell us about the rules of war, as you shamelessly urge the most sophisticated war machines in history to preemptively attack defenseless countries. Rules of war? Guerrilla fighters from Iraq to Vietnam to Lebanon have a right to wear grandma's clothes, walk right up to a foreign occupier, and blow his fucking head off.
"And never mind that the prisoners Israel is holding are terror killer suspects."
Yeah, 9,000 Palestinians and Lebanese prisoners versus--what's the grand total now, 2, 3, 5 Israeli prisoners of war. Yes, t hat's about right in the twisted, racist world of Zionist stooge O'Reilly, who also has no problem with the 30 to 1 ratio of Lebanese civilians killed to Israeli civilians. The prisoners held by Israel are freedom fighters arrested for resisting Israeli aggression and atrocities.
O'Reilly: "Now later on in his article, the professor, who did not respond to our questions, justifies his opinion by saying that Israel is a terrorist state itself. He points to the Israeli seizure of land in 1948 to bolster his argument.
"Makdisi's take on the Middle East is not uncommon, but it's troubling. From his perch safe in Los Angeles, this educated man believes that the Hezbollah terrorists have a perfect right to do whatever they want, because Israel violently carved out a homeland after World War II."
Notice how it's O'Reilly who does not respond to Makdisi's accurate observation that Israel is a terrorist state itself because its "seizure of land in 1948" terrorized and forcibly expelled the Palestinians who'd been living there for centuries. Makdisi's "take" on the Middle East is widely held because it's the irrefutable truth, which is "troubling" to O'Reilly because he can't even attempt to dispute it on the merits. From O'Reilly's perch safe in New York, where he's protected by bodyguards and chauffered in limousines, this simple man does not understand a fundamental law of history that a dispossessed people will fight for their h omes and families, even after simpleton O'Reilly admits that Israel "violently" (through terrorist methods) "carved out a homeland after World War II."
O'Reilly: "Now that kind of thinking is at the root of the terror war. Israel is bad and so is America for supporting Israel. Any and all violence against Americans and Jews is permitted."
O'Reilly's just frustrated that his propaganda isn't working and the world can readily see the murderous consequences of Zionist aggression and correctly blame Washington for sponsoring Tel Aviv's murder machine. His "Any and all violence against Americans and Jews is permitted" is another example of O'Reilly fabricating thoughts and falsely attributing them to his political opponents. While Palestinian and Lebanese fighters certainly have a right to defend their people against Israeli military forces, anti-imperialist opponents of Washington and Tel Aviv do not advocate "any and all violence against Americans and Jews."
O'Reilly: "To win any war, you have to understand the nature of the enemy. Has Israel made mistakes? Of course. Has America done bad things? Surely, we have."
We, O'Reilly? Speak for yourself and the rapacious, militaristic capitalist class you front for. Preemptive wars, collective punishment, illegal detentions, assassinations, torture, bombing civilian neighborhoods, preventing ambulances from reaching the wounded--these are not the policies or priorities of working people. They are the cold-blooded decisions and principles of the ruling elites in Tel Aviv and Washington. O'Reilly offers perfunctory acknowledgement that "mistakes" have been made, he's throwing dust in our eyes and attempting to cover up and rationalize war crimes carried out in the name of the working class. It's not a matter of America and Israel executing wrong policies or making bone-headed decisions, or c hoosing the wrong side. US and Israeli imperialism is the wrong side.
O'Reilly: "But in July of 2006, here is the simple and true fact: Tomorrow, if the terrorists stop killing and lay down their arms, the violence in the Middle East and in Iraq, for that matter, will stop. Tomorrow, if Israel throws all of its weapons into the Mediterranean Sea, there will be another Holocaust. Are you getting that, Professor Makdisi? Wise up."
Once again, a classic Orwellian inversion of reality. If the state "terrorists" in Tel Aviv and Washington stop killing and lay down their arms (which they'll never do voluntarily; they'll have to be forcibly disarmed by the revolutionary proletariat in Israel and the US), the violence in the Middle East and in Iraq...will stop. Israel is carrying out a Holocaust against Palestine and Lebanon. It will be disarmed by the revolutionary action of Israeli workers. US and Israeli imperialists are deluding themselves when they call for Hezbollah to disarm. That will never happen. Hezbollah will not commit suicide. The peace sought by the American and Israeli aggressors is the peace of the grave. That Hezbollah will never concede. Wise up, O'Reilly.
From "Cease fire in the Middle East" (Talking Points Memo), July 20, 2006:
O'Reilly: "Should there be a cease-fire in the Middle East? The pope wants one. French President Chirac wants one. The Lebanese prime minister, the Russians, they all want Israel and Hezbollah to stop fighting.
"So let's examine this in a fair and balanced way."
Brace yourselves.
"We now know that Hezbollah had about 13,000 missiles in southern Lebanon in violation of a United Nations order. We know that because Hezbollah attacked Israel, killing eight of its soldiers and kidnapping two others. This attack was unprovoked. After Israel responded, Hezbollah opened up with its missiles."
Hezbollah got those Katyusha rockets to defend southern Lebanon from nearly 30 years of constant invasions, occupations, and bombardments by Israel possessing far more deadly and sophisticated bombs and "missiles" than Katyusha rockets. Lebanon's national resistance movement had a moral right to procure weapons to defend the nation's sovereignty from Israeli aggression, since all the United Nations resolutions in the world had not prevented Israel from invading Lebanon in 1978 and killing 2,000 Lebanese. Nor did it prevent Israel from invading Lebanon again in 1982; Sharon's forces shelled villages and towns and bombed them from the air, killing another 20,000 Lebanese. His aggression and support for proxy Christian fascist outfits like the Phalange directly led to the massacre of nearly 2,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
Israel then occupied southern Lebanon for 18 years, until the guerrilla war waged by the popular mass-based resistance movement known as Hezbollah forced the Zionists to leave in 2000. Since 2000, UN reports say that Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored "blue line" nearly every day, terrorizing Lebanese by killing civilians and destroying property, including a 15-year-old shepherd in February. (Anders Strindberg, Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 1, 2006).
Given this track record, if you think Hezbollah is going to listen to an imperialist-sponsored UN resolution 1559 that calls on it to commit suicide and disarm while leaving the Lebanese people defenseless in the face of this rapacious, murderous Zionist enemy, you're out of your mind.
Saddam O'Reilly
Thanks to callingallwingnuts.com
"Shoot them on sight. That’s me… President O’Reilly… Curfew in Ramadi, seven o’clock at night. You’re on the street? You’re dead. I shoot you right between the eyes. Ok? That’s how I run that country. Just like Saddam ran it."--Bill O'Reilly, The Radio Factor, 6/19/06
You're only about three years behind the times, O'Reilly. Beginning in 2003, the US occupation force started recruiting agents from the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's hated secret police for the purpose of terrorizing Iraqis into submission. Since then, according to Army documents obtained by Salon, US forces have routinely used kidnapping to break the insurgency, breaking into homes, abducted fathers and sons, abusing and humiliating the latter to force confessions from the former. It's all part of O'Reilly's noble effort to bless these people with democracy.
When Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page correctly asserted that O'Reilly had praised Hussein's methods of rule, O'Reilly replied, "I never praised Saddam Hussein once. I said he ran the country in a totalitarian way, and he didn't have an insurgency because he ran it that way...That's exactly what I said. That's a statement of fact."
It's a statement of fact that O'Reilly praised Hussein for effectively suppressing insurgencies through his ruthless methods of gangster rule--an approach O'Reilly can't stop himself from publicly endorsing.
O'Reilly's exchange with Page occurred during their discussion about a column by former Tribune editor Don Wycliff that criticized O'Reilly for disingenuously blaming Air America Radio and the ACLU for the brutal murders of two US soldiers near Baghdad.
July 30, 2006:
Perhaps O'Reilly would like to explain to the families of those 2600 US soldiers killed in Iraq that in addition to finding no WMDs and no ties to Al Qaeda or 9/11, their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters died so that Washington could reimpose Saddam-like terror over the people of Iraq.
O'Reilly Attacks Herbert for Writing About Fascists in Military and Comparing Iraq to Vietnam
But in their ongoing attempt to deceive the people by spinning for the US imperialist war machine, these 3 Stooges failed to tell their viewers that it was a Defense Department investigator who was quoted as saying: "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a problem."
If O'Reilly were a serious journalist he'd follow up and seriously examine the charge that the ranks of the military are swelling with neo-Nazis and extremist skinheads. But that would undermine O'Reilly's agenda of providing uncritical, unwavering support for the US imperialist war machine. The notion that we're the good guys waging a noble fight to free people is undercut with news that the guys are sadistic fascists just itching to ethnically cleanse all ragheads from Iraq. Instead, O'Reilly resorts to his favorite tactic--attacking the messenger (especially if he's from the NY Times) instead of the message.
