Cosmos Left

December 2003/January 27, 2004--Gloating in misplaced triumphalism, Bill O'Reilly wasted no time in inciting the most depraved and ignorant people in this country to cheer the capture and humiliation of Saddam Hussein. The "No-Spin Zone" is rapidly spinning this news to boost Bush as much as possible and justify the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. So let's unravel the latest pack of spin and lies from the country's chief spinmeister.

"A Great Day for America" led off the Factor's December 15th show that combined so many lies and distortions with O'Reilly's repulsive jingoistic chauvinism befitting America's chief war propagandist.

"In the end they found him in the dirt, which is poetic justice for sure, Saddam Hussein hiding like a worm and surrendering meekly, because above all the man is a coward."

O'Reilly should be careful when making statements that do nothing but weaken his own position as well as Bush's. First, the disheveled and disoriented condition of Hussein when he was found undermines Bush's argument that the Iraqi leader had been directing the insurgency. Second, given the fact that Bush went AWOL from the Texas National Air Guard in 1972, plus his less than heroic performance on September 11, when his main concern was expressed this way--"I just wanted to get out of the way"--this the commander in chief of a country under attack--a Bush supporter is in no position to taunt Hussein for his cowardice.

"Most Americans see this as a great victory. Some however, are disappointed because of the actual bolster to the Bush administration, at least in the short run. However, violence will continue inside Iraq, as it is driven by hatred for the west, and the capture of Saddam will not make that go away."

First, "most Americans see this as a great victory," is an unsubstantiated assertion, a piece of subjective spin by a pro-war fanatic who is trying to shape public opinion his way. The inevitable uptick in Bush's approval ratings following the capture does not translate into most Americans seeing the capture as a great victory. Despite the relentless bombardment of jingoistic hysteria, most Americans were not imbued with the frenzy of bloodlust and sadism that permeated the US bourgeois political establishment.

Even the manipulative, phony bourgeois public opinion polls reflected this. A Washington Post survey showed that a small minority th ought the arrest would help a great deal. Ninety percent of Americans see "big challenges" ahead in Iraq. Forty two percent still don't think the war was worth waging. A CNN-Gallup revealed the samesentiments.

The feeling among the masses is more subdued, cautious, resigned, even apathetic. It is among bloodthirsty hyenas like O'Reilly that the bloodlust over Hussein's capture and humiliation is so strong. These ilk are frustrated over the disastrous course of the war and the lack of pro-war fervor in the country. O'Reilly is projecting his inhumanity and depravity onto "most Americans." It is an exercise in wishful thinking on the part of a millionaire parasite who knows this war is being fought to defend the profit system he feeds off.

O'Reilly is right that Hussein's capture will not halt the violence in Iraq, but not because it is driven by terror and hatred for the West. It is driven by the fact that Iraqis want foreign troops who are killing Iraqi civilians out of their country. We've seen enough evidence already to demonstrate that resistance to the US occupation is intensifying after Saddam's arrest because the insurgents will no longer be identified as Hussein loyalists. They are fighting for an independent and sovereign Iraq free from foreign domination.

"Another tyrant bites the dust, and the world is a better place."

Another US-backed tyrant bit the dust, but the world is NOT a safer place, because far more dangerous and lethal tyrants are still around. The world will be a better place when BUSH and SHARON are gone.

"It's interesting to see countries like France, Russia, anda few others, states that want America to fail in the Middle East give half hearted congratulations. The worse things go for America, the better the French government for example, likes it."

January 2004--Sometimes O'Reilly actually expresses kernels of truth in his blathering, although he has no idea of the big picture. Here the Factor host has stumbled upon the very real interimperialist conflicts, divisions, and antagonisms that define world politics today, specifically, which of the imperialist nations will control the vital strategic natural resources of Iraq, the Middle East and Central Asia.

While it's true that the French and Germans were acting in defense of their respective imperialist interests when they opposed a US invasion of Iraq, there was also an element of capitalist "family" members trying to rein in an out-of-control cousin from wrecking the plundering party for everyone.

When O'Reilly spews venom toward the French and Germans these days, he is merely the embodiment of the rapacious, predatory and gangster faction of the US capitalist class now in power, whose attitude toward all rivals and competitors is as follows: "We're the baddest and toughest honchos on the block now, so either play ball our way or hit the highway. Because might makes right, partners, and besides, we've got God on our side."

And just as Michael Corleone told Tom Hagen in The Godfather: "You're out, Tom," Donald Rumsfeld has told France and Germany, "You're out, Old Europe."

O'Reilly continued:

"The capture of Saddam hopefully will clear up a number of important issues. Did he have weapons of mass destruction? Is so, where are they? Did he bribe foreign leaders to support him, and which ones gave him arms in violation of the embargo? Which terrorist groups did he directly support with money and safe harbor, and what did he know about Al Qaeda?"

We already know that there were no WMD left in Iraq. That is just one of many claims that Bush--and O"Reilly--have already been exposed as lies.

On February 24, 2001, Secretary of State Colin P owell had this to say while in Cairo, Egypt:

"He (Saddam H ussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his regional neighbors."

On May 15, 2001, Powell volunteered that Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years,"and that Hussein "had been kept in a box."

Just two months later, national security advisor Condoleeza Rice stated, "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

As if there wasn't already enough proof that Bush and O'Reilly have been lying from the beginning about Iraq's WMD, more comes from the mouths of two of Bush's closest aides.

Notice how all of those quotes from Powell and Rice were before September 11, 2001. The fires from the Towers were still burning and Rumsfeld was already saying he wanted to "hit" Iraq without a shred of evidence linking Baghdad to 911.

"Go massive. Sweep it all up. THINGS RELATED AND NOT." [emphasis added]

None of this, of course, has ever been mentioned on The O'Reilly Factor or Fox News, which is a big reason why most Americans are clueless on these matters.

O'Reilly has been openly wishing that WMD be found to exonerate his own culpability in the deception of the American public. COSMOS LEFT has believed from the outset that the US would plant WMD in Iraq to frame Hussein and justify the war, a routine practice of US cops. The only reason we have not heard about "discovered" WMD in Iraq is because credible reports suggest that US "friendly fire" hit the Special Forces who were planting them.

This, too, has escaped the attention of Bill O'Reilly.

As for bribing foreign leaders for support, this is exactly what Washington got caught doing to the Security Council, which is one reason why Bush failed to win that body's support for his invasion of Iraq.

Giving arms in violation of an embargo? O'Reilly, and any supporter of Bush, should be careful about levying that charge against anyone, given the fact that Bush's father and several key members of this Bush's administration were up to their necks in selling arms to Iran to finance an illegal war against Nicaragua in the '80s.

O'Reilly fails to inform his audience that Cheney's Halliburton made a tidy profit doing business with Iraq throughout the 1990s while US-led sanctions were in effect. Mr. Fair and Balanced also neglects to report that Washington violates US and international law by financing Israel's illegal and brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"Which terrorist groups did he directly support with money and safe harbor?"

We already know that every attempt by the Bushites to link Hussein to Al Qaeda has failed, a fact even Bush has been forced to concede. The question should be directed at Bush, since bin Laden and the Afghanistan mujahadeen were trained and financed by the CIA, and his brother in law, Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, has been a major benefactor of Al Qaeda who also had extensive business ties with Dubya Bush dating back to the '80s.

Strange how O'Reilly isn't asking Bush what HE knew about Al Qaeda after the August 6, 2001, briefing by the CIA regarding the skyjacking plot that was about to strike the US, why Bush lied about that briefing for nine months, and why Bush refuses to turn over an unedited transcript of that briefing.

Instead, O'Reilly pontificates "It is vital Saddam tell the truth about those questions and EVERY MEASURE, EVERY MEASURE should be taken to ensure that he does." [emphased added]

The ease with which O'Reilly talks approvingly of torturting Hussein dovetailed with the overall atmosphere of bloodlust and homicidal fury that permeated America's airwaves following the capture of Hussein. O'Reilly's viciousness, vindictiveness, and moral depravity fits in nicely with the mindset of Bush and the rest of the capitalist trash running this country, media included.

O'Reilly has the nerve to accuse others of assassinating his character, when he assassinates it every time he opens his mouth. O'Reilly gleefully contributes to the media's sadistic hysteria over Hussein's arrest because it diverts attention away from the fact that weapons of mass destruction have not been found.

But there's something else going on here. Listen carefully to O'Reilly's words: "It is vital Saddam TELL THE TRUTH about those questions and every measure . . . should be taken to ensure that he does." [emphasis added]

Here O'Reilly is saying Hussein should be tortured into saying that he really DID have weapons of mass destruction in order to exonerate Bush and O'Reilly. To O'Reilly, "the truth" is preordained--Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which justifies Bush's war lets O'Reilly off the hook for publicly declaring he'd hang Bush if he lied about those weapons.

Think about that. O'Reilly wants Hussein tortured into saying there were WMD in order to preserve O'Reilly's nonexistent professional integrity. O'Reilly's also doing his part to present Hussein's arrest as justification for the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"After he tells U.S. intelligence what he knows, Saddam should be returned to Iraq to be tried for crimes against humanity. Let them deal with him. If they cannot or will not then send him to the world court in The Hague."

Translation: After Hussein is tortured into saying what we want him to say, he "should be returned to Iraq. . ." Excuse me? Is anyone aware that Hussein is currently outside of Iraq? That kind of cutting edge journalism could earn O'Reilly another Polk award. Or was that a Peabody? It's so easy to confuse those prestigious awards.

I did a double take upon hearing O'Reilly volunteer The Hague as a resolution to the dilemma of where to try Hussein. Bush is deathly afraid of subjecting the US to the jurisdiction of any international war crimes tribunal, which is why he has worked so hard to exempt the actions of any US military personnel from the reach of any international court. This is why Bush will never take Hussein out of Iraq. He wants Hussein tried inside occupied Iraq by a puppet regime, so that Washington controls the proceedings and dictates to the world who can commit war crimes.

That was on December 15. Someone on O'Reilly's staff must have pointed out his error. On December 17, O'Reilly announced that thebilloreilly.com poll question of the day was "Where should Saddam be tried--in the USA, Iraq, or The Hague?"

And on December 18, we had our answer: "Ninety percent of Factor watchers and listeners say Iraq; 5 percent, USA; 5 percent, The Hague."

Good little Pavlovian dogs, those Factor watchers who participate in O'Reilly's loaded polls. They caught the signals from their master, and obediently gave him the politically correct answer in the No Spin Zone.

O'Reilly continued: "Now, by contrast,a Gallup poll shows the majority of Americans want Saddam tried at The Hague, which shows you how smart the The Factor audience really is."

No, it shows the extent to which Factor viewers who vote in O'Reilly's polls are manipulated and brainwashed by their demagogic master.

"No one has the authority to put Saddam on trial in Holland. No one. His fate is purely the responsibility of the Iraqis, and the other scenario is simply not right."

No one--least of all the occupying colonial power in Iraq, has the authority to put Hussein on trial in Iraq. His fate is not "purely the responsibility of the Iraqs while Iraqis are under the jackboot of US occupation. Iraq is not a sovereign enough nation to try anybody in a court of law. Iraqi courts do not belong to Iraqis while under occupation. When every vestige of Washington's occupation has left Iraq, then the Iraqs will possess the degree of self-determination necessary to conduct a trial of Saddam Hussein. But right now any trial occurring in Iraq is illegitimate, because it is conducted under the auspices of the armed colonial power.

"Finally, Talking Points asks all Americans to be honest with themselves. Are you happy today? Are you glad Saddam has been caught and America has achieved another great victory? If not, that says a lot about you."

The very fact that O'Reilly had to ask these leading questions is a reflection of the War Party's frustration over the fact that Hussein's capture did not spark the jingoistic fervor among the populace they had hoped for. Characteristic of the widespread disorientation pervading the US population, Americans seemed more apathetic and almost numb to the news.

But it's also true that many Americans know that Hussein's capture hasn't changed all that much on the ground in Iraq. Americans and Iraqis are still dying every day. Hatred and resentment against the US occupation among Iraqis are on the rise.

Many Americans don't share O'Reilly's assessment that Hussein's capture was "another great victory for America." First, there is not one America. There are two Americas--capitalist and working class. US foreign policy is capitalist foreign policy.

A victory for capitalist America in foreign policy is a defeat for US workers, because it means US rulers have inflicted a defeat on working people overseas. The looting of the US Treasury by the Bush regime is integrally tied to the looting of Iraq's resources.

Hussein's capture represented a short-term boost to US capitalists and THEIR armed forces's morale. But for US workers and workers everywhere, it changes nothing. Iraqi workers are still dying. Iraqi families are gunned down by US soldiers. US worker/soldiers are still dying for a war based on lies that benefits only the war profiteers and military contractors in the "defense" industry.

Many understand too that the capture of a drugged fugitive found in a hole proves Hussein was not directing or inspiring the sophisticated Iraqi guerrilla resistance that shows no signs of abating.

Workers should turn the tables on O'Reilly and ask him: "Are you happy that US soldiers are throwing children into prison and taunting them with shouts like "Bark like a dog, and I'll throw you candy?"

"Are you happy that soldiers teased prisoners by saying, "Say that you love Bush and I will give you food?"

"Are you happy that tens of thousands of Iraqis who had nothing to do with 911 were killed by US forces?
"Are you happy that US bombs poisoned water systems, destroyed electricity plants, hospitals, schools, mosques, and farms?

"Are you happy that Iraq is littered with depleted uranium shells and napalm?"

If so, that says a lot about Bill O'Reilly.

But the Factor host wasn't through revealing the quality of his character. In his "Parting Thoughts on the Capture of Saddam," O'Reilly's shrillness takes an ominous turn toward the pathological fanaticism of the Crusades.

"Finally to night, the world is a safer place because Saddam has been pulled from the dirt. The Bible says, from dust you are, to dust you shall return, a prophecy fitting for the killer Saddam."

We've already demonstrated the fallaciousness of the claim that the world is safer since Hussein was captured. THAT is spin. The whole world knows we're in more danger because Bush is even more emboldened. He's already drawing up plans to attack North Korea, Cuba, Syria and Iran.