He begins by distorting Herbert by putting words in his mouth he never said. "New York Times columnist bob Herbert wrote today that the military is 'infested with Nazis and morale is akin to Vietnam .But is all this true?"
No, because this is what Herbert actually said, as O'Reilly quoted him:
"The Army has had to lower its standards because most young Americans want no part of George Bush's war in Iraq. Recruiters, desperate to meet their quotas, are sifting for warm bodies among those who are less talented, less disciplined, and in some cases repellant. John Kifner reported in the Times last week that a study by a watchdog group that showed recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed quote 'large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists to infiltrate the military .''
Then O'Reilly left this out, too:
"The study, by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist groups, was titled 'A Few Bad Men." It said that recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure to fill the thinning ranks, 'often look the other way' as militant white supremacists and anti-Semites make their way into the armed forces.
"The center quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying: 'We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a problem.'"
That's not Herbert or John Kifna saying that. And it's not the far-left media, Times included, saying that Aryan Nations Graffiti in Baghdad is a problem. Again, if O'Reilly were a professional journalist instead of an entertainer, he'd engage his viewers in an intelligent conversation about the implications raised by this problem. Instead O'Reilly and his guests call Herbert a liar or an ideologue with an anti-Bush agenda
O'Reilly then feigned shock at the suggestion that the US military in Iraq is demoralized along the lines of their counterparts in Vietnam four decades earlier.
[In progress]
O'Reilly: Wisconsin Professor a Nutjob for Calling 9/11 an Inside Job
If University of Wisconsin-Madison part-time professor Kevin Baxter is a nutjob, then so are Morgan Reynolds, Texas A&M Professor Emeritus of Economics, former Labor Department chief economist under George W. Bush, and former Director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis; Robert Bowman, former Director of the U.S. Star Wars Space Defense Program and a former U.S. Air Force Colonel; Stephen E. Jones, Professor of Physics at Brigham Young University; Lloyd DeMause, Director of the Institute of Psychohistory; James Fetzer, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota; Andreas Von Buelow, former assistant German defense minister, director of the German Secret Service--all member of "9/11 Scholars for Truth"; Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan; David Shayler, former MI5 agent; U.S. Air Force Lt. Colonel Steve Butler; David Ray Griffin, distinguished professor and theologian; and 50% of New York City's population.
The dam has burst for O'Reilly and his good friend Ann Coulter. The floodgates are open. It's not just Charlie Sheen who has smelled enough stench surrounding September 11 and concluded that the true nutjobs are government propagandists and Bush lemmings who believe the most discredited conspiracy theory of them all--the official version.--July 13, 2006
Baxter Responds to O'Reilly's Call for Killing and Tossing Him into Boston Harbor:
In a letter to FOX Boss Rupert Murdoch, Baxter states:
"It has come to my attention that one of your announcers, Bill OReilly, has stated on national television that he would like to see me murdered and thrown into Boston Harbor. Since I get so many email death threats I cant keep track of them (among the 10% of my 9/11-related emails that are negative) this is a pretty inflammatory thing to say. If anything were to happen to me, Fox News would find itself facing the mother of all lawsuits, and my family might very well end up in control of the Murdoch fortune.
"You may wish to consider urging your friends in the White House to offer me Secret Service protection. Please assign me the guy who said were out of here to Bush when the second plane hit the building at 9:04 not the higher-up who overruled him and kept Bush reading about pet goats while our nation was allegedly under surprise attack. See: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/9-11secretservice.htmlThe Secret Service agent who said were out of here before being overruled was honest.
"That's the guy I want protecting my life. Also, you might want to tell O'Reilly that HE's the one who should worry about ending up in Boston Harbor. 9/11 was an act of high treason and mass murder, and media figures complicit in the cover-up will be viewed, a few years hence, the way we now view Dr. Goebbels.
"The last time a bunch of empire-builders tried to trample on our rights, we had a little uprising called the American Revolution. Its time for another one. Lets kick it off with another Boston Tea Party--a little red-white-and-blue version of V-for-Vendetta--and throw the whole Fox News crew, along with the traitors in this administration, straight into Boston Harbor.
"Sincerely,
"Kevin Barrett Lecturer University of Wisconsin-Madison Edgewood College of Madison"
I like this guy's revolutionary spirit. His next-to-last paragraph sounds very much like what I was getting at in a letter to O'Reilly dated October 15, 2001:
"No, it is you, O'Reilly, who are insulting the families of the victims of 9/11, by leading the media cheerleading for Washington's war drive, which cynically exploits the emotions surrounding 9/11, and uses the tragedy as a pretext to carry out military plans long in the making, by covering up the human rights and war crimes of this government through absurd statements like US foreign policy is not about killing people but tries to keep people from killing each other, by playing a central role in the media's frenzy for war, and by urging people to rally around the flag of the very government that has slaughtered millions of civilians in recent decades and has created the hatred which shaped these violent acts of retaliation, the same government whose murderous, criminal policies have now turned these shores into a bloody death trap, and whose criminal negligence is partly to blame for the 9/11 tragedy.
"Consequently, O'Reilly, it is you who are hindering the people from getting at the murderers."
Spins Guantanamo Ruling to Blunt Its Significance, Minimize Damage to Bush
Bush: "We take the findings of the Court seriously..."
That's mighty big of you, Bush, but they're not just "findings" of facts--they're "rulings" of law, as in the law of the Land. But his choice of words is just another indication of the contempt Bush has for US and international law as he continues to erect a presidential dictatorship as the best way to preserve capitalist rule.
O'Reilly displayed a similarly contemptuous attitude toward Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in his June 29 Talking Points memo, "Cutting Through the Fog About Military Tribunals":
"The rulings contain much bloviating and mumbo-jumbo. It's what those people do." [emphasis added]
The ruling did a lot more than that, but you'd never know it from the spin in this Talking Points. Missing from O'Reilly's attempt to cut through the fog is any mention of "enemy combatants" or the Geneva Convention. This makes it easier for O'Reilly to ignore the fact that the Court 1) rejected Bush's use of the legal fiction known as "enemy combatants" to throw people into a legal black hole with no rights to see any evidence or cross-examine any witnesses; 2) ruled that Hamdan, who was captured on the battlefield of Afghanistan's civil war, deserves all rights under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, which pertains to prisoners captured in conflicts "occurring in the territory" of a signatory to that Convention--including Afghanistan. Article 3 also bars "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
Which rules out Bill O'Reilly, George W. Bush, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and their ilk, and explains why the Geneva Convention is so alien to these warriors for capitalism.
Slaughtered Soldiers' Blood Is on Your Hands, O'Reilly
And on the hands of your guest, fellow ultrarightist and war cheerleader Laura Ingraham.
We'll return soon to O'Reilly's hysterical Talking Points memo on the barbaric deaths of privates Tucker and Menchaca, as well as his discussion with Ingraham on "what to do" with war dissenters who they claim are helping terrorists.
For now we take great satisfaction in noting that 1) the combination of the Iraqi Resistance and US opposition to this vicious and predatory colonial war almost caused O'Reilly to have a heart attack in front of the entire world, and 2) Ingraham is so desperate over the impending defeat for US imperialism in Iraq that she was forced to whine about International ANSWER's success in organizing massive antiwar rallies across the country. ANSWER--the antiwar coalition led by Workers World, a communist organization.
Something that will keep these two working class enemies crying on their shoulders for years to come.--June 20, 2006
"Now is the time to use all the power America has to defeat the terrorists in Iraq....Again this window of opportunity that is opened in the wake of these brutal murders of our soldiers will not remain open long." [emphasis added]
That's right, in a despicable display of cynicism and opportunism, O'Reilly is exploiting the deaths of Privates Tucker and Menchaca to justify the even greater slaughter of Iraqis planned by the Pentagon in order to achieve Washington's aim--the total conquering of Iraq through the submission of its vanquished citizenry.
O'Reilly obviously views the entire Iraqi population as terrorists. One hundred fifty thousand dead Iraqis are not enough for O'Reilly, who lusts for more so that his masters in Washington and Wall Street can reap massive profits and geopolitical control of the energy rich Middle East. While the dead soldiers' families and friends grieve, O'Reilly shamelessly uses their deaths to advance US imperialism's strategic objective--conquering Iraq to control its oil.
O'Reilly is trying to use the barbarity of the soldiers' deaths to justify the illegal US invasion and occupation of Iraq--the over-arching crime from which the blood of these soldiers--and all the blood spilt in Iraq--flows. Further, he is trying to use their deaths to silence all opposition to the war, lecturing The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that even if you're for withdrawing from Iraq, "the day after two Americans are murdered by terrorists is not the time to call for any withdrawal."
O'Reilly shows not a trace of remorse for the blood--Iraqi and American--on his hands already. We should take that into account when considering his sentence after his war crimes conviction.