But when O'Reilly starts quoting from the Bible, you'd better start ducking. He can no longer restrain himself from openly declaring his alliance with the fundamentalist Christian ultraright and its Crusader General Boykin, who thinks his God is bigger than the Muslim God, that the US is a Christian nation with God on our side, a God whose installation of Bush in the White House was an act of divine intervention.

O'Reilly's quote selection only showed he's not much of a Biblical buff. "From dust you are, to dust you shall return, a prophecy fitting for the killer Saddam."
Except this profound observation applies to every single human born into this world. How this constitutes some kind of Nostradamus-like prophecy as applied to Hussein is not explained.

Hussein eluded capture from the most powerful, sophisticated military machine in history for 8 months. His capture was a combination of betrayal, bribery and his being drugged. One wonders how much different Bush, or any American president, would appear under similar conditions, since many cry at the drop of a hat, including Bush, whose valor during public service includes desertion from the Texas National Air Guard in 1972 and scurrying around the country in fear on 911, wanting above all else “to get out of the way.”

If O'Reilly seeks wisdom from the Bible, he should focus on passages with more specific relevance to his own life, such as "He that troubleth his own house . . . shall inherit the wind" (Proverbs). Or, "As you sow, so shall you reap" (Galatians).

O'Reilly closed "A Great Day for America" with this illuminating observation: "But watch closely over the next few weeks to see exactly who is happy about the demise of the tyrant and also watch for revelations about who enabled Saddam to retain his power all these years. There are many nervous people in Europe and Russia this evening. Trust me on that."

Sure we will. Anyone who predicted with a straight face that invading Iraq will bring peace in the Middle East deserves that trust.

The entire world is nervous these days. America's imperialist rivals are nervous that Washington's military supremacy will allow it to conquer the world for US capitalism and leave them begging for crumbs. The rest of humanity is nervous about the US military machine unleashing death and destruction across the globe with unilateral, aggressive, preemptive and criminal wars of aggression, openly threatening nuclear war along the way.

But the people most nervous about the capture of Saddam Hussein reside in Washington, DC, and they are the leaders Bill O'Reilly admires and supports as a flag-waving patriotic American. "Dead Men Tell No Tales," but live ones can sing like a canary, and if Hussein is allowed to testify publicly it's a good bet he will tell all about the chemical and biological weapons he received from the Bush and Reagan administrations who helped h im kill as many Iranians as possible d uring the Iran/Iraq war.

In fact, Hussein's most treacherous acts against the Iraq people and their neighbors were committed with massive American support--the war against Iran, the repression of the Kurds and Shiites, the installation of the Baathist party/police state dictatorship.

As special envoy to President Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in 1983 to shore up relations with Hussein and assure him he'd have all the weapons and aid he'd need to crush the Iranian revolution. Last year Rumsfeld claimed that he brought up chemical weapons with Hussein, but recently declassified documents show oth erwise.

A year later, Rumsfeld returned to Baghdad to assure Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz not to worry about Washington's public criticism of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran, that it was all for show and the strategic alliance against Iran was stronger than ever.

James Baker, long-time consigilieri to the Bush family, engineered a massive US campaign to illegally aid and arm Hussein while secretary of state in Bush Senior's administration. He personally approved the clearances for export licenses enableing Iraq to acquire chemical and biological weapons. Today, Baker, after helping Bush steal the 2000 election, offers his services to the Godfather by strong-arming US "allies" to cancel the debt Iraq owes them, a move that will facilitate the stabilization and conquest of that country.

It is a fact that Hussein's most egregious crimes were committed while he was strongly backed and armed by the Bush and Reagan administrations. This truth, which the capitalist media can no longer cover up, is finally causing some visible discomfort among right wingers and Bush partisans like O'Reilly. To help him out, O'Reilly turned to former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, whom O'Reilly treats condescendingly and with a respect befitting a favorite aunt.

But O' Reilly's fondness for Albright is not driven by sentimentality. Clinton's Secretary of State is one of O'Reilly's favorite Democrats because she has been one of US imperialism's most ruthless servants. When asked about the deaths of half million Iraqi kids that resulted from the US-led sanctions, Albright replied that it "was a price worth paying."

O'Reilly's kind of girl.

The "far left" is scoring points, O'Reilly whined to Albright, claiming that Hussein is America's fault because we armed him. Is there anything to that? the clueless O'Reilly asked.

There's no question that the US "had a relationship with Hussein," Albright replied to O'Reilly's obvious discomfort, but she quickly recited the well worn script: he was an evil, brutal dictator who gassed his own people.

Sure, O'Reilly chimed in, and besides, changing geopolitical realities generate new alliances, like when we did business with Stalin. It's always dangerous when O'Reilly attempts to give history lessons, but sometimes he articulates a kernel of truth: US imperialism is often in bed with monsters, usually of its own creation (Hussein, Noriega, bin Laden), and uses them to advance imperialism's interests. But O'Reilly's equation of Washington's policies toward Stalin and Hussein is an invalid historical metaphor.

Roosevelt made a tactical military alliance with a powerful workers state on behalf of one gang of imperialist powers to defeat a rival gang of imperialist rivals for world domination. Reagan and Bush armed a bourgeois semi-colonial leader to the teeth with biological and chemical weapons to crush an anti-imperialist revolution in another semi-colonial nation, Iran.

You can't hire a thug as a hit man, install him in power, help him create a tyrannical state, sell him biological and chemical weapons and urge him to attack another country, and then turn around and use those weapons as an excuse to overthrow him.

But all this is too complex for O'Reilly's cartoonish mind, which is preoccupied with defending Reagan and the Bushes.

So O'Reilly asked Albright if she saw any evidence of ghastly errors on Iraq made by Bush Senior when she began her stint as Secretary of State.

Certainly not, Albright assured the Factor host, breathing not a word about the divisions that raged within ruling class circles over the wisdom of leaving Hussein in power in 1991 and then setting up the Shiites to be slaughtered by the Iraqi dictator.

O'Reilly continued his spin to absolve the US of responsibility for Hussein: all US presidents agreed that it was expedient to support him. The problem is that he "evolved" into a monster. Albright agreed, saying we now regret the relationship but he got worse over the years. Right, O'Reilly concurred, it was that "evolutionary thing," sounding, understandably enough, very much like Bush Senior.

Except this "evolutionary" theory doesn't square with what a former US government official said in 1959 about Hussein after the latter lost his nerve in a failed assassination attempt against Iraq's prime minister:

"Saddam was known as having no class. He was a thug--a real cutthroat."

So much for O'Reilly's "evolutionary" theory of Saddam Hussein's evil. But what should we expect from a religious traditionalist who rejects secularism?

On December 16, we saw O'Reilly's traditional religious values at work with a vengeance. In a Talking Points memo entitled, "The Vatican and Kofi Annan Weigh In On Saddam," O'Reilly turned his fire on the Vatican and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for not joining the frenzy of bloodlust toward Hussein. First O'Reilly criticized Annan for "demanding that Saddam not be executed. With all due respect to Secretary Annan, it's not his call."

For someone supposedly opposed to the death penalty, it seems odd that O'Reilly would object to Annan's position, until one understands he's playing the role of US imperialism's mouthpiece and objecting to Annan--or anyone else--interfering with Washington's hegemony over its colonial conquest.

It's not O'Reilly's call, it's not Bush's call, it's not Blair's call. It's Iraq's call. A sovereign Iraq free from all foreign occupying armies. That's why the US and UK should immediately withdraw all its forces and turn Hussein over to the Iraqi people to decide his fate.

"He allowed Saddam to impose the death penalty on hundreds of thousands of people, so Annan has zero moral authority. If this man had backed up tough action against Saddam five years ago, thousands of human beings would be alive today."

Actually, Annan has been a willing accomplice to the "tough action" by Washington in the form of severe economic sanctions against Iraq that caused the deaths of over one million Iraqis, including at least 500,000 children, and in two wars, which have conservatively killed 150,000 more human beings.

Washington is far more responsible for Hussein's crimes than Annan is. It wasn't Annan who hired Hussein as a hit man in 1959 to assassinate the prime minister who was too democratic for Washington's liking; it wasn't Annan's CIA that helped install Hussein to power and eliminate thousands of Iraqi communists; it wasn't Annan who helped Hussein construct his brutal police/party dictatorship; it wasn't Annan who armed Hussein with biological, chemical and conventional weapons; it wasn't Annan who urged Iraq to attack Iran and helped Hussein kill as many Iranians as possible; and it wasn't Annan who gave Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait in 1990.

It is Washington--and its media whores like Bill O' Reilly--who have zero moral authority, particularly when every reason the US gave to invade Iraq has been exposed as a lie.

Next O'Reilly directed his wrath toward Cardinal Renato Martino, the chief of the Vatican's Justice and Peace Department, for these remarks:

"I felt pity to see this man Saddam destroyed, the military looking at his teeth as if he were a beast. They could have spared us these pictures. Seeing him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him."

O'Reilly was livid. A Vatican official exhibiting a trace of humanitarian compassion toward Hussein undercuts US imperialism and gives credence to internationalist solidarity. That is a no-no to O'Reilly. In responding to Martino, O'Reilly was forced to further reveal his unChristian vindictiveness.

"Now, let's break down the cardinal's statement. One, the U.S. military doctors [were] looking in Saddam's mouth to see if poison was secreted in a tooth, a common form of suicide for war criminals. Get a clue, Cardinal."

Martino was not concerned about WHY they were looking in Hussein's mouth. He was objecting to the humiliating and degrading spectacle of repeatedly shoving it into the world's face, something O'Reilly is obviously quite comfortable with. Get a clue yourself, O'Reilly.

"Two, showing pictures of a humiliated butcher may prevent other butchers from doing evil. Get it, Cardinal?"

No, humiliating Hussein and the entire Arab world by repeatedly showing the medical examination of his mouth will only deepen the hatred for the US among the Muslim masses of the world but the international working class as as whole.

But O'Reilly was expressing a kernel of truth here, albeit in a distorted way. In degrading Hussein as they did, in brutally murdering his two sons, and as Clinton, Reno, and Wesley Clark did when they incinerated 84 men, women and children in Waco, all of this is intended to intimidate and terrorize not merely the Iraqi resistance and people, not just the Arabs, Cubans, North Koreans, and anyone else who stand up to the armies and dictates of imperial Washington, but above all, the US working class.

September/October 2003--The recent Supreme Court decisions on gay rights, the right to privacy, and affirmative action signify that the forces of capitalist reaction in the US are LOSING the "culture war." This is why Bill O'Reilly is intensifying his unholy war against gays, abortion rights, the ACLU, and secularism. As O'Reilly himself put it in his August 5 Talking Points, "The secularists are making the big gains these days, abortion for minors without parental consent in Florida, gay marriage initiatives, and a well-funded drug legalization lobby, just to name a few."

In response, O'Reilly continues the mode of operation we examined in "The Twisted Mind of Bill O'Reilly" below. While posing as the self-appointed guardian of public morality, he ends up being the biggest pornographer in the country.

The latest O'Reilly-orchestrated obscenity was courtesy of a right wing outfit called the Christian Action Network, which provided him videos they have taken of gay men over a 6 year period during Gay Day festivities at Disney World. In his ongoing campaign to villify homosexuals and generate intolerance toward them, O'Reilly graced viewers' screens with sexually suggestive still footage from the videos, making sure to blur the naked torsos to demonstrate how moral and legal he is.

Portions of the video were shot outdoors, but the most lurid scenes were taken in private clubs. If O'Reilly had not plastered these images on the TV screens of millions of viewers, they never would have seen or known about them.

In his self-appointed role as the country's maven of morality and sultan of sobriety, O'Reilly is emerging as one of the nation's most prominent pornographers.

Apparently some of the videos appear on the website of a group called Gayday.com, but O'Reilly's guest , Chris Alexander Manley, represented a rival group called Gay Days.com. Manley had not seen the videos, and clarified the confusion caused by O'Reilly and his Christian Action Network guest that the videos were on his group's site.

Once again, O'Reilly could barely control his homophobia as he viciously badgered Manley ("What are YOU going to do about it"?) as if HE was responsible for the behavior captured on the videos and Disney's alleged immorality.

After tens of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans are dead due to lies that were peddled by Bill O'Reilly, it is obscene for him to show sexually suggestive conduct and then declare gays threaten society's moral fiber.

A related O'Reilly obscenity is his demagogic crusade against the American Civil Liberties Union. After careful consultation with his lawyers, O'Reilly just called the ACLU the "most DANGEROUS LEGITIMATE organization in the US." [emphasis added] Like any fascist-minded goon, O'Reilly resents a legal organization that stands in the way of repressive police state tyranny. And, as the leading example of Orwellian journalism today, O'Reilly has been calling the ACLU a "fascist" organization, simultaneously revealing his own ignorance and contempt for the intelligence of his audience.
O'Reilly's aides have probably been telling their boss that many of his Internet detractors are saying he's a fascist. Demagogue that he is, O'Reilly is crudely trying to preempt his opponents by throwing the word at his enemies.

This time the ACLU earned O'Reilly's wrath for convincing a federal judge that San Diego's leasing of public property to the Boy Scouts violated the separation of church and state doctrine. The judge, a Clinton-appointed African American named Napoleon Jones, correctly ruled that since the Boy Scouts excludes gays and atheists because of its religious principles, then it is a religious organization and thus illegal for San Diego to do business with it.

You can hear O'Reilly salivating over this one--an African American Clinton appointee, God, secularism, the ACLU. He even got to take a swipe at the lesbian and atheist couples whom the ACLU "found" to file the suit.

"The ACLU always 'finds' somebody," O'Reilly remarked ominously.

Just examine the insidiousness of O'Reilly's unprincipled "journalism" on display here. He paints this picture of the ACLU to working people: a godless, "fascist" group of lawyers bent on subverting God, the flag, morality and all decency, a sinister group that lurking in the shadows that "finds" people to advance its godless agenda of snatching away Americans right to pray.

In truth, we should "thank God" that the ACLU is there to turn when our civil liberties are threatened by bosses and their politicians, judges, cops, and media stooges like Bill O'Reilly.

The only "finding" we should be worried about concerns Bill O'Reilly, who always seems to "find" someone to infiltrate antiwar demonstrations and secretly videotape protesters, or someone to tape entertainment acts in private clubs and splash the lurid images across millions of screens.

O'Reilly accused Judge Jones of every reactionary's worst nightmare--judicial activism. According to O'Reilly, Jones and the ACLU "have teamed up to punish the Scouts for winning a Supreme Court case that allows them to ban declared atheists and gays from membership."

Further, according to O'Reilly, Jones harbors a personal vendetta against the Boy Scouts, and is using the judgeship to "pervert the Constitution and hurt the Scouts."

Rubbish. Jones is trying to stop Bush and Ashcroft from perverting the Constitution with their unrelenting assault on separation of church/state doctrine. The Boy Scouts adult leadership is a fanatical right wing clique that instills reactionary values in young people. It should be stopped when it violates a fundamental law of this land--separation of church and state.

As for O'Reilly's charge that Judge Jones is getting back at the Supreme Court for its decision allowing the Boy Scouts to ban gays and atheists--good for Jones for sending a message to the criminal Supreme Court that "perverted the Constitution" and the will of the people in 2000 when it stopped the vote count in an obviously flawed Florida election and declared George Bush the winner by judicial fiat.
COSMOS LEFT has not read Jones's decision, but I bet he makes a reasoned and cogent case that the Boy Scouts is a religious organization. Jones is probably one of the minority of bourgeois democratic judges who thinks the Bush/Ashcroft effort to tear down the wall separating church and state has gone too far and threatens capitalism's long term interests.
But on this night, O'Reilly would not permit even the restrictive debate that normally airs on The Factor. He announced this brazenly. "There is no debate tonight. This ruling is dangerous. When judges can subvert the Constitution, rather than uphold it, we are all in major trouble."

Which is why O'Reilly has no credibility in judging Jones, because when his right wing allies on the Supreme Court, led by Scalia and Rehnquist, subverted the Constitution in 2000 by preventing the vote count, misinterpreting several constitutional amendments, especially the 14th, usurping Florida's right to resolve the issue, we heard nothing from O'Reilly about how much trouble we were in because judges had subverted the Constitution. In fact, O'Reilly had no problem with the Supreme Court handing the election to Bush, a REAL example of "facts and evidence no longer exist[ing] for agenda driven fanatics."

Thus O'Reilly didn't even go through the motions of a debate, instead choosing two guests who agreed with O'Reilly's denunciation of Jones's ruling--John Eastman, a Chapman University constitutional law professor, and Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey Superior Court judge and now a Fox legal analyst. Everyone agreed that Judge Jones's decision was "bizarre," yet in what has become O'Reilly's standard mode of operation, he refused to provide his viewers with one sentence from Jones's ruling.

Fair and balanced once again from Fox News.

The August 7 Talking Points memo revealed what's really eating Bill O'Reilly. It's that secularism is winning and religious superstition and obscurantism is in a historic decline. It is, as Socialist Workers Party leader Jack Barnes recently put it, "The rise of secularism and the decline of religion--the refusal of growing sections of humanity to rely on dogma and authority--especially in the West. . .This is one of the great guarantees of the possibilities for revolution and reorganizing society along rational lines."

Here is how O'Reilly expressed it:

"It is well past time for Americans to begin dealing with the insanity that is taking place in the courts, in the press, and in the schools. In recent weeks, we have been told by a city councilman who favors reparations that Abraham Lincoln didn't much care about freeing the slaves, by a Boston University professor that there was no rivalry between the radical preacher Jesus and some in the Jewish hierarchy, and by an Espiscopal bishop that there is no tension between the gay bishop and some scriptural passages."

Oh Really O'Reilly? This cretin is most nauseating when he tries to give history lessons. While each statement merits a separate essay, they will be dealt with briefly here. As of this writing, however, COSMOS LEFT does not have the transcripts of the programs O'Reilly is referring to, and only recollections of the second and third related shows.

"We have been told by a city councilman who favors reparations that Abraham Lincoln didn't care about freeing the slaves..."

We don't know precisely what the councilman said about Lincoln not caring about freeing the slaves. O'Reilly has a nasty habit of misconstruing and misquoting what his guests say, but let's assume for now that's what the councilman said. It's an easy assumption to make, as there exist no shortage of "anti-Negro" Lincoln quotes. Readers can run a search on the subject to see for themselves that Lincoln's views of slavery and Negroes were a bit more complex than O'Reilly's dogmatic interpretation.

As a flag-waving ultranationalist, O'Reilly spins the pristine and mythological propaganda about Lincoln spoonfed to all American kids--a near saintly man, the All American hero with a halo who freed the slaves. To speak against Lincoln is to speak against America in the eyes of superpatriots like O'Reilly. To criticize Lincoln is almost sacrilegious in American mythology.

Once again, history is more complex than O'Reilly's cartoonish spin on it. Lincoln disavowed abolitionism, opposed Negro citizenship, backed the fugitive slave laws, represented a slaveowner, supported colonization of Negroes and opposed intermarriage.

Abraham Lincoln was an able representative of the US bourgeoisie at a time when that class was still revolutionary because it had historically progressive tasks to achieve--namely, national unification and the destruction of the Southern slavocracy, which meant replacing slave labor with "free" wage labor so the country could be consolidated under industrial capitalism. The strength of Lincoln from the capitalist viewpoint was his resoluteness in uniting the country on a capitalist foundation, not his affinity for Blacks. Lincoln was a complex man full of contradictions; the fact that a poor boy from Illinois still harbored racist convictions in the 1860s should not shock anyone.
So it turns out that city councilman was closer to the facts than O'Reilly regarding Lincoln's views on slavery.

For superpatriots like O'Reilly, Lincoln is a political tool to be used for nefarious and reactionary purposes in 2003. It's the freedoms that Lincoln gave from the goodness of his heart that America's soldiers fight and die for in every war, according to the myth that O'Reilly does his best to disseminate. O'Reilly twists the legacy of Lincoln to push his pro-war, jingoist agenda.

WE ARE NOW LIVING IN A TIME WHERE FACTS AND EVIDENCE NO LONGER EXIST FOR AGENDA-DRIVEN FANATICS like Bill O'Reilly.

But Cosmos Left IS challenging this insanity.

You won't hear O'Reilly discussing the class dynamics of the American Civil War, the fact that it was the Second American Revolution that violently resolved the unfinished historical tasks left over from the first American Revolution. You won't hear O'Reilly talking about the class struggle. That's loony left ideology. He's a problem solver with no need for such historical complexities. Besides, people might start asking messy questions about the role of the working class today, how its line of march points to making a socialist revolution that will achieve the historical tasks left under by the first two American revolutions.

Similarly, you won't hear O'Reilly talk about the underlying class dynamics in the following passage as he alludes to the controversy over Mel Gibson's depiction of Christ's crucifixion in "The Passion":

"...we have been told by a Boston University professor that there was no rivalry between the radical preacher Jesus and some in the Jewish hierarchy."

What I remember from this exchange is that the Boston University professor was having a hard time expressing herself because of the host's constant interruptions. I think she was trying to say that O'Reilly is too simplistic when he claims that friction between Jesus and some in the Jewish hierarchy was the driving force behind Christ's crucifixion. [More on this point below.]

O'Reilly's been defending fellow right winger Mel Gibson against charges that The Passion is anti-Semitic because it portrays a Jewish mob as being more responsible for Christ's execution than Pontius Pilate.

Now I haven't seen the film, so what is written here pertaining to it is based on articles I've read and discussions on The Factor. We do know that Gibson is a conservative Catholic, part of a traditionalist sect that disagrees with the modern Catholic Church's repudiation of early Christianity's version of the Passion--which DID depict Jews as depraved scum of the earth responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.

The problem with Gibson and fellow conservative Catholic Bill O'Reilly is that religious dogmatists they accept at face value, as gospel, if you will, the version of history recorded in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.

The truth is these early Christian evangelists were consummate spinmeisters, which explains O'Reilly's affinity for them. These days O'Reilly is spinning like a top that the far left secularists hate Gibson for making a film about Jesus Christ's "moral code" and are slandering him with a vicious personal campaign characterized by accusations that Gibson is a "Jew baiter."

First of all, O'Reilly nor anyone else knows anything about the moral code of the historical figure known as Jesus Christ. As a dogmatic Catholic, O'Reilly accepts as gospel the version depicted in the New Testament. But the Gospels are not exact and precise documentation of what occurred. They are early, primitive attempts at recording history, from which we can glean glimpses of what happened then.

But the Gospels are not objective historic accounts. They were rewritten and edited by leaders of the early Christian church in the first centuries A.D, at a time when Christianity was hostile to the Jews and seeking to ingratiate themselves with Rome. The early Christian Church and the Jews were bitter enemies and the polemics between them were quite harsh.

Thus these early Christians had a vested interest placing the blame for Christ's execution on the Jews, whom they described as depraved mobs and the scum of humanity. This is how the early, traditional Christians viewed it, this is what the Catholic Church later repudiated, and what traditionalist Mel Gibson is rehabilitating in The Passion.

So don't feign shock and horror when you hear charges of anti-Semitism. This is the historical context for them; not blind hateful vendetta against Gibson for trying to be religious and spotlight Christ's moral code.

What moral code, O'Reilly? The totality of the historical evidence points to a rational conclusion that Christ was a proletarian seditionist from Galilee who led gangs of guerrilla fighters against Roman rule. Christ was probably much closer to the "moral code" of Che Guevera than that of Bill O'Reilly.

The Gospels that Gibson and O'Reilly genuflect in front of as exact history were edited and rewritten several centuries later by the hierarchy of the Christian Church, by people who were bitter opponents of Jews and who were cozying up to the authorities in Rome. Thus it is no accident that the Gospels' version of the death of Christ places most of the blame on the depraved Jewish mob, not on Pontius Pilate and Rome.

But this makes no sense, and is at odds with all the historical evidence available concerning that period. And after the early Christian evangelists performed their crude retouching of the Gospels, we're left with a story rife with contradictions and absurdities.

These guys were about as smooth at spinning as their friend Bill O'Reilly.

The Passion begins with Christ's entrance into Jerusalem. He is greeted like a king by the city's populace. "Hosanna (help us!); blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: blessed be the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord" (Mark xi, 9). The masses are with Christ; only the aristocracy, the "high priests and scribes" are hostile to him.

This is where O'Reilly tried to score points against the Boston University professor who thought he was too simplistic in attributing the crucifixion to friction between Christ and the Jewish hierarchy. It's true that the Jewish community had an extremely vibrant political life that represented the highest extremes of social and political oppositions. Political groupings were well organized. Jerusalem's lower classes were imbued with Zealotism and in constant conflict with the Sadducees and Pharisees. The Jewish masses hated the Romans, and their strongest allies were the rebellious Galileans.

The last aspect of history that O'Reilly will talk about is the CLASS STRUGGLE, let alone the national struggle, so his viewers will never hear about these details on The Factor.

The truth is Jerusalem --and Galilee--at the time of Christ were rife with insurrectionary bands of Jewish proletarians fighting the oppression of Roman rule. It is entirely probable that one charismatic Jewish guerrilla from Galilee migrated to Jerusalem and led an unsuccessful rebellion against the Romans for which he was crucified, which was the preferred method of exeuctions those days. The writings of Josephus, one of the known historians from that time whom even O'Reilly mentions, are filled with such events. The elements from which Christianity arose--the rebellious Jewish proletarians from Jerusalem and Galilee--were not peace and love advocates, and they weren't forerunners of Gandhi, Thoreau or King, either.

But the Gospels' version of the events of this time is absurd, contradictory, and should not be passed off as historically accurate. And that's the problem with Gibson's film, O'Reilly.

Let's look at what the Gospels have to say about Christ and the story of the Passion, with the able assistance of Karl Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity, the seminal 1925 work of this outstanding Austrian Marxist. We'll start with the events right after the Last Supper--the armed conflict on the Mount of Olives and the treason of Judas.

The Gospels try to obscure what no doubt happened--Christ led an armed insurrection against Roman soldiers at the Mount of Olives that was foiled, leading to his arrest and crucifixion. Soon after the Last Supper, Jesus says to his disciples: "Now, he who has a purse, let him take it and also a pocket, and he who has it not, let him sell his cloak, and buy a sword. For I say unto you it must now be fulfilled in me what is written, namely: And he will be counted among the lawless. For what is written of me sh all be fulfilled. They said, however: Lord, here are two swords. And he said to them, That is sufficient."

Then, on the Mount of Olives, the conflict occurs with the armed power of the state. Jesus is about to be arrested.

"And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck a servant of the high priest's, and smote off his ear."

But then the Gospel says that Jesus is opposed to all bloodshed, submits to arrest peaceably, and is executed, while his companions are untouched.

Think about it. Jesus calls for swords, signaling the uprising is at hand. His followers are armed with swords and draw them. Just at that point, Jesus reverses course and gives us the "for all them that take the sword shall perish by the sword."

But why did Christ call for swords? Kautsky sheds some light:

"We can only understand this contradiction by assuming that the Christian tradition in its original form must have contained a report of a carefully planned coup d'etat, in which Jesus was captured, a coup d'etat for which the time had seemed to be ripe after he had successfully driven the bankers and sellers out of the Temple. the later editors did not dare to throw out this report, deeply rooted in tradition, in its entirety. They mutilated it by making the use of force appear to be an act undertaken by the apostles against the will of Jesus."

This framework also clarifies another contradictory tale of the Gospels: the treason of Judas. The official version is that  Judas's kiss showed the Romans who to arrest. But as Kautsky points out, this gesture have been meaningless, given the context:

"Jesus was well known in Jerusalem, according to the Gospels; he preached publicly every day; he was received by the masses with open arms; and yet we are suddenly to believe that it was necessary for Judas to point him out, in order that he might be distinguished from his adherents."

But the context of a coup d'etat presents a situation that involves som ething worth betraying, a secret worth buying, as Kautsky put it. Now the kiss by Judas is not so meaningless.

The arrest of Jesus makes no sense either if you take the Gospels as gospel. It is only Christ who is arrested by the Romans, although he preaches peaceful methods, while his followers who've drawn swords are not. And Peter, the guy who cut off the high priest's servant's ear, chats with the policeman in the high priest's yard.

I don't think so.

So Jesus is now a prisoner and led to the high priest's palace and tried. Kautsky describes Mark's absurd depiction of the proceedings.