O'Reilly's fascistic rants against all those who blame Washington for these deaths or place a "moral equivalency" (O'Reilly's words, no one else's) between their executioners and US forces is a sign of the desperation plaguing the US ruling class as the crisis of confidence in their rule grows among the people. It's not a matter of moral equivalency. It's that the primary responsibility for Menchaca and Tucker's deaths lies with the government and military that sent them to subjugate a country in an illegal war of aggression. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote, "On the basis of fear-mongering and lies, as part of its drive to dominate the globe, the American ruling elite put these soldiers...in a deadly situation" ("The killing of US soldiers in Yusufiya: who's responsible?" David Walsh, June 24, 2006)
No one here supports car bombings, sectarian violence or the beheadings of civilians and aid workers. While no one--least of all O'Reilly--knows for sure the perpetrators of these atrocities. Some are no doubt the handiwork of US-backed death squads; others the result of reactionary Al Qaeda-type Islamic fundamentalists. But all of this violence flows from the illegal, predatory war of colonial conquest by Washington for control of Iraq's oil and its strategic Middle East value.
The logic of O'Reilly's position is that US imperialism can wipe out Iraqi families in their homes with 500-pound bombs, its troops can massacre, rape and burn as many civilians as possible, and anyone who questions the morality of these atrocities are terrorist sympathizers. But it's O'Reilly who is on the level of the terrorists; it is O'Reilly who leaps to a knee-jerk defense of every war crime committed by US forces against Iraqis. And watching him defense these atrocities is like watching a Dutchman plugging up holes in a bursting dyke.
As Kate Randall of the World Socialist Web Site put it:
"The regularity with which wanton killings of Iraqi civilians are being reported demonstrates that such atrocities are not mere anomalies. These cases provide only a glimpse of a pattern of h omicidal violence that is undoubtedly widespread and, if anything, increasing in frequency and savagery.
"They demonstrate that American forces in Iraq are being brutalized and dehumanized by their involvement in a filthy colonialist enterprise. The US occupation of Iraq--entailing the indiscriminate bombing of towns and v illages, mass roundups of men, women and even children, incarceration and sadistic torture--exhibits the most vicious forms the mass murder and repression that have been part and parcel of every imperialist effort to conquer and subjugate a foreign population."
Randall correctly notes that the endless revelations of US atrocities demolishes the "few bad apples" theory so often advanced by O'Reilly while apologizing for Abu Ghraib:
"...These images were snapshots of the conditioning of the American 'volunteer Army' to carry out a criminal mission, one that requires the disintegration of all humane and democratic instincts, affectiong not only the victims of US violence, but inflicting irreparable psychological, emotional and moral damage on those who carry it out."
COSMOS LEFT submits that no media personality has contributed more the "disintegration of all humane and democratic instincts" than Bill O'Reilly.--July 6, 2006
King, O'Reilly Play Hard Cop, Soft Cop on Massive Bank Record Spying
"[the New York Times] are the ones who gave Fidel Castro his job in Cuba."--Republican New York Congressman Peter King, during his June 25th fascistic rant in which he called for the prosecution of the e Times as traitors for publishing the story about the Bush administration's compilation of a massive database of financial transactions allegedly involving Al Qaeda operations.
King is as ignorant about Cuba as he is about the US Constitution. "The ones" who gave Fidel Castro his job as president of Cuba and leader of the Revolution were the Cuban workers and peasants, whose socialist revolution still has capitalist swine like Peter King squealing like stuck pigs. Fidel's more political and moral authority in his fingernails than a lying war criminal like King could ever dream of having. Fidel's authority was earned during a genuine people's revolution, a workers and peasants revolution, in the hills of the Sierra Maestra. King was elected in a bogus US bourgeois election in which most workers don't vote and have no parties presenting them.
Which brings us to this revealing portion of King's diatribe against the Times:
"Nobody elected The New York Times to do anything. And The New York Times is putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people."
Putting aside the fact that the Times is a pro-imperialist paper that helped Bush tell the lies on which this war was based, nobody elected The Times because newspapers are not supposed to be elected in a representative bourgeois democracy, you ignoramus. The real problem is that nobody elected George W. Bush to do anything because he stole the 2000 and 2004 elections. And The Times, Bush, O'Reilly, and King are putting their own arrogant, elitist, capitalist agenda before the interests of the American working people.--June 27, 2006
Distinguished guest and co-thinker Ann Coulter teamed up with O'Reilly to falsely claim that no one had challenged the legality of Bush's bank records monitoring program because it was totally legal. Big deal. Case closed. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Coulter: "...no one thinks" Bush's spying on financial transactions "violates any laws."
O'Reilly: "...by all accounts" the program was "entirely legal." Or, "...by all sane accounts, there is no illegality." Further, "nobody is asserting that they [Bush administration] overstepped their authority."
Oh Really O'Reilly?
What about the testimony of Washington lawyer L. Richard Fischer, who told the NY Times that such a program "appears to do an end run around bank privacy laws that generally require the government th show that the records of a particular person or group are relevant to an in vestigation.
"There has to be some due process," said Fischer. "At an absolute minimum, it strikes me as inappropriate."
O'Reilly was too busy condemning the Times for r unning the story to tell his viewers that SWIFT officials were "[w]orried about potential legal liability and wanted to terminate the program until Alan Greenspan put his two cents in. Further, the Times reported:
"But at the outset of the operation, Treasury and Justice Department lawyers debated whether the program had to do to comply with such laws before concluding that it did not...Several outside banking experts, however, say that financial privacy laws are murky and sometimes contradictory and that the program raises difficult legal and public policy questions."
"...Several people familiar with the Swift program said they believed that they were exploiting a ''gray area'' in the law and that a case could be made for restricting the government's access to the records on Fourth Amendment and statutory grounds. They also worried about the impact on Swift if the program were disclosed.
That doesn't sound like "by all accounts" the program is "entirely legal."--July 6, 2006
What say you, O'Reilly? Think this is newsworthy enough to make it on The Factor? Care to ask your "premium" viewers about it in a Bill O'Reilly poll?
O'Reilly on Miami "Terror Plot": "The Al Qaeda were undercover FBI agents"
And again: "The Al Qaeda agents were undercover FBI agents."
Repeat: "The Al Qaeda were undercover FBI agents."
Bill O'Reilly's so clueless he sometimes makes statements of fact without realizing how damning they are to his entire worldview and undermines the very purpose of his program--defending capitalism and the wars its government wages to defend the profit system O'Reilly benefits from. This statement is from his June 23 Talking Points memo, "Big Day in the War on Terror," that discussed in part today's indictment of Black Muslims from Miami on trumped up terrorism charges. Another transparently phony case fueled by government informants and provocateurs that O'Reilly the stooge dutifully passes along as fact. In so doing, he is helping the government pull the wool over the public's eyes, further disarming the people for the next inside job terrorist attack.
The fact that the framed up patsies are Black Muslims from Miami's Liberty City--scene of a militant rebellion by that community's oppressed national minority in 1980--was a softball served up to O'Reilly by the Justice Department, who must have known he would just love the chance to portray young Black men as 9/11 wannabes by posting their mug shots.
No matter. African American workers will be in the vanguard of the coming American socialist revolution, as will Latino workers. And there's not a damn thing Bill O'Reilly can do about that.--June 23, 2006
Are these dead kids "propaganda," O'Reilly?
O'Reilly Dismisses Ishaqi Massacre as "Propaganda"
June 2006--While O'Reilly took his best crack at "damage control" by pushing the "few bad apples" excuse to explain Haditha, the Marines own report forced him to concede that the massacre indeed took place and that the lawbreakers must be prosecuted.
But the massacre of 11 civilians in Ishaqi on March 15th received a much different treatment from O'Reilly, who upon hearing that the videotape of the slaughter was given to the BBC by a militant Sunni group, contemputously dismissed the story as "propaganda" and facilitated the Pentagon's coverup of the atrocity.
O'Reilly failed to inform his audience that the BBC had verified the accuracy of the images by checking them against other photographic images. He said nothing about multiple news accounts of the slaughter that also corroborated the BBC's reporting: the official Iraqi police report obtained by a Knight Ridder reporter which said, "The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people.; the graphic pictures shot by Agent France Press revealing the bullet-riddled corposes of children and infants; the testimony of a Balad police official who told CNN that witnesses said US soldiers gathered a family in a r oom and randomly shot them with bullets; the Associated Press video showing five children and one man with entry wounds in the head (World Socialist Web Site: Kate Randall, "Another US atrocity in Iraq: Eleven civilians massacred in Ishaqi," 6/3/06)
The nerve of those detainees--killing themselves two days before O'Reilly arrives to con Americans into thinking Gitmo's prisoners are getting fat off US tax dollars.