"Truly a remarkable form of court procedure! The court assembles immediately after the arrest of the prisoner, the same night, and not in the courthouse, which was probably on the Mount of the Temple, but in the palace of the high priest!...False witnesses now appear against Jesus, but in the spite of the fact that no one cross examines them, and that Jesus makes no reply to their accusations, they can adduce nothing to incriminate him. Jesus is the first to incriminate himself by declaring that he is the Messiah. Wherefore all this apparatus of false witnesses if this admission is sufficient to condemn Jesus? Their object is solely to demonstrate the wickedness of the Jews. [Gee, O'Reilly, maybe that's why Gibson's getting hit with anti-Semitic accusations.] The death sentence is immediately  imposed. This is a violation of the prescribed fo rms, on which the Jews at that time laid very careful stress. Only a sentence of acquittal could be pronounced by the court without delay; a condemnation could only be pronounced on the day following the trial."

February 24, 2004--It is doubtful that the high priests had the right to impose a death sentence. The Sanhedrin says: "Forty years before the destruction of the Temple Israel was deprived of the right to pronounce judgment of life and death."

Perhaps this is why the council does not carry out the punishment of Christ, but hands him over, after trying him, to be tried again by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate for high treason against the Romans for intending to anoint himself king of the Jews and liberate Judea from Roman rule. This from a group of Jewish patriots, we're asked to believe with righteous faith.

Now the Christian evangelical spinmeisters shift into high gear. Pilate, known for his severity, ruthlessless and "continuous executions without sentence, endless and intolerable cruelties [letter from Agrippa I to Philo], pleads with the Jewish masses to allow him to acquit the prisoner Jesus."

Kautsky tell us that Pilate's rule was marked with such ruthlessless that Rome recalled him in 36 A.D. Yet Christians and the rest of humanity is supposed to accept the notion that Pilate had a soft spot for the proletarian seditionist Jesus. To counter this skepticism and facilitate the myth, the Gospels' authors concoct a story that Pilate had a c ustom of releasing a prisoner at Easter at the request of the Jews. When he offers to release Jesus, the Jews allegedly replied: "No, we should rather have the murderer Barabbas!"

"If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again, all right?"

Moore challenges O'Reilly to own up on that promise. As of today, it's 267 days and counting.

COSMOS LEFT does Moore one better. In an essay below, "Hang 'em high, O'Reilly," we reported that on July 7, 2003, Bill O'Reilly made another promise to his viewers:

"If Bush lied, I'll be the first to hang him."

Get the noose ready, O'Reilly. And then stand in line to wait your turn. Because the precedents are well established to throw your ass in the dock as well.

Three Rwandan media executives were recently found guilty of inciting violence against Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the genocide of 1994 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Judge Navanathem Pillay told one of the convicted executives that he had "poisoned the minds of your readers" against Tutsis.

Bill O'Reilly has been poisoning the minds of Americans against Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, and anyone else in the way of US imperialism these days. He has been a central propagandist for war in the big business media, zealously serving as a conduit for every White House and Pentagon lie. O'Reilly is a major reason why 70% of Americans wrongly believe that Iraq was connected to September 11.

O'Reilly has cheered on the Pentagon's slaughter of Afghan and Iraqi civilians, blaming the latter for their own deaths if they dared stay in their homes. He is not some sideline commentator or Monday morning pundit exercising his First Amendment rights. He has played a key role in confusing, intimidating and terrorizing the American public into passive acceptance of Bush's illegal aggressive war.

There was a precedent for busting O'Reilly long before the recent Rwandan convictions--the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Readers should revisit the April 16 World Socialist Web Site article on this subject by David North, who discusses at length the Nuremberg prosecution of Nazi media propagandist Hans Fritzsche.

Just consider these words from the prosecutor's brief:

"Fritzsche incited atrocities and encouraged a ruthless occupation policy. The results of propaganda as a weapon of the Nazi conspirators reaches into every aspect of this conspiracy, including the atrocities and ruthless exploitation in occupied countries. It is likely that many ordinary Germans would never have participated in or tolerated the atrocities committed throughout Europe, had they not been conditioned and goaded by the constant Nazi propaganda. The callousness and zeal of the people who actually committed the atrocities was in large part due to the constant and corrosive propaganda of Fritszsche and his official associates."

"Constant and corrosive propaganda." Nothing describes O'Reilly's hate-mongering national chauvinism better. As North aptly states, "Clearly, by the 'constant and corrosive propaganda' of the US media over the course of months and even years, dating back to the first Gulf war. The media's very success in manipulating public opinion is one of the strongest proofs of its culpability in the commission of war crimes."

And Bill O'Reilly has been leading the way.

Think about O'Reilly while reading the conclusion of the Nuremberg prosecution's case against Hans Fritzsche:

"Fritzsche was not the type of conspirator who signed decrees, or who sat in the inner councils planning the overall grand strategy. The function of propaganda is, for the most part, apart from the field of such planning. The function of a propaganda agency is somewhat more analogous to an advertising agency or public relations department, the job of which is to sell the product. . . .In this case, propaganda was a weapon of tremendous importance to this conspiracy. Furthermore, the leading propagandists were major accomplices in this conspiracy, and Fritzsche was one of them. . . .

"Fritzsche is not in the dock as a free journalist but as a propagandist who helped substantially tighten the Nazi stranglehold over the German people, who made the excessess of the conspirators palatable to the German people, who goaded the German nation to fury and crime against people they were told by him were subhuman . . .  [emphasis added]

"The basic presentation of the Nazi propagandistic activity lay in the false presentation of facts. . . .The dissemination of provocative lies and the systematic deception of public opinion were as necessary for the Hitlerites for the realization of their plans as were the production of armaments and the drafting of military plans. Without propaganda, founded on the total eclipse of the freedom of the press and of speech, it would not have been possible for German Fascism to realize its aggressive intentions, to lay the groundwork and then to put to practice the war crimes and the crimes against humanity. In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons."

These words resonate with chilling clarity as they relate to Bill O'Reilly today.

Ask not for whom the hangman calls, O'Reilly. He calls for thee.

December 2-3, 2003--In his December 1 Talking Points memo, "The Growing War at Home," clueless Bill O'Reilly warned his equally clueless followers that the Hollywood left is actually holding meetings to figure out how to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. It was the typical ignorant O'Reilly diatribe against his liberal political opponents in music and entertainment, which is anyone to the left of Genghis Khan. He whined pitifully over how "powerful" Hollywood is because "it has access to many more Americans than the actual politicians do."

Oh Really O'Reilly? Please, genius, tell us how "it works."

"Actors and singers can get on programs like 'Letterman' and 'Leno' and say pretty much what they want to say. More and more, they are deriding Mr. Bush and his supporters." Damn those pesky actors for exercising their 1st Amendment right and saying pretty much what they want to say. They are "deriding" Bush and his supporters because the former lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to September 11 in order to illegally invade this sovereign and defenseless country and slaughter tens of thousands of its citizens, while the latter is giving political cover to this war criminal.

"Now Jay Leno is a fair guy and gives voices to all sides, but others do not." [Translation: Leno gets O'Reilly's approval because he's a reactionary swine who practically elected Arnold Schwarzenegger by allowing him to announce his candidacy on the Tonight show.]

"David Letterman, for example, has far more liberals on his program than conservatives." No, O'Reilly's not a conservative. He just doesn't like that there are more liberals than conservatives on Letterman's show. It's just O'Reilly being fair and balanced, you see.

Then came the cruncher. "Most Americans don't follow politics and form impressions based on hearsay and repetition. If they only hear one thing, they tend to believe that thing. And if a person like Oprah or Katie Couric seem sympathetic to a political point of view, that carries a lot of weight."

What a startling admission and self indictment of his own role as a war propagandist! What barely disguised contempt for the American working class he professes to "look out for." What is dangerous is the power that lies in Bill O'Reilly's hands and HIS access to "many more Americans than the actual politicians do."

The reason that 70% of Americans erroneously believe that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks is because they have been bombarded with "hearsay and repetition" from the likes of Bill O'Reilly and other propagandists for the capitalist war machine. Washington and media stooges like Bill O'Reilly have been waging a relentless campaign of psychological warfare designed to disorient and stampede the public into blindly supporting Bush's imperialist wars, cynically exploiting 911 to achieve this goal.

Yes, O'Reilly, when people hear the same "thing" repeatedly drummed into their brains, they tend to believe that "thing." This is what's known as "The Big Lie," the propaganda technique begun by the Nazis and perfected by "Bush and his supporters," led by Bill O'Reilly.

O'Reilly's so clueless he opened this very Talking Points memo by repeating the Big Lie that the invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terror that began on September 11. Revealing that he spent Thanksgiving visiting Marines and Navy personnel in Hawaii, O'Reilly said he told them that "the only thing standing between us and the terror killers are the men and women in the U.S. military."

Substitute "Bill O'Reilly" for "Oprah or Katie Couric" and you get to the scary truth about the state of affairs in America today: "And if a person like Bill O'Reilly seems sympathetic to a political point of view, that carries a lot of weight."

Witness the success of the anti-France boycott, the indictment of Professor Al-Arian, Pepsi's firing of the rapper Ludicris, the deluge of letters to the LA Times and VH1, CBS's capitulation on "The Reagans" and on and on. O'Reilly whips his legions of brain-dead bigots into a froth, and the modern-day shock troops of an incipient American fascist movement respond like Pavlov's dogs.

O'Reilly is well aware of the growing political and class polarization taking place in this country. He's conscious of the revulsion for Bush and his reactionary, pro-corporate, and antilabor policies. O'Reilly sees the runaway book sales for liberal Bush critics like Joe Conason, David Corn, Eric Alterman, and Michael Moore. He knows that September 11 skeptics and intellectual heavyweights like Noam Chomsky are speaking to sold out audiences.

O'Reilly, incapable of debating his opponents on the facts, resorts to name-calling and falsely accusing them of character assassination, brutality, and smear tactics. "The character assassination recently generated by the left has been brutal."

When O'Reilly talks about character assassination and brutality here, he's referring to those opponents who can demolish him on the facts and are passionate in their opposition to the lies Bush tells every day to justify mass murder and repression. O'Reilly mischaracterizes the spate of anti-Bush books on the market as "left wing smear books" without providing a shred of factual evidence to refute a single statement in them.

"Combine the DNC's alliance with the Hollywood left, add a boat load of billionaire extremist George Soros [see "O'Reilly Feels Heat from MoveOn, Fears Cold Cash from Soros, so He Slanders Them," below], and you have a potent strategy designed to turn America into a far different place than it is now."

Any person of conscience and decency should want to turn this country into a far different place than it is now. Many of us are horrified and angry over the America that Bill O'Reilly and George Bush stand for--Miami cops shooting protesters in the back with rubber bullets; Cincinnati police beating an unarmed African American to death with nighsticks; shackled men and boys in orange jumpsuits at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, itself illegally based on Cuban soil, where hundreds of foot soldiers from the Afghanistan civil war have been illegally detained indefinitely with no charges and no evidence against them; US forces shooting innocent civilians in Iraq and Afganistan, blowing kids to pieces, bombing villages, beating prisoners of war to death, suffocating hundreds to death inside containers in Afghanistan; frisking 6 year old girls; blowing up homes, schools and mosques.

This America may be acceptable to a thug like O'Reilly, but it is not to anyone with a bone of humanity in their body.

In truth, the last thing you have coming from the Democratic National Committee, Hollywood, and Soros is a "potent strategy designed to turn America into a far different place than it is now." Liberalism has no answers for the deepening crisis facing working people, which is why O'Reilly's targets are nothing more than straw men. The problem is capitalism and the profit motive and exploitation inherent to it. Liberals support capitalism and production for private profit. There exists no working class voice in the big business media or in the two capitalist parties. All "public opinion" is bourgeois public opinion. The US working class is disenfranchised from the existing political power structure.

A big majority of the US capitalist class backs Bush's occupation of Iraq. What possible alternative to Bush can the Hollywood liberals come up with? Howard Dean, who vows he would never cut and run from Iraq? John Kerry, who worries that Bush will cut and run next year and openly states he would send more troops to Iraq?

Every single Democratic presidential candidate, for all their rhetoric and posturing, supports Bush's course in Iraq and opposes the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US forces. Dennis Kucinich, representing a small minority of US capitalists,would replace US imperialist domination of Iraq with a more internationalized imperialist occupation. No thanks.

The only potent strategy for the working class is to break from the capitalist two party shell game and build a mass revolutionary socialist party that will fight for an independent working class political program. When that happens, O'Reilly will truly have something to worry about. Recently O'Reilly explained that our is a capitalist society. If you want socialism, let's discuss it.

We'll see how rationally O'Reilly discusses the prospects for socialism with workers who become fed up with the capitalist free market. Judging from his the fact that he threatened to smash Jeremy Glick's head into f***king pieces for merely mentioning the word "imperialism," that discussion will never happen. Nor should it. As the World Socialist Web Site once said about ilk like O'Reilly, "There is no discussion with them. They're on the opposite side of the barricades."

******************

SOME ITEMS YOU WON'T HEAR ON THE O'REILLY FACTOR--

While you will be exposed to a steady stream of smut, salacious gossip, child molestation, Paris Hilton videos, Laci Peterson, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, there's little chance you'll hear:

1) O'Reilly report that war hawk and defense policy board member Richard Perle recently admitted the invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that violated international law. "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

We also haven't heard O'Reilly mention how hard Perle lobbied for Boeing's bid for an $18 billion government contract one year after the company made a $20 million investment in Trireme Partners, the venture capital fund that Perle runs!

2) O'Reilly talk about the report from October's Toledo Blade that examined in detail the shocking atrocities committed by US troops against Vietnamese civilians in 1967. The Blade's reporters discovered secret army records contained information about an elite arm of the 101st Airborne called theTiger Force embarked on an orgy of murder, torture and rape against Vietnamese villagers.

Tiger Force ravaged more than 40 villages with ordersof shoot everything that moves. One platoon leader remembered: "We killed everything that walked. It didn't matter if they wer ecivilians.They shouldn't have been there."

After prisoners were tortured and executed, their ears and scalps were cut off and used as souvenirs. One soldier decapitated an infant to own the child's necklace as a souvenir. Other soldiers paraded around with necklaces made of ears.

The US big business media has essentially ignored this story, fearing it would not work well in the current context of preparing American citizens and soldiers for the intensification of savage attacks and war crimes the Pentagon is already carrying out against the people of Iraq for daring to resist their occupiers.

As the nation's leading cheerleader for US imperialist wars, Bill O'Reilly is only too happy to lead this latest shameful act of censorship by the bourgeois media.

3) And we haven't heard O'Reilly's pithy comments about what former Fox producer Charlie Reina had to say about how fair and balanced Murdoch's network really is. In an essay found on Poynteronline, Reina spills the beans about "The Memo," an executive memo sent electronically to Fox News employees every day that tells them what will be reported and how they should be covered.

"The Memo" is the Bible at Fox News, Reina tells us, which should make the "traditionalist" Judeo-Christian O'Reilly very happy. In over 20 years of broadcast journalism, Reina says he never felt pressure from management to toe the management line. "But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to 'be careful' how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan (You know how Roger [Fox News Chariman Ailes] feels about him."), [Gee, that wouldn't have had any effect on O'Reilly's stance on "The Reagans," do you think?], he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean "(You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

Obviously, The Memo is truly the Bible in MurdochLand.

"Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. First of all, it's a news network run by one of the most high profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, 'Roger's Revenge' - against what he consider as a liberal, pro-Democratic media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Reina also says that The Memo was born when Bush came to power, and, "intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently comes across FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo. . . .There have been subtle hints as to the tone of the anchors' copy. For instance, from the March 20 memo, "there is something utterly incomprehensible about Kofi Annan's remarks in which he allows that his thoughtrs are with the "Iraqi people.' One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought."

Food for thought from Fox News will only give you an ulcer. This is a blatant attempt to steer Fox reporters in the direction Murdoch wanted them to go.

Reina reveals that just after the US invaded Iraq, "The Memo warned that antiwar protesters would be 'whining' about US bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested that they could tell that to the families of American soldiers there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killeda correspondent's report on the day's fighting--simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital."

Bill O'Reilly surely read that Memo. Remember the time he openly said that Sean Penn visiting a wounded Iraqi child in the hospital was pure propaganda.

I quoted extensively from Reina's thoughts about The Memo because its existence proves that O'Reilly and the rest of Fox News are liars when they parrot the fair and balanced tag line. And, The Memo is an effective guiding light, a compass, for examining O'Reilly's approach to many issues, most recently, his despicable defense of the Cincinnati cops who beat Nathaniel Jones to death like the bloodthirsty animals they are.

November 20-25, 2003--Reconfirming his status as America's No. 1 hate-mongering culture warrior, last night Bill O'Reilly continued his venomous campaign against two of his favorite targets: gays and Michael Jackson. Each night since the Massachusetts Supreme Court's ruling that legalized gay marriages, O'Reilly has told his audience that he couldn't care less if "Tommy and Vinnie or Joanie and Samantha want to get married."

Oh Really O'Reilly? Then why are you harping on the subject every night? No, he doesn't care about gay marriage. He doesn't care about it at all. It's only another example of secularist judges tearing down the moral fabric and Judeo-Christian values the country was founded on, according to this self-appointed watchdog of morality, Bill O'Reilly.

No, O'Reilly doesn't give a whit about gay marriage. It's not him. It's all "the folks," out there whom he speaks for, you see.

And no, O'Reilly doesn't favor the Republican Party. It's just that the gay marriage ruling may cost the Democrats the election, according to O'Reilly's razor-sharp analytical mind, because the people won't stand for secular judges saying it's okay for Tommy to marry Vinnie. It's un-American and un-Christian, and, according to O'Reilly, it violates the sanctity of marriage as defined by the Judeo-Christian values this country was founded: a union of man and woman.

Not that O'Reilly cares, you understand. This is classic fascist agitation: stoke the fires of ignorance, appeal to the most reactionary and base elements of the population, prey on people's fears and prejudices. It's just an accident that all this dovetails with one of the Republican Party's central strategies for the 2004 election--whipping up the party's fascistic core by putting opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights and support for school prayer at the heart of the campaign.

O'Reilly's demagoguery is working. His homophobic diatribe against gay marriage motivated most of his viewers to vote against gay marriage in the most unscientific poll in the country--BillOReilly.com. This is Slick Willie at his most insidious. Although he gives the perfunctory qualifier that his poll is not scientific, O'Reilly distorts his phony poll's results as part of a carefully calculated ruse to shape public opinion his way. First he whips his legions of right-wing zealots into a frenzy. Then he formulates the question to guarantee the right-wing response, knowing that the overwhelming majority of people who are actually moved to respond to his polls are in his corner politically.

O'Reilly often says that all shades of the political spectrum watch The Factor, not just conservatives, as if that proves that he's fair and balanced and not a right-wing ideologue. Obviously, all political types, including this writer, watch his show regularly; indeed, there's a cyberspace cottage industry devoted to debunking him, which we're proud to be part of. But it's incontestable that at least a solid majority of his viewers are right of center, and of those, the vast majority of people who answer his polls are ideologically motivated. Thus it's no shock that most of the time, 90% are voting his way, which O'Reilly spins as a reflection of how the "folks" are feeling, his perfunctory qualifier that the poll is unscientific notwithstanding.

True to form, that's what happened when BillO'Reilly.com asked the audience for their opinions on the Massachusetts Supreme Court's legalizing gay marriage. O'Reilly proudly trumpeted that over 90% disagreed with the court, admitting again that while the poll was not scientific, it showed "the passion" out there among the folks.

But no matter how many fake polls he produces, and much he rants about about gay marriage and New York City banning Christmas displays, O'Reilly is losing the culture war and is powerless to reverse the inexorable advance of secularism. And that's why he's foaming at the mouth and in danger of losing control during his vicious tirades against Michael Jackson.

Once again, Bill O'Reilly is proving he's one of the most dangerous individuals in this country, this time the despicable and salacious way in which he's convicting Jackson in the media.

His November 20 Talking Points Memo was called, "Worldwide Outcry Over Pedophile Charges against Jackson," and as the title can't hide, it was gutter journalism at its worst.

Of course, slick Willie obeyed his lawyers and gave lip service to Jackson's presumption of innocence, but in essence retracted that presumption, as follows: "The singer is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, BUT IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION, HE'S THROUGH. [emphasis added] He got away with a child molestation rap 10 years ago buy buying the family off. This time, that's not going to happen."

And later, "To be fair, there's a slight chance Jackson is a victim here, as we remember the McMartin case in L.A. But the heavy odds are that he's a troubled pervert, a danger to society. And now the system is finally going to deal with him."

COSMOS LEFT is not a character witness for Michael Jackson. No one--including O'Reilly--knows what occurred. Unlike O'Reilly, I don't care, because there are far more important things to focus on like Iraq, Sept. 11 and the Patriot Act. Unlike O'Reilly, no political agenda drives COSMOS LEFT to legally lynch Jackson in order to divert attention away from the political disaster facing Bush in Iraq.

But I do recognize when someone's constitutional right to a fair trial is jeopardized by a demagogue's hysterical campaign to convict that person in the press. O'Reilly' has called Jackson a menace to society, a child molester, and a pervert, inflaming public opinion against Jackson to the point where a fair trial is now impossible.

The rulers have a two-fold interest in demonizing Jackson and flooding the airwaves with his case: 1) this latest attack on the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence is another front in the capitalists' assault on democratic rights, and 2) along with Kobe Bryant and Laci Peterson, it is another juicy way to divert attention away from the growing catastrophe in Iraq and the Middle East.

Once again, O'Reilly's fascist method of operationhas been revealed--incite his legions of fanatical followers into a hate-filled frenzy, give them an organizational outlet to carry out O'Reilly's reactionary agenda that always involves hurting or destroying people--fire rappers, indict Professor Al-Arian, boycott France, convict Jackson in the press, the list is growing every day.

These legions of O'Reilly's reactionary followers are evolving into the shock troops for an American fascist movement that is just around the corner. Now we're hearing that Bill O'Reilly is seriously considering a run for the presidency.

COSMOS LEFT has seen an O'Reilly presidential candidacy coming for years. Indeed, that was the motivation for creating "Oh Really O'Reilly" in the first place. We sensed that he was a dangerous rightist demagogue positioning to launch himself into the political arena as a Bonapartist strongman unfettered by partisan ideology.

O'Reilly's gone much further than Patrick Buchanan ever did. Buchanan talked about storming the moats with peasants armed with pitchforks. O'Reilly HAS them.

Some fool over at one of those "Democratic underground" Web sites thinks an O'Reilly candidacy would be humorous; that we'd all have fun watching O'Reilly self destruct every day.

Leave it to liberals to miss the fascist and Bonapartist dynamics fueling O'Reilly and his popularity. O'Reilly is no one to be laughed at. He is one of the most powerful and dangerous individuals in this country with a mass base of shock troops at his command, a movement that has already ruined lives and gotten opponents indicted, and he's just getting started.

It's no given that O'Reilly will run as a Republican, either. While it's true that O'Reilly is overwhelmingly pro-Republican, and that he was a registered Republican until the lie that he was an independent was publicly exposed, there's no guarantee that O'Reilly and the fascistic base of the Christian fundamentalist right won't bolt the Republicans to form a third party.

There was always a kernel of truth, if not a method to his madness, in O'Reilly's posturing as "nonpartisan" and "independent" of both major political parties. Whenever he does criticize Bush, it's usually from the RIGHT, for not getting the job done right for US imperialism, for providing weak and ineffectual relationship. If O'Reilly decides that the Republican elites are too weak-willed and politically correct to get the job done--like militarizing the borders, imprisoning material witnesses, cleansing the culture from polluting influences like gangsta rap, and the rest of O'Reillys authoritarian agenda--look for O'Reilly to lead the Christian right and other fascistic elements out of the Republican ranks and under his banner of National Salvation.

Patrick Buchanan tested the waters for a fascist movement, but it was historically premature for the US capitalists to turn to Buchanan, so the peasants and their pitchforks didn't materialize. But slowly, under cover of a cable talk show, O'Reilly's been assembling the shock troops, the mass base, for the fascist movement whose time may be drawing near.

We are living through a crisis of class rule that is deeper than what most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. The violent eruption of US imperialism at home and abroad is but one manifestation of this widening crisis. Social and economic inequalities are deepening; Miami cops are shooting dispersing protesters in the back; Bush is operating a concentration camp in Guantanamo and preparing more on US soil; the FBI is spying on antiwar demonstrators; Ashcroft has illegally detained thousands of Muslims and vastly increased government spying on dissent with Patriot Acts I and II; Bush can order any American arrested and thrown in a military brig without any evidence or charges presented; Bush can order the assassination of any American he thinks is an "enemy combatant"; and General Tommy Franks just told Cigar magazine that a successful large scale terrorist attack on US soil involving biological, nuclear or chemical weapons would mean the suspension of the US Constitution and republican form of government, and the imposition of a military dictatorship and martial law.

Make way for Bill O'Reilly. He never liked constitutional rights anyway.

November 21, 2003--I was wondering when Bill O'Reilly would pick up the ball from his boss Rupert Murdoch and run with the leaked Oct. 27 Pentagon memo by Deputy Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith linking Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. After Fox News and the NY Post continuously reported as fact the memo's contents as described in The Weekly Standard, a right-wing magazine also owned by Rupert Murdoch, last night's O'Reilly Factor devoted a segment to the Feith memo simply entitled, "Linkage."

As one of Bush's lead propagandists for the Iraq war, O'Reilly desperately needs this story to be true. In his eyes, documentation showing a link between bin Laden and Hussein would be the smoking gun that would justify Washington's invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Since the WMD issue is dead in the water, and even O'Reilly isn't convinced Hussein moved them to Syria, though he'd love that to be true as well, O'Reilly and Bush need proof that September 11and Hussein were connected in order to stem the swelling opposition to the increasingly disastrous occupation of Iraq.

But shrewd demagogue that he is, O'Reilly was slick enough not to immediately embrace Feith's allegations wholeheartedly. O'Reilly's staff had no doubt brief him on the widespread skepticism and even hostility in the intelligence community to the leaking of Feith's memo.

Before we get to O'Reilly, consider the memo's source--Douglas Feith, a rabid Zionist who participated in the 1996 Likud Party's policy deliberations, a former member of Reagan's National Security staff, a key player in the reactionary, pro-war, neoconservative cabal advising Bush, a co-author of the 1996 "clean break" paper written for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that advocated crushing Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, inducing Washington to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, overthrowing the Syrian government and restructure the entire Middle East through further military aggression against Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Not exactly an objective source, but you'd never know that from Bill O'Reilly's fair and balanced "reporting."

The leaking of Feith's memo was a desperate response to the political disaster facing Bush in Iraq. Given the mounting US casualties, the growing Iraqi resistance, the nonexistence of WMD, and the erosion in public support for the war and occupation, the sudden emergence of evidence allegedly proving links between bin Laden and Hussein is as predictable as a Hollywood script. COSMOS LEFT greeted this news with skepticism, sensing that "proof" would consist of uncorroborated sources and Iraqi defectors' testimony.

Indeed, Jim Lobe ("New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation," 11/20/03, antiwar.com) reported that Feith's memo consisted "mainly of 50 excerpts culled from raw intelligence reports by four US intelligence agencies . . . " Most originated from unnamed sources like "a contact with good access," "a well placed source," "a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer," a "regular and reliable source," "sensitive CIA reporting," and "a foreign government service."

My skepticism was bolstered when the Pentagon issued a statement declaring that "news reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq . . . are inaccurate . . . " and were not "an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al- Qaida and it drew no conclusions."

The harsh reviews of Feith's memo were not limited to the Pentagon. Former State Department official Greg Thielmann, who resigned in protest of Bush's invasion of Iraq, opined "This is made to dazzle the eyes of the not terrible educated. [Perfect for the O'Reilly bozos who actually participate in his "polls".]

"It begs the question, 'Is this the best they can do'? If you're going to expose this stuff, you'd better have something more than this. My inclination is to interpret this as probably a very good example of cherry-picking and the selective use of intelligence that was so obvious in the lead-up to the war."

Added former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman: "To me, they had to leak something like this, because the neo-conservatives (in the administration) have nothing to stand on.

"They're trying to get the idea out there that, 'Hey, there was a case for war', and they have 'useful idiots' like Safire [and Bill O'Reilly] who say they're right."