Forty-one suicide attempts preceded the suicides announced on June 10, 2006.
Shut Down Guantanamo Now!
And then give the land it sits on back to Cuba to whom it belongs.
Prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and O'Reilly as War Criminals and Torturers
We can have a healthy debate as to whether they deserve the punishment allowed by US law: the death penalty.
"Just hours after I left the prison at Gitmo last Friday, three detainees committed suicide, the first fatalities in the camp since it was set up shortly after 9/11."
O'Reilly omits that there were 41 other suicide attempts previously.
"The Joint Army/Navy Task Force granted 'The Factor almost total access to the prison. And ironically, I asked the c olonel in charge of the cells why some of the detainees had covered the small windows that allowed guards to observe t hem.
"The colonel replied that the International Red Cross wants as much privacy for the prisoners as possible. That privacy may have allowed the suicides."
Yes that follows. The International Red Cross and its desire to coddle the prisoners is responsible for the suicides, according to the colonel. Yes, and the IRC are the ones who locked these individuals up for four years with no evidence brought against them. The IRC made them lie in fetal positions covered with excrement, too.
"The Guantanamo controversy is easy to define: The Bush administration sees the 460 detainees as prisoners of war."
False! It's so easy to define for O'Reilly that he can't get the first sentence out of his mouth right. The one thing Bush refuses to acknowledge is that the 460 detainees are prisoners of war. Instead, he views them as "enemy combatants"--a legal fiction that enables Bush to ignore the Geneva Conventions, illegally detain prisoners indefinitely, and pave the way for the torture and abuse we've seen from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram.
"The liberal press and human rights groups believe they are criminals entitled to due process."
A typically slimy O'Reilly tactic at work here--attributing beliefs to people without offering a shred of evidence to back it up. Liberal press and human rights groups may think Guantanamo detainees are suspects entitled to due process, but it's fascist minded individuals like O'Reilly who have already convicted detainees as "criminals." Genuinely far-left forces like COSMOS LEFT believe they are political prisoners who should be immediately released. We also believe Gitmo should be dismantled and the land it sits on returned to Cuba from whom Washington stole it after the so-called Spanish-American War in 1898.
"The Joint Task Force in Gitmo -- more than 1,000 military people -- do not make policy. They institute it. So the bulk of my reporting tonight is not about the political controversy. It's about the prison itself."
Since the "bulk of [his] reporting" was devoted to defending the US gulag at Guantanamo, O'Reilly's coverage of the "prison itself"was very much about the political controversy.
"Although some have called Gitmo a place where torture is practiced, there is no proof of that on the record."
Let's review what's on the record, because if we've learned anything over the years about Bill O'Reilly, it's that his interpretation of the record is fraught with deception and self-serving spin.
First, the three Gitmo detainees who committed suicide were tortured to death. That's on top of the 41 previous suicide attempts. Then there were the recent hunger strikes by as many as 150 prisoners that lasted almost 3 months; many joining to protest the ongoing incarceration of 20 juveniles at Gitmo, some of them languishing in solitary confinement.
The record also includes videotapes taken by the US military showing military personnel punching prisoners, tying one to a gurney and forcing inmates to strip naked from the waist down. (Kate Randall, World Socialist Web Site, Feb. 7, 2005). Randall reported that the AP received a secret report based on the videotapes written by the US South Command in Miami--an investigation that was ordered after an ACLU lawsuit forced the release of testimony by FBI agents describing torture at Guantanamo. FBI agents spoke of prisoners shackled in the fetal position for 24 hours and wallowing in their own feces and urine. Another described a detainee tearing his hair out after spending a night in an extremely hot room. Video footage also showed a guard spraying a prisoner with pepper spray. Other video clips showed female interrogators humiliating and traumatizing detainees.
A draft manuscript written by a former Guantanamo translator is also part of the "record." Former Sgt. Erik Saar graphically details incidents in which female interrogators smeared fake menstrual blood on a Muslim prisoner.
In 2004, a confidential report by the International Red Cross accused the US military of intentionally engaging in methods "tantamount to torture" at Guantanamo Bay. A New York Times article on this report talked with military guards and intelligence agents who described " a range of procedures that they said were highly abusive occurring over a long period."
"One regular procedure was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels."
Media Matters reported on an FBI email discussing testimony of agents about how a female sergeant "grabbed the detainees' thumbs and bent them backwards and indicated that she grabbed his genitals."
But according to O'Reilly, this damning testimony by FBI agents isn't part of "the record" because they "haven't appeared on this program. We've never seen them...And until they do, they don't mean anything."
O'Reilly's view that nothing makes it into the official "record" unless it is said on The Factor is as arrogant and fallacious as the pronouncement by his friends and fellow elite media members over at the NY Times that it contains "All the News That's Fit to Print."
O'Reilly contradicted his assertion there exists no proof of torture on the record by admitting that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld authorized "coercive interrogation techniques" that resulted in Saudi prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani being "treated harshly":
"It is true that Mohammed al-Gatani, thought to be directly involved with the 9/11 attack, was treated harshly. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered that Gatani could be subjected to coerced interrogation, including loud noise, the presence of a dog and sleep deprivation." [emphasis added]
The presence of a dog? Now we understand why O'Reilly has vociferously objected to the release of torture photos that have included horrifying images of vicious police dogs terrorizing helpless detainees. A picture's worth a 1,000 words. Without photographic evidence, spinmeisters like O'Reilly would be able to get away with descriptions such as "the presence of a dog."
In conceding Rumsfeld authorized interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions, isolation, and vicious dogs, O'Reilly is undermining his bogus assertion that no proof exists on the record that torture occurred at Guantanamo. These methods violate the Geneva Convention and are considered to be torture by anyone possessing a streak of humanity. Media Matters reminds us that the Boston Globe reported that Rumsfeld closely monitored the interrogation of Qahtani when he was "subjected to sleep deprivation, stripped naked, forced to wear women's underwear on his head, denied bathroom access until he urinated on himself, threatened with snarling dogs and forced to perform tricks on a dog leash, among other things."
O'Reilly: "But outside of that, the detainees at Gitmo have been treated humanely, the military says. They have access to the International Red Cross and civilian lawyers."
Outside of that, we have seen O'Reilly ignore or censor the mounting evidence--hunger strikes, suicides, videotapes, FBI testimony, detainee testimony, interviews with military guards, intelligence officials, and translators--indicating that Gitmo detainees have not been treated humanely. As for what the military says, we've learned they lie so much that anyone who recommends giving them the benefit of the doubt is a liar, a fool, a propagandist, or all of the above. The military said a lot about Jessica Lynch; the military said a lot about Pat Tillman; the military said a lot about weapons of mass destruction; the military said a lot about Haditha. A journalist worth his mettle, one truly looking out for the folks, would not pass along what the military says as the truth.
O'Reilly should think twice before using the International Red Cross to defend Gitmo, given the fact the IRC accused the US military of intentionally using interrogation methods that were "tantamount to torture."
O'Reilly should also refrain from boasting about detainee access to civilian lawyers, since it turns out that the three prisoners who took their lives last week did not know they had lawyers.
"As far as we know he (Ali Abdullah Ahmed) did not know he had an attorney. We certainl nbever got through to him to advise him of that fact," said Dave Engelhardt, Ahmed's lawyer. "Perhaps he wuld n't have co mmitted suicide if he had known the facts ofhis representation of counsel and the profess that is mbing made in the American courts for the detainees."
Engelhardt and another detainee lawyer, Jeff Davis, complained that government lawyers had prevented their attempts to see their clients.
O'Reilly: "Many live in air conditioned cells."
Except when it's their turn for coerced interrogation techniques and are left to roast overnight in a sweltering room.
"The average detainee has gained 18 pounds since entering Gitmo."
Yeah, they're writing home about how swell the food is. That's why so many went on hunger strike, they were so happy.
"And the USA spends three times as much on their food as on military food."
Which doesn't say much about how the US feeds its own soldiers.
O'Reilly: 'The Factor' was given rare access to the prison camp. We were just yards away from some of the prisoners, who noted our presence:
"(PRISONER SHOUTING)
"That prisoner's screaming in Arabic."
Yeah, and he's probably saying, "Let me have a piece of that torture-loving, bloodthirsty, motherfucking infidel."
O'Reilly: "Obviously, the military showed us what they wanted us to see."
Obviously, the military knows the propaganda value of giving a media stooge such "rare access" to Gitmo.
"But again, there's absolutely no evidence that I've seen that says any abuse is taking place at Guantanamo Bay.
But again, locking up human beings like animals in 8 by 10 cages for more than four years with no evidence and no charges presented against them is abuse and torture.
O'Reilly: "Nevertheless, the left continues to call for the prison to be closed. People like Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi are adamant about it."