The Hill's Josh Marshall shed further light on the credibility of Douglas Feith. In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent Feith's aides to brief the CIA on what they had discovered about Iraq and Al Qaeda.  Marshall writes that the CIA viewed Feith's findings as "a classic example of what Intel professionals call 'cherry-picking' -- culling through the sheaves of raw data to find the bits and pieces that confirm the desired conclusion while ignoring everything that tends to refute it and all the while turning a credulous eye to unreliable sources."

As retired CIA analyst Larry Johnson said about Feith's August 2002 "findings":  "If anybody doubted that there was such a thing as intelligence with a [predetermined] purpose, this is a case study. Just because someone says something and it gets 'classified' stamped on it, doesn't necessarily mean it's true."

Why did Feith's cherry-picking surface now in Stephen Hayes's Weekly Standard article? Because the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Bush's prewar intelligence claims asked Feith to back up his claims about Hussein's relations with bin Laden. Feith sent back the Oct. 27 memo with the same garbage that even the CIA had rejected a year ago.

And how credible a source is The Weekly Standard? Aside from being owned by right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, Jim Lobe reported that The Standard, "particularly Hayes and executive editor William Kristol, have acted as a mouthpiece for administration hawks like Feith,  his immediate boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and their friends in Cheney's office, particularly his powerful chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby," since before September 11.

When this background is considered, we can identify The Weekly Standard's misnamed article, "Case Closed," for what it is--pro-government propaganda. Whenever a ruling class journalist calls something "Case Closed," one thing is certain--it isn't. Witness Gerald Posner's defense of the Warren Commission's coverup of the JFK assassination by the same name.

For a detailed refutation of Feith's memo, readers should read Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball's authoritative article in the Nov. 19 Newsweek, "Case Decidedly Not Closed: The Defense Dept. memo allegedly proving a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam does nothing of the sort."

Now we're ready for O'Reilly's fair and balanced treatment of Feith's memo. The two guests on the not so subtle segment title, "Linkage," were Stephen Hayes, author of The Weekly Standard article, and Evan Kohlmann, one of O'Reilly's favorite "terrorism experts" frequently trotted out on the Factor.

O'Reilly introduced the segment by referring to the recent Istanbul terrorist attacks and adding a loaded qualifier: "It's hard to say what's true." Whenever O'Reilly claims that it's hard to say what's true, it's a good bet he doesn't have a leg to stand on and the spin will be fast and furious.

Hayes began by stating the premise of his article--that Feith's memo proved that an "operational relationship" existed between bin Laden and Hussein as early as 1990. The memo, Hayes claimed with a straight face, "put flesh on the bones" of Bush's allegations that such a nexus is real.

O'Reilly enlightened his viewers with the observation that the "elite media" wasn't publicizing Feith's memo.

Earth to O'Reilly: Fox News IS elite media. Murdoch's company is a multibillion dollar communications conglomerate with close ties to the White House and the Pentagon. That qualifies as elite media, O'Reilly. What O'Reilly refers to as "elite media" is the other wing of bourgeois journalism that is more "liberal" than Fox, but is every bit as CAPITALIST as Fox. Since US liberalism has shifted markedly to the right in recent decades, the distinction between the NY Times and Fox has blurred. Indeed, "liberal" publications such as the Times have played a key role in covering up Bush's lies while supporting his criminal course of military aggression in Iraq.

However, in this case it's true that much of the big business press was more reticent in giving credence to Feith's memo than Murdoch's puppets at Fox, The Weekly Standard and the NY Post.

Hayes tried to validate Feith's memo by pointing to its 16-page length and the fact that it contained 50 bulleted points! Such is the level of intellectual sophistication displayed by bourgeois journalism in this epoch of capitalism's death agony.

Even O'Reilly's terrorism expert Kohlmann was not impressed with Hayes's arguments. In fact, Kohlmann threw water on Hayes's entire presentation, stating that Feith's memo was not accurate or reliable for the reasons discussed at length above.

O'Reilly then did what he does best: misstate the facts and misinform his audience. He drudged up another Bush/Powell allegation that was widely discredited months ago: that the militant Islamic group Ansar al-Islam ran a "poison factory" of chemical weapons in northern Iraq, which allegedly proved that Hussein, Al Qaeda, and chemical weapons were linked.

Oh Really O'Reilly?

The Factor blowhard left out several key facts: first, the Ansar al-Islam group in northern Iraq was outside the control of Hussein's government! Second, the location of this camp was not where Powell claimed it was--Khurmal. Third, Khurmal was not even under the control of Ansar al-Islam. Fourth, when Ansar showed their "poison factory" to Western reporters, they found several sm all buildings without plumbing, powered by a generator. The buildings were either civilian homesk, fighters' barracks, and a television station for the group.

Ansar al-Islam was an Islamic group that broke away from a larger organization and had been fighting rival Kurdish militias in northern Iraq. In fact, their principal enemy was the secular Patriotic Union of Kurdistan--O'Reilly should be embracing Ansar al-Islam!

O'Reilly also resurrected still another long-discredited Bush/Powell claim--that Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who fought in Afghanistan as part of the CIA-backed Mujaheddin against the Soviets, had received medical care in Baghdad and established an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell there. But even CIA chief George Tenet admitted that Zarqai was not under Hussein's control and that his network was independent of Al Qaeda. German, British and French intelligence also publicly doubted that any link exists between Zarqawi and Hussein.

Neither of O'Reilly's expert guests countered any of these erroneous claims. And not one of these geniuses mentioned the fact that bin Laden and Hussein were political enemies, the former viewing the latter as an infidel.

Despite the flimsiness and weakness of Hayes's presentation, which even O'Reilly did not embrace and which Kohlmann shot down unhesitatingly, O'Reilly declared, "I believe there was contact between Saddam and Al Qaeda."

Bill O'Reilly is never one to let facts get in the way of his spin.

November 2003--It's been a rough week for Bill O'Reilly. Iraq keeps blowing up in Bush's face, public support for Bush's war is eroding, the CIA says it's going to get worse, Japan now says it won't send troops to Iraq, Ray Kroc's billionaire widow left $200 million to O'Reilly's nemesis National Public Radio, and to add insult to O'Reilly's injury, billionaire George Soros gave $5 million to another O'Reilly favorite, MoveOn.org.

O'Reilly was already fuming over the phenomenal Internet-driven grassroots organizing success of MoveOn, a liberal Democratic activist organization that has been critical of Bush's war drive, the Patriot Act, his right-wing judicial appointments, etc. MoveOn's sophisticated Internet campaign has convinced millions of fervently anti-Bush citizens to donate whatever they can afford to fund the group's efforts to defeat Bush.

This is infuriating and sobering to O'Reilly, who, like so many other deluded right wingers, are shocked there are so many Americans who despise Bush and see right through him. O'Reilly's sensing that there's a formidable political opposition coalescing out there to Bush's wars and repression. O'Reilly thought everyone was being taken in by his smooth talking demagoguery. But money talks. And MoveOn is raising money. O'Reilly knows that MoveOn has become a major player in organizing the vociferous dissent against Bush's policies in this country.

And O'Reilly's worried.

Then along came Mrs. Kroc, who bequeathed $200 million to NPR, no doubt because she heard O'Reilly hates NPR so venomously. This must doubly hurt O'Reilly, because Ray Kroc had long been an arch conservative Republican. His widow either underwent a political conversion late in life or liberated herself after being repressed politically for so many years while married to her reactionary and powerful husband.Whatever.

Kroc's $200 million bequest to NPR was a political blow that cost O'Reilly some sleep, and that is a good thing. Then along came George Soros with his $5 million to O'Reilly nemesis MoveOn.org.

Listening to O'Reilly, you'd swear Soros was some kind of closet communist. Soros is no friend of working people. He's a parasite who has made his money in part through underwriting programs to destabilize countries whose markets are not fully open to Western capital. Once the capital-unfriendly government is ousted and a puppet regime is in place, Soros swoops in to buy up state assets as bargain basement prices. He's one of the world's richest individuals who has pumped huge amounts of money into the former Soviet Union to jumpstart capitalism there under the guise of promoting "democracy."

But Soros is a unique, eccentric, iconoclastic capitalist, which is nothing new in history. There have always been "enlightened" capitalists who understand that left to its own devices, the free market will generate enough crises, instability and resistance to threaten its long-term survival.
In other words, better reform than revolution. In the 1930s, Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt represented this type of enlightened capitalist thinking.

This is where George Soros is coming from today. Viewing with alarm the abyss that George Bush is plunging the entire world toward, Soros is frantically financing the only alternative open to his limited political framework--the Democratic Party, and specifically, its liberal activist wing, currently spearheaded by MoveOn.org.

"It is the central focus of my life," Soros said recently, and "a matter of life and death. America is a danger to the world. And I'm ready to put my money where my mouth is."

Soros is worried about the "supremacist ideology" that drives Bush. It reminds him of childhood memories of Nazi-occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, "You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans," specifically conjuring up recollections of walls covered with Nazi slogans like, "The enemy is listening."

This talk of a connection between the Bushes and Nazis, which continues to crop up even in the mainstream media, clearly bothers O'Reilly, in part because any linking of fascism to Bush, whom O'Reilly strongly supports, might eventually lead clear-thinking people to O'Reilly's own fascist leanings (which is the major theme of Oh Really O'Reilly!).

Soros correctly believes that Bush exploited Sept. 11 to carry out a previously planned agenda of war and global hegemony.

"Bush feels that on September 11th, he was anointed by God. Rather than defeating terrorism, he's leading the US and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence."

Soros confesses that these thoughts have been waking him up at 3 am, shaking him "like an alarm clock."

We should all be waking up at 3 am when we realize that the bastards in power have pulled off the biggest con job in this country's history by engineering another Pearl Harbor, Operation Northwoods operation--September 11.

This level of honesty and perceptiveness is anathema to O'Reilly, but, coming from a powerful capitalist like Soros presents a thorny challenge for O'Reilly. Soros can't be bullied as easily as young Jeremy Glick, the courageous young man who refused to let O'Reilly exploit his dead father, a WTC victim on September 11.

Thus we hear O'Reilly call Soros "an interesting guy. . . worth about $7 billion." O'Reilly informs his viewers that Soros is "secularist, who wants profound change in America. BY ALL ACCOUNTS, his left wing libertarianism is extreme." [emphasis added--O'Reilly can't name those "accounts," because he's referring only to his limited mind]

Actually, Soros's "left wing libertarianism" not extreme at all. O' Reilly's just frustrated that so many Americans share Soros's views, particularly concerning legalization of drugs. O'Reilly neglected to add that even HE advocates legalization of marijuana!

O'Reilly swipes at Soros for believing that "individuals should do pretty much what they want to do without government interference."

And so did the Founding Fathers! Contrary to O'Reilly's ongoing falsification of American history, the leaders of the American Revolution were opposed to legislative schemes to legislative morality and personal conduct based on religious scriptures. In fact, Shannon Jones of the WSWS stated in a May 15, 2002, article, "In the period following the American Revolution the prosecution of individuals for violations of a purely moral character declined. The principle that personal beliefs and personal ethics, so long as th ey did not harm others, were not to be dictated by the state, but reserved for the individual, became embedded in popular consciousness, marking a major advance in democratic rights."

An advance that contemporary reactionaries like Bill O'Reilly are doing their best to roll back.O'Reilly laments that Soros "is now a major player in America's landscape. He's not a fringe. And the far left is uniting behind him and his surrogates at MoveOn.org."

Translation of this muddle-headed drivel: Soros's views are not as loony, far left and marginalized as O'Reilly had deluded himself into believing. Tens of millions hate Bush and O'Reilly. And now they have a rich capitalist's money behind them.

Of course, what O'Reilly falsely characterizes as the "far left" (LA Times, NY Times, actors Sarandon and Robbins) is in truth what's left of American liberalism. Soros represents the minority faction within US ruling class circles which worries that growing opposition to the occupation of Iraq and Bush's repression at home threatens to rupture the two party system and ultimately the entire capitalist setup.

That's why MoveOn.org recently sponsored the recent major address by Al Gore in which the former vice president bluntly criticized Bush for allowing 911 to occur and sabotaging its investigation, and exploiting the attacks to wage wars and assault civil liberties.

The forces behind MoveOn.org, including George Soros, seek to channel the mounting anger against Bush's policies within the Democratic Party and prevent it from overflowing into a movement they will not be able to control--a mass socialist party based in the working class.

O'Reilly, working overtime to peddle the fiction that he's a nonpartisan nonconservative, cautioned his audience not to feel sorry for the Republicans. "They've raised almost $100 million to fight the left's agenda. So it will be the battle of the bucks and the propaganda will fly on both sides."

As opposed to the pragmatic and nonideological Bill O' Reilly, whose incisive and objective analysis will cut through the propaganda from "both sides."
The propaganda is flying from The Factor studio.

Bush raises $100 million from corporate fatcats. MoveOn receives $5 million from Soros. Another fair and balanced analysis from the star of that fair and balanced network--Fox News.

"But there is no question the far left has embraced extremely questionable tactics. Defamation, distortion, and demonizing are now common. And the Soros money will make them more common."

Except there is a question, because O'Reilly has proven nothing. A classic demagogue, he makes a sweeping assertion without a shred of evidence. What "far left"? O'Reilly's so ignorant he doesn't realize that every time he labels the NY Times or Moveon as "far left," he's only demonstrating how right wing his politics are!"

Defamation, distortion and demonizing are now common." Yes, and they're flowing from your filthy mouth, O'Reilly.

When you hear O'Reilly cry defamation, you know he's getting desperate, because it means he's up against a political opponent who can destroy him on the facts and do it with a passion that may win over those sitting on fence.

"Talking Points believes these tactics are un-American. And we know Senators Lieberman, Edwards, and Kerry and Congressman Gephardt are not buying into the program."

In other words, to destroy O'Reilly in a debate is un-American, you see, because in so doing you are defaming poor Bill. It's no accident that the Democrats whom O'Reilly names are the most conservative, pro-imperialist candidates in the race, the safest, most reliable ones who won't defame Bush by accusing him of dereliction of duty on September 11, lying and covering up September 11, using September 11 to wage wars long planned, lying about the reasons for invading Iraq, exploiting September 11 to attack civil liberties, and on and on.

But O'Reilly knows that millions of Americans--much more than these pathetic four Democrats--ARE "buying into the program" of seeing through Bush's lies.

It's galling to O'Reilly that there are so many Americans opposed to Bush and his imperialist wars. It's a blow to his pride that more people aren't listening to him. He's cranking up the propaganda and accusing people of defamation and anti-Americanism because he senses he's in danger of losing on the battlefield of political ideas.

In a further sign of O'Reilly's desperation, intellectual dishonesty, and complete lack of journalistic integrity, he claims that Soros's generous donation to MoveOn proves that left-wing opposition to Bush is financed by big bucks and special interests--ignoring the fact that millions of Americans had given money to MoveOn long before the recent boost from Soros.

O'Reilly's having a hard time accepting the growing and passionate opposition to Bush's militarism and authoritarianism. In a pathetic attempt to downplay its magnitude, O'Reilly misleads and disorients his viewers by insinuating that MoveOn is totally bankrolled by that evil secularist billionaire, George Soros.

And he's doing something far worse. Taking gutter journalism to new depths, O'Reilly is actually equating Soros's financing of Bush's opponents with Richard Nixon's Watergate dirty trickster, Donald Segretti. Once again, O'Reilly is caught red-handed trying to criminalize dissent.

Donald Segretti was hired by Nixon to head up the "dirty tricks" campaign against Democratic opponents. He was part of Nixon's secret "Plumbers" unit that burglarized Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. In 1974, Segretti pled guilty to three misdemeanor counts of distributing illegal campaign literature, including a letter erroneously claiming that Senator Henry Jackson had fathered an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old girl.

Soros gave money to the Democratic Party to defeat Bush because he sincerely believes this despot is a disaster for the world. O'Reilly supports this despot and his brutal imperialist occupation of Iraq. He disagrees with Soros politically, and, thoroughly incapable of debating Soros on the facts and battlefield of ideas on either Bush or the war, O'Reilly is reduced to slandering Soros as a contemporary Donald Segretti.

O'Reilly did not attempt to engage Soros on a single issue or refute him on the facts for one simple reason--he can't. Every single reason Bush gave for invading Iraq--and Afghanistan--has been exposed as a lie. Bush is a liar. O'Reilly defends and apologizes for Bush because whatever tactical disagreements he has him, he backed Bush on the war and lied with him every step of the way.

Oh, O'Reilly tried to cover himself by demagogically stating if it turned out Bush was lying, he'd hang him. Well, it turned out Bush was lying, but the only rope O'Reilly is weaving is destined for his own neck. Meanwhile, O'Reilly's still defending Bush and the war, cheering on the latest escalation of US aggression in the form of Operation Iron Hammer.

O'Reilly, incapable of debating Soros on the facts because the facts have revealed Soros was right on the facts while O' Reilly and Bush have been wrong, since they're the ones caught in lies, not Soros. All O'Reilly can do is what he does best--name calling. MoveOn is un-American because they opposed the war in Afghanistan.

There was some confusion on the show regarding whether MoveOn had indeed criticized Washington's 2001 war in Afghanistan. A guest took issue with O'Reilly's interpretation that MoveOn was unpatriotic for opposing the attack on Afghanistan, which O'Reilly saw as a national obligation after the Sept. 11attacks.

You can bet that whatever position MoveOn adopted concerning the US attack on Afghanistan to remove the Taliban, it was firmly within the liberal imperialist framework. This doesn't mean that MoveOn or any similar group were not capable of recognizing disastrous consequences f or US imperialism in the hills of Afghanistan.

Tomorrow's anti-Bush protest in London also has O'Reilly on the defensive. Taking his cue from Fox boss Rupert Murdoch, US intelligence, and Scotland Yard, O'Reilly did his part by implying there may be violence because of the presence of "socialists"--without offering a shred of evidence to justify this disgusting exercise in red-baiting, violence-baiting and McCarthyism.

November 2003--On a near nightly basis, Bill O'Reilly rails against the LA Times and NY Times as far left secularists who hurt the US by slanting their coverage against Bush and the Iraq war. Aside from false characterization of these publications as "far left"--an absurdity that only exposes O'Reilly's right wing bias--a close examination of the facts reveals that both newspapers are in truth mouthpieces for capitalism's reactionary political forces.

The November 7 Sydney Morning Herald carries a Reuters report that the LA Times sent an email to its reporters ordering them not to characterize Iraqi guerrilla forces as "resistance fighters." Assistant managing editor Melissa McCoy said the term is associated with the French resistance to the Nazis or the Jews who fought the Nazis in Warsaw.

On a day when Jessica Lynch is making Bush and O'Reilly look putrid by denouncing the Pentagon's exploitation and falsification of her case, the editorial decision by the LA Times should be welcome news to the warmakers. At a time when Iraq is blowing up in their faces, it must be comforting to know the LA Times is helping out in the propaganda department.

This is not the work of a "far left" publication. Once again, the facts expose O'Reilly as the pathological liar that he is.

Let's turn now to that other bastion of far left journalism in O'Reilly's twisted spin zone--the NY Times. In David North's November 7 World Socialist Web Site article entitled, "New York Times on the Reagan series controversy: in praise of cowardice," we learn that the NY Times' reaction to CBS's cancellation of "The Reagans"actually dovetails with Bill O'Reilly's!

The Times's November 5 editorial laments: "It is hard to know, what CBS was thinking when it decided to order up a less-than-complimentary mini-series about the Reagans at a time when former President Ronald Reagan is failing and his wife, Nancy, is nursing him."

The night before, O'Reilly expressed similar sentiments: "How could CBS have ever given it the green light in the first place?"

Walsh correctly points out that the Times "is making clear its solidarity not with those whose work has been censored and essentially suppressed as a result of the right-wing campaign, but with those doing the censoring and suppressing . . . . It is well known that the Times played a critical role in the fabricated scandals beginning in 1992 aimed at destabilizing the Clinton administration. It launched the so-called Whitewater affair, promoted the media frenzy over the Lewinsky sex scandal and served as an apologist for Independent Kenneth Starr and his efforts to stage a quasi-judicial coup d'etat.

"Since the theft of the 2000 election the newspaper has sought to portray George W. Bush as a legitimate political leader and "statesman" and covered up the lies of his administration over Iraq--and continues to support the brutal colonial occupation of that country."

So much for O'Reilly's "far left" New York Times--and the accuracy of O'Reilly's political analysis.

November 2003--Right wingers of all stripes have waged a shameful McCarthyite campaign of hysteria against the CBS movie,"The Reagans." While these reactionaries claim they are only trying to protect a dying former president from a cruel hatchet job by a liberal Democratic network, they have mounted a frontal assault on the First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

Before the film was even released and viewed, Republicans and Reagan supporters whipped up an atmosphere of intimidation and hysteria against CBS, claiming the movie is unsympathetic toward Reagan. First they objected to a line of dialogue that Reagan never uttered: "Those who live in sin shall die in sin." Now the criticism has expanded to a more generalized objection: "The Reagans" is disrespectul, ill timed, and cruel because Reagan is dying of Alzheimer's disease.

Republican loyalists, including Republican National Committee chairperson Ed Gillespie, organized a well-financed, Internet-driven boycott of CBS in a transparent attempt to intimidate the network into radically altering the film or canceling it altogether. Gillespie demanded that Republicans must approve the film's script before it is released, and that the network include a continuous crawl along the bottom of the television screen reminding viewers "The Reagans" is a fictional account.

This is prior censorship pure and simple; an ideologically driven attack on artistic freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment.

UPDATE: On November 4, 2003, the liberal cowards at CBS caved into the McCarthyite pressure and announced they were canceling "The Reagans"and handing it off to Showtime, the cable channel also owned by CBS's parent company, Viacom. In so doing, CBS showed the same spinelessness exhibited recently by the L.A. Times and National Public Radio when they retreated in the face of O'Reilly-driven hysteria. While Republican loyalists like Gillespie were in the front lines of the boycott and censorship campaigns, right wing talk show hosts did their part to whip their legions of Howard Stern-like zombies into a frenzy against the liberal CBS elite that dared to insult Ronald Reagan. And the fact that Reagan is played by James Brolin, husband of Democratic Party activist Barbara Streisand, proved to the Repugnants that a vast left-wing conspiracy was at work.

Enter Bill O'Reilly. Oh, to be a fly on the wall during the briefings with his lawyers on this one. Using the same slimy tactic he employed against Professor Sami Al-Arian, O'Reilly first incited his rabid followers into a frenzy against CBS, but then pulled back from formally endorsing the boycott out of "fairness"--real big of O'Reilly, given the fact the movie has yet to air.

After all, O'Reilly pontificated, "some condemned the upcoming Mel Gibson movie about the death of Jesus without seeing it. We said that wasn't fair and we're holding to that." Oh Really O'Reilly? People criticizing Gibson's film did so because they saw an advance copy of the screenplay--just as those bashing "The Reagans" did so because they got an early peek at the script. The difference is that Gibson's movie was merely criticized; no one tried to censor it or prevent its release, unlike with "The Reagans," where Republican loyalists succeeded in preventing its broadcast on a prime time network.

O'Reilly's been real slick on this one. You see, it wasn't HIM calling for a boycott, remember he was too busy telling everyone how fair and balanced he is. It was "some Americans," and they weren't all conservative Republicans, you understand, they were just red-blooded Americans angry that CBS was insulting the president, though only a very few well connected Americans were privy to the film's content.
And you see, O'Reilly speaks for those patriotic Americans, because he understands them, unlike those liberal elites running CBS.

O'Reilly began his fair and balanced approached to "The Reagans" in his October 29th Talking Points, entitled, "Is CBS in Big Trouble?" No, not with you around, O'Reilly. Your fairness will rub off.

That's why he said, "But should the Reagan movie turn out to be unfair, well CBS is going to be in a terrible position. Millions of Americans will be angry if the Reagans are portrayed as mean-spirited. And they will take their anger out on the network and the sponsors of the movie."

O'Reilly already had enough confidence in the atmosphere of intimidation his right-wing ilk was generating to predict that CBS executives would "modify the film." But that wouldn't satisfy O'Reilly, he made clear, because "you can legitimately question their judgment in the first place. They allowed two far left actors to portray Ronald and Nancy Reagan. They allowed a screenwriter to put in a scene where President Reagan says people with AIDS deserve it, although there's no evidence Mr. Reagan ever said that."

Aside from the absurdity of labeling Brolin and Judy Davis as "far left," which only reveals how right wing O'Reilly really is, the big question is: so what? So what if Brolin and Davis are merely liberal Democrats? Aren't they actors? Don't they have the right to portray the Reagans? Wouldn't that be a legitimate test of their acting prowess? Is O'Reilly, forever railing against "political correctness," the pot calling the kettle black here? In O'Reilly's vision of America, in his "No-Spin Zone," is it only permissible for conservative actors to portray conservative politicians?

Reagan may never have said "They that live in sin shall die in sin," but WSWS's David Walsh reports that Edmund Morris, Reagan's authorized biographer, wrote that Reagan did say about AIDS: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague."

That's close enough to "They that live in sin shall die in sin," to clear scriptwriter Elizabeth Egloff from the charge that she smeared Reagan by making up a ridiculous line. Further, when you consider Reagan's delayed and halting response to AIDS, plus the fact that Reagan's inner circle included ultraright fundamentalist Christians like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who WERE saying those who live in sin shall die in sin, it is entirely probable that Reagan DID say such a thing to his wife. And Egloff has a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to write that Reagan DID say it, no matter what bozos like Bill O'Reilly say.

O'Reilly's incitement of his shock troops was relentless. CBS will pay with their pocketbook. Americans are angry. Americans won't forget. Americans feel an emotional attachment to Ronald Reagan. The elite media doesn't understand how strong Americans feel about this. Emotions are running high. If this movie is cruel to Reagan, Americans will boycott CBS, because Americans don't like cruelty.

After working his fanatical followers into a frenzy, O'Reilly pulled back, as is his trademark: "We hope the movie is fair and balanced. But if it isn't, I wouldn't want to be in the boardroom at CBS or working the switchboard."

O'Reilly's parting shot at Professor Sami Al-Arian comes to mind: "If I were the CIA, Professor, I'd be tailing you every single day."

This is O'Reilly's MO: McCarthyism with a smile.

O'Reilly kept up the drumbeat the next night, but this time he donned his Michael Medved hat, blessing us with his film critic talent. Apparently O'Reilly is close enough to the media elite that he was privy to a viewing of a seven minute trailer of "The Reagans."
O'Reilly whined that it was dopey, campy, over the top a la Mae West, reminiscent of The Brady Bunch; in other words, like any run-of-the-mill TV movie.

In a pathetic performance even for him, O'Reilly quoted several lines from the movie that show Reagan trying to be romantic with Nancy: "Come here, mommy. Do you wanna marry me?"

O'Reilly, obviously auditioning for Ed Gillespie's historical accuracy police, mocked the notion that Reagan would call her mommy here. Why, O'Reilly? How the fuck do you know? It's a known fact that was his favorite pet name for Nancy.

O'Reilly took special pleasure in mocking another line: "Nancy, I'd crawl half way across the country for you."

"Why not ALL the way across the country?" O'Reilly asked sarcastically.

Why are you polluting the nation's airwaves with your small-minded filth?

There's a common thread that runs through O'Reilly's particular brand of demagoguery--his shameless intellectual dishonesty. Just as he continues to deny with a straight face that he's a conservative ideologue, O'Reilly denies that the uproar over "The Reagans" is driven by Republican partisans and right wingers. All kinds of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike (O'Reilly apparently doesn't recognize Americans who aren't Republicans or Democrats) are outraged by CBS's cruel portrait of a popular, dying president, according to O' Reilly. It's an American thing, not a partisan issue along party lines.

In fact, in O'Reilly's spin zone, CBS's retreat "showed the power of the American people" and represented a defeat for the liberal media elites who don't understand the folks out there like O'Reilly does.

This is a contemptible lie. Not only have the vast majority of Americans not seen "The Reagans"--they didn't even know that it was in production or anything about it! Only a very small minority, a privileged few, the media elite--like O'Reilly--saw any advance trailers or scripts of "The Reagans." The campaign to intimidate CBS to cancel the movie WAS was begun by well financed, powerful Republican partisans--including Fox News and right wing Web sites--who whipped up the right wing base of the Republican party into a frenzy by telling them their God, Ronald Reagan was being blasphemed.