Presumably, the "left" in O'Reilly's twisted, ultrarightist mind includes Great Britain's Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith, former US president Jimmy Carter, and Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who called Gitmo the "greatest propaganda tool that exists for the recruiting of terrorists around the world."
Those calling for the immediate dismantling of Camp Gitmo fall into two categories: 1) enlightened ruling class elements like Goldsmith, Carter, Biden, and Pelosi, who worry that Gitmo is doing irreparable harm to US imperialism's interests; and 2) the rest of humanity who consider Gitmo a war crime and want those US government and military officials responsible for it prosecuted as war criminals.
O'Reilly: "So at this point, 10 detainees have been charged with war crimes. More than 300 are deemed dangerous to the USA. And about 140 have been designated for release, but few countries want to take them.
"Two hundred and seventy nine Gitmo prisoners have already been set free. Few of them went on to commit murder. For example, the Gitmo jihadists blew up a Marriott hotel in Pakistan shortly after the USA repatriated him back to that country."
"[I]f you've been to the subways in New York City in the summer, I don't know how you would tell there was a gas attack, based upon the smell that's down there every day."
Sounds like O'Reilly's been sleeping with Ann Coulter recently. Go ahead, O'Reilly, keep revealing to young folks the depths of your moral degeneration.
One wonders if the source of O'Reilly's dismissive posture toward this supposedly aborted terrorist plot is the fact that it comes from the same book (Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11") that according to Washington Post reviewer Barton Gellman,
"...tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled 'bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: 'All right. You've covered your ass, now.'"
Michael Moore was right. O'Reilly was--and still is--wrong. If the US is hit again, Bill O'Reilly is in part to blame for his consistent, dogged defense of George W. Bush's capacities to protect US soil.--June 21, 2006
O'Reilly Has More Respect for 1st Amendment Than Clinton!
Opposes Constitutional Amendment Banning Flag-burning While "Hillary" Supports it
Even Bill O'Reilly correctly views the proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting flag-burning as violating the freedom of expression enshrined in the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Something to consider for all those lesser-evil Democrats still mired in the swamp of bourgeois politics and its two-party shell game.
O'Reilly Shocked Over Capitalist Profiteering in Wartime
In recent months, skyrocketing gas prices have forced O'Reilly to reveal his fascist hand by talking tough against oil companies while steering workers away from any socialist alternative that would enroach on private profits. Throughout this demagoguery, O'Reilly has feigned shock and outrage over the fact that oil tycoons are profiteering during wartime at the expense of the nation.
A lesson for working people here: Heed not the words of a millionaire elite media hack so ignorant of his country's history he's oblivious to the fact that war profiteering is as American as apple pie.--June 18, 2006
O'Reilly to US Workers: Drive Less
O'Reilly's advice to American workers who watch their living standards deteriorate while gas prices hit the roof and oil companies rake in record profits is the 21st century equivalent of Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake."
It's easy for someone who's chauffered to work in a limousine to tell workers to drive less as a way of socking it to the oil companies.
Working people need action, not "let them eat cake" rhetoric from a millionaire who gets driven to work.WE need proposals that will protect us from the ravages and chaos of this profit system. We need an immediate cap on gas prices for workers and small to medium sized business owners at $1.50 a gallon. We need to confiscate and expropriate the obscene profits made by oil companies along with the multihundred million-dollar bonuses paid to oil executives. We need to nationalize the energy corporations and convert them into publicly owned and democratically run utilities.
And in order to realize these proposals, we need to stop listening to rightist demagogues like Bill O'Reilly and form a mass socialist party based on and rooted in the working class.--June 18, 2006
O'Reilly Defends Torture by Lying About It
"But if you're gonna tell me there's torture going on, I wanna see the torture. I wanna see some evidence of the torture. OK? I have not seen any evidence of that.
"Coerced rehabilitate -- coerced interrogation? Yes. Abu Ghraib abuse? Absolutely, absolutely. People getting their eyes cut out, fingers cut off, electric shock?No. OK. So I haven't seen any."--Bill O'Reilly, Radio Factor, June 13, 2006
Oh Really O'Reilly?
Media Matters reminds us that:
A Washington Post article reported that declassified documents from the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force "detail[ed] several reported incidents of abuse at Guantanamo Bay and at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan" that "included beatings, Koran desecration, death threats, and electric shocks."
From the March 6 New York Times:
"On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for 'excessive use of force' and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns."
Media Matters also reported that Amnesty International documented "multiple abuse allegations involving the use of electric shock," including a "47-year-old imam and preacher...insulted, blindfolded, beaten and subjected to electric shocks from a stun gun (taser) by US troops at a detention facility in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad."
Karim R described his ordeal to Amnesty International:
“They tied my hands to the back with a cable. There was an instrument with a chain which was attached to the ceiling. When they switched it on the chain pulled me up to the ceiling. Because the hands are tied to the back this is even more painful (...) Afterwards they threw water over me and they used electric shocks. They connected the current to my legs and also to other parts of my body. (...) The first time they subjected me to electric shocks I fainted for 40 seconds or one minute. It felt like falling from a building. I had a headache and was not able to walk. The interrogator said: You better confess to terrorist activities, in order to save your life. I responded that I was not involved in these activities and that I had a heart condition. (...) Later they forced me to confess on camera. They asked questions claiming that I was a terrorist but they did not even give me the chance to reply. They just stated that I was a terrorist. (...).”
As discussed above in "Three Guantanamo Prisoners Commit Suicide," a series of memos were written by FBI agents describing abuse they'd witnessed at Guantanamo. This evidence poses a problem for O'Reilly because its existence undermines his claims that no proof of torture exists and the only people saying otherwise are "far-leftists" like the ACLU. O'Reilly's solution to this quandary? Simple. Doubt the veracity of this FBI testimony because no agent has said this on The Factor. And as we all know, if it's not said on O'Reilly's program, then it was never said. You know the logic: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, then the tree never fell, you see.
O'Reilly: "I was down in Guantánamo Bay, there was an FBI agent standing right in front of me says, 'There's no torture here.' OK? Where are the FBI agents who says there's torture. Where? Where are they?"
He might ask Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Thomas Harrington, who wrote a memo to Maj. General Donald Ryder of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command outlining three cases of abuse witnessed by FBI agents while serving at Guantanamo Bay.
From Harrington's memo:
"The Marine said Sgt. Lacey had grabbed the detainee's thumbs and bent them backwards and indicated that she also grabbed his genitals. The Marine also implied that her treatment of that detainee was less harsh than her treatment of others by indicating that he had seen her treatment of other detainees result in detainees curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain."
"...the far-left press believes that any kind of coerced interrogation is torture...Degrading treatment...which could be anything. It could be mocking the guy's turban. It could be anything. Some people say that's torture, OK?"--Bill O'Reilly, 6/6/06
"Right, humiliating and degrading....The Human Rights Watch, if they [interrogators] call a guy a name, that's you know torture."--O'Reilly, 6/6/06
Irish Immigrants in St. Patrick's Battalion Knew Which Folks to Look After
The fact that one of this country's most prominent Irish-Americans is leading the xenophobic charge against Mexican immigrants represents a perverse irony of history that every worker should know about.
Once upon a time in America, Irish Catholic immigrants were the new kids on the block whose cheap labor status caused great resentment among the largely Protestant nativist population. In the years preceding the Mexican-American War, these newcomers joined the US Army more for the $7 monthly paycheck than out of patriotic fervor.
"The U.S. anti-immigrant press of the time caricatured the Irish with simian features, portraying them as unintelligent and drunk and charging that they were seditiously loyal to the pope," wrote Anne-Marie O'Connor of the LA Times in 1997. "But cheap Irish labor was welcome. Irish maids became as familiar as Latin American nannies are today." [Thanks to Mickey Z of Zmag, 3/17/02]
Once in the army, Irish Catholic immigrants were subjected to beatings and abuse from Anglo soldiers and officers, who viewed the newcomers as undesirable, unwashed lowlives. In 1848, these Irish soldiers found themselves in Mexico on the orders of President James Polk, who, imbued with the spirit of Manifest Destiny, decided it was time to conquer half of Mexico's land mass by military force.
But a funny thing happened to a group of these Irish soldiers on the way to Polk's war of colonial conquest--they rejected it. In the spirit of Mohammed Ali, who refused to fight in Vietnam because "no Vietnamese ever called me 'nigger'," 200 of these Irish Catholics deserted the US Army, crossed the Rio Grande, and joined the Mexican Army as a new unit--St. Patrick's Battalion, whose leader was an Irishman from Galway named John Riley.
Riley and his compatriots fought under a banner made of green silk that was stitched by nuns and combined the Mexican coat of arms saying "Freedom for the Mexican Republic" with a painting of St. Patrick and the inscription, "Erin Go Bragh" (Ireland Forever). The soldiers of St. Patrick's Battalion were also known as the "Red Guards," fought bravely in a series of battles until they were overwhelmed at Churubusco. Sixteen prisoners were hanged as traitors; others, including Riley, were whipped and branded with a "D" for deserter--an embryonic manifestation of American fascism that is more fully developed today in the person of Bill O'Reilly.
Riley and his compatriots in St. Patrick's Battalion had seen enough oppression and exploitation in Ireland's potato famine to recognize who were the folks and who were the elitist plunderers in the Mexican-American War. When they realized they had joined an imperial army bent on stealing Mexico's land, they deserted that invading army and fought on the side of the Mexican people. St. Patrick's soldiers were internationalists and anti-imperialists to the core. They are rightly memorialized in Mexico as heroes who gave their lives so that the Mexican people could live. St. Patrick's Battalion represented the best of Ireland. It was filled with true Irish patriots who foreshadowed the revolutionary spirit and action of James Connolly and Bobby Sands.
We will never hear about St. Patrick's Battalion from Bill O'Reilly, because they represent everything he is not. Indeed, he is a negation of his own history. As a multimillionaire, as a member of the privileged elite, as a bitter opponent of labor unions, as a defender of Anglo-American militarism, imperialism, and colonial occupations, and most of all, as the country's leading basher of Mexican immigrants, Bill O'Reilly has long shed his Irish working class roots, and his Catholicism is closer to Franco, Opus Dei, and the fascist-leaning, property owning Vatican than to the plebian masses of Ireland.--June 1, 2006
O'Reilly Defames WWII American Soldiers--Again
Last time it was done in a futile attempt to rationalize Abu Ghraib during an interview with General Wesley Clark. This time O'Reilly was attempting to blunt the impact of the massacre at Haditha in another discussion with Clark. Both times O'Reilly falsely stated it was American soldiers who massacred German forces at Malmedy, Belgium, when in truth it was the other way around. A fuming Keith Olbermann did an excellent job exposing this latest insult from O'Reilly toward the US soldiers he hypocritically idolizes in furtherance of Washington's imperial ambitions. We can expect Media Matters, Crooks and Liars and Newshounds to record O'Reilly's lie as well.
For our part, O'Reilly's reprise of his perversion of history validates our analysis of that initial defamation, when we speculated that his "mistake" that Americans murdered German prisoners was rooted in Senator Joseph McCarthy's belief that the SS officers who ordered the Americans' executions had been tortured by US personnel. Olbermann agrees with our conclusion that O'Reilly's second offense here demonstrates it was no mere "mistake, but the Countdown host fails to dig deeper and examine the link between O'Reilly and McCarthy's defense of the SS officers.
Not only did O'Reilly repeat the lie that US soldiers massacred German prisoners at Malmedy, but FOX News repeated their slimy practice of deleting O'Reilly's false statements from the official FOX transcript. Talk about George Orwell! Talk about the Stalinist School of Falsification!
Olbermann proved that FOX altered the transcript of O'Reilly's May 30 conversation with General Clark. First Keith showed the video clip in which O'Reilly said, "And in Malmedy, as you know, U.S. forces captured S.S. forces, who had their hands in the air. And they were unarmed. And they shot them down . You know that. That's on the record. Been documented."
Then Olbermann showed the latest FOX transcript of the interview, which now reads "And in Normandy, as you know, U.S. forces captured S.S. forces,..." [emphasis added]
If nothing else, FOX News is consistent. After the first Clark interview in October 2005, FOX indulged in a similar cut and paste hatchet job on the transcript. From "O'Reilly Defames WWII American Soldiers":
"There's little doubt that American GIs committed retaliatory executions of German soldiers after hearing about Malmedy. During the invasion of Sicily in 1943, soldiers from the 45th (Thunderbird) Division of the US Army executed 100 German prisoners. Members of that same division executed SS officers during the liberation of Dachau in 1945 as well. But that's not what O'Reilly said. He specifically attributed the Malmedy Massacre to the 82nd Airborne: 'You need to look at the Malmedy Massacre in World War II, and the 82nd Airborne that did it.' [emphasis added]
"FOX News and Bill O'Reilly did not wish to add any emphasis to that assertion. In fact, FOX deleted that passage from their transcript of the program! Go to their version and you'll see only, 'You need to look at the Malmedy Massacre in World War II.'
"It's all part of their fair and balanced approach. Instead of yanking this lying fraud from the air, FOX covers up for him. Because lying is precisely what they're paying him to do!"--June 2, 2006
"...I know the right demand is an apology. And I think that he owes that to all our troops, and he especially owes that to the World War II generation."
It looks like O'Reilly doesn't speak for all American war veterans.--June 7, 2006
The Deadly Business of Defending Capitalism...
...is what Bill O'Reilly should have called his May 18 Talking Points memo introducing his interview with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "The Deadly Business of Defense...":
"Did you know that more than 100,000 illegal aliens are currently in U.S. prisons after being convicted of felonies?"
Did you know that's less than one percent of undocumented workers in the US? Did you know that historically, superexploited immigrants fill prisons in disproportionate numbers? Did you know that the White House and Congress are filled with war criminals, felons, and felons in waiting? Did you know that these present and future felons are trying to make millions of hard working Latino immigrants felons?
O'Reilly: "Did you know that Iraqi civilian militias are murdering thousands of people — murdering them — every month in that country?"
Did you know the sectarian violence engulfing Iraq is a direct result of the violence unleashed by Washington's illegal, unprovoked invasion that has murdered hundreds of thousands of people?
O'Reilly: "Did you know that American Marines are being investigated for killing unarmed Iraqi women and children? And the charges may have validity."
Did you know that Time magazine broke this story on March 19, 2006? That O'Reilly ignored it until Congressman Jack Murtha forced it into the open this week? That Oh Really O'Reilly covered it on March 21? (See below, "Demented US Soldiers Scream with Laughter Over Victims' Deaths" under "Marine Recruiters Accused of Raping High School Girls")
Oh Really predicted O'Reilly would try to defend this horrific slaughter of civilians by US Marines, as he had rushed to the defense of the Marine who cold-bloodedly executed a wounded Iraqi. But even O'Reilly didn't touch the Haditha massacre with a 10-foot pole until Murtha left him no alternative. O'Reilly began his interview with Rumsfeld with a warning he was about to "pop a very tough question." He then proceeds to blunt that question with a mealy-mouthed characterization of Murtha's charges:
"Congressman Murtha goes on national television and accuses U.S. marines of slaughtering women and children, innocent civilians in Iraq. We know that there's an investigation to that. We know that the investigation is complete. I know that you can't comment because it's a criminal proceeding."
Rumsfeld: "Right."
Then comes the "tough question":
"Should I take this story ultra-seriously?" [Not just "seriously" but ultra-seriously.]
What follows is an illuminating exchange between these war criminals, both of whose hands are stained with the blood of working people from the US to Iraq.
Rumsfeld: "Well, I really can't say anything on that. What I can say is that the Department of Defense takes it seriously."
O'Reilly: "All right. So you're taking this story..."
Rumsfeld: "No, no, I'm not taking the story seriously. The Department of Defense, the command out there in Iraq...is investigating the information, and is proceeding under the Code of Military Justice. Needless to say, we have to take seriously allegations of that type. And they're under investigation, and they will then be handled in the normal order of things."
Translation: Of course we have to go through the motions on a case this hot, this politically embarrassing. But don't worry, these "allegations" will be whitewashed as much as possible, even if we have to sacrifice some lower level officers, just like we did with Abu Ghraib. And I know we can count on you to help us all the way, Bill.
Next O'Reilly almost groveled before his master.
"All right, I need you to do me a favor. Right after this interview tonight we're going to run a story on this investigation...If there's nothing to this I don't want to do that story. I don't want to besmirch the U .S. Marine Corps if this is bull."
Translation: Help me out here, Rummy. I can only spin so much. Defending that Marine in the mosque is one thing, but this might be too much even for me.
But Rumsfeld wasn't biting and gave O'Reilly nothing but his typical bureaucratic doublespeak.
"But it could at any stage it could go farther or less far."
O'Reilly: "This is so upsetting to me as an American, and I'm sure--because we respect the military on the 'Factor' and most Americans do....If you've got Marines--you have another My Lai on your hands and that's going to be not only for the marines and the people involved."
Rumsfeld: "I think it would be premature to characterize it that way."
No it wouldn't. In fact, Oh Really O'Reilly called Haditha a mini-My Lai on March 21, 2006. And it was balls-on accurate then.
O'Reilly: "I just said if. It's a huge if. But that will impact the whole war effort."
And that's all that matters to O'Reilly. He could give a rat's ass about the family slaughtered in that house. It's all about the war effort. O'Reilly's noble war effort that is made up of enough Hadithas to cause over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians. Hadithas have been occurring all over Iraq, and O'Reilly's helped cover them up after he has publicly called for the destruction of entire towns.
The blood of those dead Iraqis in Haditha is on both these scoundrels' hands.--May 20, 2006
O'Reilly's "Victory": Bush Militarizes Border, Moves Closer to Police State
May 17-22, 2006--When you hear George W. Bush's May 15th proposal to militarize the US-Mexican border with 6,000 National Guardsmen described as a sop to the prejudices of the ultrarightist Republican Party base, they're talking most of all about Bill O'Reilly. While the initial deployment of 6,000 Guardsmen was criticized as inadequate by O'Reilly, he welcomed Bush's measure as "better than nothing."As he reminded his audience the other night in "Border Action, Finally," he's been advocating this punitive, police state measure for six years.
"Well, in the past six years since I called for troops on the border, millions of illegal immigrants have arrived in the USA, along with untold tons of narcotics and who knows how many terrorists."
For someone who claims he has nothing against Mexican immigrants, notice how he's not so subtly equating millions of them with drug traffickers and terrorists. Drug trafficking is caused by the criminalization of drugs and capitalist free enterprise. From Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle heroin to Latin America's cocaine, it's O'Reilly's CIA that's been responsible for drugs pouring into America's cities. As for terrorists coming from south of the border, O'Reilly doesn't know because there are none. As the Washington Post's Peter Beinart reported on May 4:
Using newspaper reports and government documents, Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke of the Nixon Center have painstakingly compiled a database of 373 known or suspected terrorists in North America or Western Europe since 1993. In a forthcoming essay in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, they disclose their findings: Not one terrorist has entered the United States from Mexico. And they're not the only ones who have reached that conclusion. As a recent paper published by Syracuse University's Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism notes, "it does not appear that authorities have apprehended even a single terrorist trying to cross over the southern border into the United States."
That's because terrorist come not from the ranks of Mexican workers but from the machinations and training camps of Washington's military and intelligence apparatus. You want to look for terrorists? Declassifiy and release all intelligence files classified on the basis of national security so we can discover the links between US intelligence and terrorists, particularly "Al Qaeda." But all the Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly's of the world should keep their filthy chauvinist hands off our brothers and sisters from Mexico and quit painting toilers from that country with the broad brush of terrorism and drug smugglers.
O'Reilly's immigration stance personifies the political and economic contradictions within the capitalist camp that is for a change dividing the exploiters and creating the foundation for working class unity. On the one hand, big business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers want a steady supply of illegal immigrants because the superexploitation of their cheap labor is a lucrative source of profits. On the other hand, fascist elements like the Minutemen and others in the Republicans ultrarightist base want to deport the estimated 12 million undocumented workers as a form of ethnic cleansing to prevent the "browning of America" and any further dilution of the white European culture--the establishment of which was the result of a genuine "illegal immigration" involving hordes of invaders usurping the land of indigenous peoples.
As usual, O'Reilly is the political godfather of the Christian right seeking to shepherd a middle course that bridges the antagonisms between big capital and the ultrarightists. While he has long advocated "securing the border" by militarizing it, he opposes the wholesale deportation of undocumented Mexican workers and backs Bush's guest worker program that would ensure a large, steady supply of poverty wage immigrants with no rights who would be sent back to their country when they were no longer needed.
Historically, this arrangement has been a double blessing for the US capitalists. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are a huge source of superprofits that depress overall wages, the threat of deportation has prevented them from fighting for higher wages and benefits and improved safety on the job, while anti-immigrant xenophobia has served to divide the working class.
But the recent mass mobilizations by immigrant workers demanding legalization and amnesty has thrown the US capitalist class on the defensive and forced Bush to respond with his "immigration reform" package that once again attempts to use the military directly against the working class. The capitalists' only alternative is to intensify the anti-immigrant hysteria to keep the US working class from uniting politically around a socialist, internationalist agenda. That's where O'Reilly earns the millions Rupert Murdoch pays him.
"There are more than 100,000 illegal aliens in prison for felonies in the USA."
Here O'Reilly tries to smear the entire immigrant worker population as criminals because less than one percent of them are in prison, most of them for narcotic related or antisocial crimes that are fueled by the profit system and laws that cause more crime than they prevent. O'Reilly neglects to add that throughout history, prisons in the US have been disproportionately filled with superexploited immigrants, including those from Ireland and Italy.
The House-passed Sensenbrenner bill aims to turn the entire undocumented worker population--and all those helping them--into felons as well. How ironic that a corrupt institution filled with potential felons sits in judgment of hard-working immigrants. The criminals whom working people in the US should be concerned about are in the White House and Congress, as well as the capitalists who legally steal the surplus value we create. The criminals are the IMF and World Bank officials whose policies have starved thousands of Mexicans to death and forced millions to migrate to El Norte to earn a living. The criminals are the US capitalists and their government who had their Central American puppets torture and murder hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants over the last several decades. The criminals are the US capitalists and their political hacks in both parties, along with their junior partners in Mexico and other Central American countries.
"And according to a study at Columbia University, illegal immigration costs American taxpayers more t han $68 billion a year."
O'Reilly can't even get his facts straight from a highly skewed, biased study. According to the ultrarightist Web site Free Republic the Columbia study did not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants in its analysis of how much immigration costs "native" Americans. Quotation marks are used here in deference to any Native Americans contemplating how much illegal immigration of European settlers cost them.
The truth is far more reputable studies show the exact opposite--that immigrants are ripped off by the capitalists and their government by paying far more in Social Security and sales taxes than they receive in social services. Since 1996, the IRS has been issuing identification numbers that most undocumented workers need to get hired. Social Security and Medicare taxes are automatically deducted from their checks, but because these numbers are bogus they'll never receive the social services these taxes are supposed to pay for. According to the May 1 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service article, "Immigrants are Paying a Lot More Taxes Than You May Think," the revenues from these phony numbers make up 10% of the Social Security surplus and are put in an "earnings suspense file" that is increasing $50 billion annually.
That $68 billion is dwarfed by the hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the rich and the half a trillion dollar war budget the true purpose of which is to safeguard the profits of US capitalists--not the security of the American people. Declines in social services, unemployment, and lower wages are not caused by Mexican immigrants but because capitalism's drive to maximize private profit drives it to divert hundreds of billions of the wealth produced by workers away from jobs, schools, health care, pensions, housing, and other pressing social needs. Washington did not strengthen New Orleans' levees and neglect Katrina victims because of undocumented workers from Mexico--it did so because it was more important for the US capitalist rulers to divert money, resources and infrastructure to the task of conquering Iraq for Big Oil.
The answer for US workers is not to blame our class allies from Mexico for social services cutbacks. The road foward is to demand jobs, health care, benefits, pensions, and education for all workers--English-speaking and Spanish-speaking; native born and immigrant.
The chaos on the border is a disgraceful insult to human dignity and human rights. It is a crisis that's out of control. Millions of Mexican toilers arrested at the border last year; since 1994, thousands of have died from heat, starvation, freezing cold, and suffocation in the backs of trucks. Border Patrol agents hunting human beings as if they were animals; infrared detectors; walls and fences that will result in even more deaths. This is all an outrage and affront to humanity and the rights and dignity of working people.
This is the law and order, militaristic, punitive, police state solution to the crisis posed by the US ruling class and its agents like Bush and O'Reilly. This is the only solution the US capitalists have to any of the crises afflicting their system of private profit. US workers should not be hoodwinked by this divide and conquer strategy of the employers and their government and media. We should not let Bush and O'Reilly present the rulers' solution as the only solution open to us. We should not internalize their barbaric, inhumane values that pits us against our natural ally--Mexico's workers and peasants. We should instead advance our own solutions to the crisis on the border caused by capitalism--working class solutions that are based on our values, proletarian values, democratic, just and humane values--not the dog eat dog and brutal values of the exploiters.
We should start by rejecting this whole historically obsolete notion of national borders. They didn't always exist, and they won't always in the future. Borders were creations of the capitalists to better exploit workers in all countries.
But your friend Bill O'Reilly will. In "Protecting Your Privacy," the Orwellian title of his May 11 Talking Points memo, O'Reilly shrugs "no big deal" to news of "the advanced preparations for the establishment of a police state in the United States" revealed in this latest bombshell.
You know you're in the gutter when Newt Gingrich has more respect for the Constitution than you do.
More below in "Spittin' Out O'Reilly."
"Spittin' Out O'Reilly"
April-June 2006--Oh Really O'Reilly is all about demolishing Bill O'Reilly politically. It's about exposing this wanna-be working class hero as the charlatan he is before the US and international proletariat. Metaphorically speaking, Oh Really is about chewing up O'Reilly's "arguments" and spitting them out into the garbage can of history where they belong.
When time constraints limit a detailed analyses of the noxious brand of hate-mongering and militarism this fascist demagogue vomits on a nightly basis, COSMOS LEFT offers Spittin' Out O'Reilly as a new feature that will respond to selected excerpts from Talking Points Memos.
"Three more reasons for Democrats to stay away from the far-left fanatics..."
It's more accurate to say that "far-left fanatics," that is, all those opposing Bush, imperialist wars, tax cuts, police state repression, and torture, should stay away from Democrats, because that capitalist party has backed Bush and these policies all the way.
O'Reilly: "Reason one: whether you agree with his politics or not, Senator John McCain is a patriot, a man who suffered torture for six years at the hands of Jane Fonda's friends, the North Vietnamese."
McCain was a war criminal shot down by the North Vietnamese who were defending their people against McCain's bombs. He should have spent his time in Hanoi's prison contemplating why his government sent him 7,000 miles away from home to kill Vietnamese in theirs. He should have vowed to devote the rest of his life toward preventing future Vietnams and wars of aggression by Washington.
O'Reilly: "Since that time, McCain has devoted himself to public service."
No, since that time, McCain has devoted himself to serving the same capitalist political establishment and war machine that sent him and his comrades into a hostile, unwinnable colonial war of occupation--a "public service" that is condemning hundreds of thousands of present-day Americans to suffer the same fate; a "public service" that has condemned 2400 American soldiers--and counting--to their deaths and thousands more to return home missing their limbs and mental health.
O'Reilly: "Yet some students at the ultra-liberal New School insulted and heckled Senator McCain when he spoke to them at their graduation. These students apparently believe the Senator is a bad person while they are good, so they try to demean him."
The New School graduates exercised their 1st Amendment right of free expression and dissent from governmental policy. It's not a matter of Georgie Good or Bobby Bad. It's a question of opposing McCain's unflinching support for a brutal, imperialist war that is assaulting the sensibilities of these politically astute graduates.
"The result was shame upon the New School as most Americans understand these students have done little or nothing for their country and their actions are deplorable."
The result is that shame should be heaped upon the New School for inviting this unrepentant militarist--particularly after the Student Senate requested that McCain's invitation be withdrawn.
"Yet this exposition is standard procedure for the far left which tolerates no dissent."
This from a paragon of tolerance who threatened to smash Jeremy Glick's head into pieces for daring to mention the word "imperialism" and suggesting that US foreign policy had something to do with 9/11.
O'Reilly: "Reason number two: the ombudsman for NPR recently lashed out at two dishonest far-left Web sites, mediamatters and think progress for urging their readers to complain to the National Public Radio because some of their contributors appear here on the FOX News Channel."
In fact, neither Media Matters nor Think Progress urged their readers to complain to NPR because its contributors appear on FOX. What they did do was urge readers to inform NPR that one of its contributors, FOX's Mara Liasson, had erroneously claimed that "it's Democrats, not just Republicans, taking money from [corrupt lobbyist Jack] Abramhoff." As Think Progress points out, only Republicans received campaign contributions directly from Abramhoff.
O'Reilly: "Jeffrey Dvorkin wrote, 'The blogs encouraged people to complain to NPR and hundreds did, many did with a surprising level of rancor and vituperation which was shockingly intense even in these times of take no prisoners and shoot-the-wounded political debate.'"
Dvorkin apparently doesn't know the difference between a blog and a Web site. While Think Progress is a blog, Media Matters is not. And this is a public ombudsman talking!
Interesting choice of words from Dvorkin--"take no prisoners" and "shoot the wounded political debate" given a) the existence of US-run torture chambers like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that look like sets from the hit horror flick "Hostel" and b) the fact that a Marine shot dead a wounded Iraqi in a mosque.
Dvorkin's whining about the intensity of the public's reaction to NPR providing a forum for a dishonest reporter such as Liasson sounds remarkably like the whining we heard recently from Joe Klein after "frothy bloggers" attacked him for endorsing Bush's position to threaten Iran by keeping the "nuclear option on the table."
O'Reilly: "The ombudsman has now learned firsthand just how vicious the far left blogs are. All decent Americans should reject these haters."
No, the ombudsman learned firsthand the depth of the anger growing among the American people over the lies they were told by the government and its media hacks like Joe Klein regarding Iraq and now Iran.
O'Reilly: "And finally, I made a mistake the other day trying to have a civil conversation with Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, a committed member of the far left."
You left out the part about "card-carrying," you wretched piece of shit McCarthyite.
"...But I felt sorry for the woman because of the death threats against her--I get that stuff and I know how it disturbing it is."
Natalie doesn't need--or want--O'Reilly's pity about death threats, particularly since his hate-filled, fearmongering rants against gays, Mexicans, and "activist" judges have generated a steady stream of death threats from his deranged followers for years.
"So when I saw Ms. Maines at a Time magazine event, I complimented h er on her performance that evening and we ch atted for a minute or two. Yesterday, Natalie's version of the conversation appeared in The New York Times: 'It's like, just want to say that was great O'Reilly says. We really respect what you did. We really respect that you stood up for yourself and blah, blah, blah.' Apparently, Ms. Maines also described me as despicable."
Which shows Natalie is a good judge of character. It also shows Natalie has watched The Factor, because "blah, blah, blah" is a mainstay comment of Talking Points Memos.
"So much for a polite discourse."
O'Reilly, you lost all rights to polite discourse the day you threatened to smash Jeremy Glick's head into pieces for daring to suggest US foreign policy had something to do with September 11.
"Anyway, let me put this in words even Natalie Maines can understand, because I don't think she will be holding a geopolitical seminar any time soon:..."
Oh yes, enlighten us with one of your geopolitical seminars, Mr. History Professor; you who predicted that the US invasion of Iraq would bring peace to the Middle East; who claims US foreign policy bestows peace on the world because it prevents others from killing each other. What O'Reilly, Imus, and every other yokel still criticizing Haines seem to have missed is that on the issue of Iraq she was right and they were wrong.
"...It's like Natalie, I said I respected your right to say what you want not like I respect what you said. That would be impossible! Because no one has any idea why you dislike President Bush or what your view of the world like really is, OK? Whatever."
Anyone with a brain understands why Haines dislikes Bush--he's a lying, power-mad war criminal with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands. That's a pretty good reason why Haines--and most of humanity despise George W. Bush and his chief media apologist, Bill O'Reilly.--June 3, 2006
This from the "journalist" most responsible for the fact that 70% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind September 11. As Media Matters points out, several studies show that viewers of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart are better informed than the Factor audience. They also remind us about the October 2003 study by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy which found FOX viewers were "significantly more likely to have misperceptions" about the Iraq war.
O'Reilly can't hide his frustration over the fact that young--and most--Americans are no longer believing his propaganda; that the president he has consistently defended is going down as the worst and most reviled in American history; that the people have turned against the Iraq war; that secularism and the "far-left" are getting stronger.
His rabid followers are confused. They're either squealing like stuck pigs or whining to their master."Who cares about the Dixie Chicks?" one Factor viewer wrote, which galvanized O'Reilly to offer the illuminating explanation that it's all the fault of "bomb-throwing entertainers" like Stewart and the Dixie Chicks.
From Rumsfeld Interview (May 19, 2006)
O'Reilly: "Why do you think the left in this country is so anti-Iraq war? Why?"
Two things here. First, it's more than just the "left--or what passes for the "left"--that opposes the Iraq. O'Reilly must wish that antiwar sentiment was limited to the "left." The problem for O'Reilly and the warmakers is that a solid majority of Americans are opposed to the war--broad layers of the public finally realized that Bush sold them a pack of lies and there's a lot of people dead and Iraq's now a hellish nightmare laced with destruction and carnage but lacking electricity, water, infrastructure, health care, jobs, schools, security and national sovereignty. Second, when O'Reilly keeps talking about the "left" or "far left," he's not just referring to a marginalized, fringe group of left wing loonies. He's talking about the growing number of Americans opposed to Bush, the war in Iraq, the war on terror, governmental spying, torture. He's talking about working people who are beginning to wake up and fight for our rights and against the government's assault on them. O'Reilly's worried. And from his class perspective, he should be.
Hundreds of thousands dead, a nation's water and land poisoned, children missing limbs, torture, death squads, growing terrorism, executions, joblessness, misery, chaos--that's quite enough for most Americans to oppose this war. But there's O'Reilly, asking the individual most responsible for this hell, why? What a pinnacle of journalism!
O'Reilly: "Is it just the hatred of the president?" It's the war, stupid. And the lies you helped Bush tell to sell it. Bush is hated because his smirking lies condemned hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their deaths--and not just that family in Haditha, O'Reilly. Before this record crystallized, most people, unfortunately, liked Bush. It's Bush's record of lies, failures, crimes, sadism, arrogance, imperiousness, and cowardice that causes people to hate him.