There's no doubt that after the Republican financed and organized boycott drive hit the public airwaves, Democrats and other Americans were influenced by the hysterical campaign and drawn into the boycott. It's analogous to what happened in the California recall--once the millionaire-financed recall petition drive was launched in a broad visible way, an angry electorate jumped aboard it as a vehicle to express their discontent. But the recall itself did not spring from a mass movement or sentiment.

The right wing did not organize a threatened boycott against CBS because they thought "The Reagans" was unfair and cruel to the dying ex-president. They mobilized in defense of Reagan to with a conscious political agenda in mind--to defend the mythology surrounding Reagan that's been constructed over the last two decades that he was some kind of political giant who defeated the Soviet Union, restored national pride, and enacted the tax cuts which paved the way for the '80s "boom."

What they're covering up here, as part of the big con job being pulled on the US working class, is that Reagan's "victories," his "achievements" were for the exploiting rich, big business, the US capitalist class. The "Reagan Revolution" represented the acceleration of the ruling class offensive against working people at home and abroad.

The truth that you'll never hear from Bill O'Reilly is that Reagan's presidency was a disaster for working people from the US to Guatemala. His domestic policies enriched the capitalists and the well off middle classes at the expense of the working people in the form of tax breaks for the wealthy, large cuts in social programs, and union busting, especially the air traffic controllers (PATCO), which set the stage for a ruling class offensive that seriously weakened unions and all workers during Reagan's presidency.

Reagan's foreign policy was merely an extension of his domestic one--increased militarism and weapons spending, invading Grenada, bombing Libya, supporting Saddam Hussein and other tyrants, arming and training military dictatorships and paramilitary forces in Guatemala and El Salvador, financing and organizing Nicaraguan contras to wage a terrorist war against the people of Nicaragua.

Reagan and his cohorts literally have the blood of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants from Guatamela, El Salvador, and Nicaragua on their hands. Reagan orchestrated a virtual holocaust in Central America during his reign.

Some of us remember the reality of the "Reagan Revolution," particularly a little number call the Iran/Contra scandal, where Reagan secretly sold arms to the allegedly terrorist regime of Iran in order to covertly finance the Nicaraguan contras wh ich Congress has barred him from doing. Iran/Contra also lifted the veil over all kinds of sordid doings by Reagan and the Bushites, like setting up the CIA-backed BCCI to launder money for heroin cartels and training certain Afghan "freedom fighters" like Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers to fight a terrorist war against the pro-Soviet Kabul government.

It was Reagan who armed and supported Saddam Hussein and backed him in his 8-year-long war with Iran, whose people had earned the wrath of the US rulers for daring to overthrow the brutal dictator they'd imposed on the Iranians--the Shah. It was Reagan who sent Donald Rumsfeld to shake hands with Hussein in Baghdad to cement the alliance against the Iranian revolution, as well as, we've since learned, seal a deal for a pipeline to ship Iraqi oil through Jordan to Israel.

This is just a portion of the legacy Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the rightist scum in this country are so proud of.

The capitalists love Reagan because he was THEIR president. His victories were capitalists' victories, not
working people's. When they speak of the "national interests," or restoring "America's honor," they're referring to the US capitalists' interests and "honor," to the extent that a class which incinerated two civilian populations with atomic bombs can cloak itself with honor.

This passionate defense of Reagan's "legacy" is not just some abstract academic exercise about his presidency or waxing nostalgic about those golden years. The capitalists' cling to the Reagan myth because it serves their reactionary agenda today of war, repression, and privatization.

At a time when support for Bush and his wars continues to erode, the capitalist class cannot tolerate any deflation of the Reagan myth. Particularly when so many of the henchman like John Negroponte, Otto Reich and Elliott Abrams, who executed Reagan's policies--as well as hundreds of thousands Central American peasants--actions which caused them to be convicted felons, have been rehabilitated by Bush and restored to positions of power in Washington's imperialist setup.

Even the mildest criticism of Reagan threatens to undermine this setup and weaken the capitalist's hold over American workers. That was the crime of CBS's "The Reagans." Not that it was schlocky, sanitized, and poorly made--like most TV movies--but because it was a mildly unflattering portrayal of Reagan unacceptable to the rightist thought police who now exercise veto power over what is broadcast in the US.

In truth, criticism of "The Reagans" is more justifiable from the left than from the right. You can bet that the film did not examine the true legacy of Reagan's presidency: its union busting; its axing of social programs; its looting of the working class for the rich; its arming and financing of the Nicaraguan contras to commit terrorism against the Nicaraguan people; its support for military dictatorships and paramilitary forces throughout Central America that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands workers and peasants; its training of Osama bin Laden and his muhajadeen in the finer art of terrorism against the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, Afghanistan--none of these issues will be explored in "The Reagans" in any meaningful sense, if at all.

Instead, we'll watch scenes of Reagan appearing like an aloof airhead, and Nancy as a bossy control freak running the White House and directing Reagan's every move.

This isn't fiction. This was the dynamics governing the Reagan White House. I was alive then; I closely watched the Reagan presidency. Nancy WAS a bossy control freak who increasingly orchestrated Reagan's actions and statements. Reagan was every bit the empty-headed dolt as the present occupant of the White House. Americans were laughing from one coast to the other over Reagan's priceless verbal gaffes:

"Facts are stupid things."

"Trees cause pollution."

"Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born." [THAT sounds like Bush!]

O'Reilly tried to cloak his support for the censorship drive by claiming it was cruel of CBS to make a movie that portrayed an ex-president dying from Alzheimer's in a less than flattering manner. Once again, it is Bill O'Reilly who is guilty of exactly what he accuses his opponents of. It is O'Reilly who is being cruel by cynically hiding behind and exploiting Reagan's illness to advance the capitalists' reactionary political goals of war and repression. It was O'Reilly who was plastering Reagan's Alzheimer's all over the airwaves, just as it is O'Reilly who constantly parades pornographic images on the screen as he hypocritically rails against the decline in society's morals.

The truth is CBS or anyone else has the right to portray Reagan any way they choose at any time. Reagan is a public figure who is fair game for criticism. He's not a king; he doesn't have a halo around his head; and there's no room for personality cults in this country.

Reagan may be a hero to the bourgeoisie and its hangers-on, but he was a disaster for working people here and abroad. Workers should not be conned by the mythology woven around Reagan by his reactionary, pro-imperialist followers. As Barry Grey stated in his Nov. 14 World Socialist Web Site article: "As a matter of history, the Reagan years marked a turning point in the decay of American democracy. Reagan's administration ended in a morass of scandal and criminality . . ."

The Bush administration is taking this morass of scandal and gangsterism to new heights, complete with left over felonious trash like John Poindexter, Elliott Abrams and John Negroponte. Thanks to the political cowardice and impotence of US liberalism, the right wing thought control police now enjoy veto power over what is shown on American television.

O'Reilly didn't waste any time before he exploited the government's immigration raids at Wal-Mart to spew his anti-immigrant chauvinism. Almost every night this bigot slanders undocumented workers from Mexico and elsewhere as criminals and terrorists. Without a shred of evidence, O'Reilly connects immigrant workers with the September 11 terrorist attacks, painting lurid visions of hordes of illegal aliens massing at US borders, poised to commit further acts of terrorism.
We should tell O'Reilly to stick his ugly brand of national-chauvinism where the sun won't shine. We should WELCOME our brothers and sisters from other countries who STRENGTHEN our class when they come here. While O'Reilly libels immigrant workers as terrorists and criminals, he ignores the fact that Bush called off the FBI's investigation of Osama bin Laden in the months before 911, that several of the alleged hijackers were trained at US  military bases, that several got passports at a special State Dept. branch in Saudi Arabia, that the CIA were tracking the alleged hijackers, that the National Security Agency was intercepting their phone conversations, that the FBI knew about the flight schools and sabotaged any investigation of them, and on and on.

As usual, this dog is barking up the wrong tree. Undocumented workers weren't behind September 11. US intelligence was. OPEN THE FILES!

********************

Appearing on the Factor to discuss a column he wrote attributing the current spate of anti-Bush, far left, ideological books flooding the market to the vitriolic right-wing campaign against Clinton that preceded them, New York Times writer James Traub personified the cowardice and bankruptcy of US liberalism in 2003. O'Reilly confronted Traub with a quote from the latter's column that called the former a "liberal hater," demanding that Traub provide an example of a liberal he hates.

Traub completely caved in. O'Reilly called him out and Traub buckled in shameless capitulation, feebly admitting that maybe he shouldn't have used that formulation in his column.

COSMOS LEFT is not in the business of cleaning up a liberal's mess, but since Mr. Traub didn't have the guts or mental faculties to forthrightly respond to O'Reilly's question, we'll do so for him. A liberal whom O'Reilly hates? Let's start with Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Franken, Michael Moore . . . you get the picture, even if the spineless James Traub does not.

Iraqi child's view of his liberation

Sound familiar, Mr. Die Hard?  Do you think a movie star qualifies as a dignitary?

October 17, 2003--Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has performed a noble service to the people by catching the host of the "No Spin Zone" in still another dishonest spin. O'Reilly's been going all around the country accusing the LA Times of "selective reporting" in its coverage of the sexual harassment allegations against governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"Do you think the L.A. Times sent a squad of reporters to Arkansas to investigate Bill Clinton's problems with women? No, it did not," O'Reilly has been incessantly whining.

But as FAIR reported on October 14, 2003, the LA Times was one of the first media organizations to report the acccusations that Clinton used Arkansas state troopers to cover up his sexual escapades.

When Australian viewer Edward Frew pointed out in an email that such an article appeared in the December 21, 1993 issue of that paper, O'Reilly responded on the air by saying: "Mr. Frew, with all due respect, you need to stay off the left-wing websites, which is where you came up with that. The article you cite . . . reported giving both sides of the controversy. It was not an attempt to dig up anything and did not level accusations or exonerate Mr. Clinton. It was simply a news piece. Stay off the websites with the left-wingers, all right? You're never going to get the truth. And the right-wingers, PROBABLY the same thing." [emphasis added]

Fair and balanced, that O'Reilly. PROBABLY the same for right-wingers?

Reread O'Reilly's "response" again and try to make some sense out of it. There's none. As usual, he's throwing dust in his reader's eyes in a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that he's lying again. As FAIR points out, the LA Times article reports that the state troopers "describe a pattern of deception and indiscretions and say that he [Clinton] required them as state employees to go beyond their duties as bodyguards to help him conduct and hide these activities."

FAIR correctly points out that just as the LA Times reported "both sides of the controversy" when it investigated Clinton, it also gave space to Schwarzenegger's campaign spokesman Sean Walsh to deny the sexual harassment allegations, writing that Walsh thought "such allegations are part of an escalating political attack on Schwarzenegger as the recall election approaches."

O'Reilly's charge that the LA Times let Cruz Bustamante and Tom  McClintock off the hook is equally bogus. FAIR reports accurately that the paper "did extensive reporting on Bustamante and McClintock's ties to Indian casino interests."

So much for O'Reilly's journalistic integrity.

The haters are in power, you know.
**********************

October 21, 2003--On last night's "Talking Points" segment, Bill O'Reilly claimed vindication regarding his controversial interview with NPR's Terry Gross. O'Reilly triumphantly read an excerpt from an editorial on the exchange by NPR's "ombudsman," Jeffrey Dvorkin. After conceding that Dvorkin "took some shots at me," O'Reilly quoted Dvorkin as saying "I believe the listeners were not well served by this interview. By coming across as a pro-Franken partisan rather than a neutral and curious journalist [???], Terry Gross did almost nothing that might have allowed the interview to develop. . . . It was not about O'Reilly's ideas, or his attitudes or even about his book. It was about O'Reilly as a political media phenomenon. That's a legitimate subject for discussion, but in this case, it was an interview that was, in the end, unfair to O'Reilly."

There, you see, O'Reilly crowed with a misplaced sense of triumphalism, this proves I'm right. NPR was unfair to me. The NPR ombudsman said so. "National Public Radio Comes Clean" as this Talking Points title put it.

Oh Really, O'Reilly?

All Dvorkin proved is how utterly cowardly and bankrupt "liberalism" as represented by NPR is in the face of right-wing hysteria. As the LA Times did recently in the face of O'Reilly-inspired criticism over its reporting, NPR caved in to the deluge of negative emails from O'Reilly's legions of Howard Stern-like fanatics and left Terry Gross to twist slowly in the wind.

Dvorkin writes, "For some listeners, the interview with O'Reilly was a continuation of  Franken's anti-conservative and anti-O'Reilly attacks."

And that makes it so, Dvorkin? The rantings of O'Reilly's deluded zealots?

Dvorkin then reads excerpts from two of the more "restrained" emails that only confirm the above analysis that they were written by O'Reilly zombies whipped into a frenzy by their their master.

Dvorkin then read an email from a more enlightened viewer named Robert Black: "Thank you for the excellent O'Reilly interview. He quickly demonstrated his bullying tactics and hostility, proving himself to be an ass.

Dvorkin also quoted Danny Miller, executive producer of "Fresh Air":

"Terry was tough on O'Reilly, not unfair. And I think O'Reilly drove the interview directly towards the conclusion he was hoping for. He was looking to butt heads. He's obviously steamed that the case against Franken was thrown out of court--and came to our interview with the expressed goal of demonstrating his belief that NPR has a liberal bias, and that "Fresh Air" (like Franken) was out to defame him. . . ."It's pretty difficult for an interviewer to maintain a high level of rapport with someone who wants to prove that you're out to get them . . . .O'Reilly is one of the most controversial and powerful broadcasters in the country--Terry asked him about how he uses that power to pursue issues, and settle scores with his critics. Terry wouldn't have been doing her job if she didn't address that. . . ."

Well stated, but Miller's common sense apparently didn't sink in with Dvorkin, who responded, "Even so, I agree with the listeners who complained about the tone of the interview: Her questions were pointed from the beginning. She went after O'Reilly using critical quotes from the Franken book and a New York Times book review."

So what? So what if Gross was pointed? So what if she "went after O'Reilly" with critical quotes? Isn't that was tough journalism all about?

O'Reilly's the most polarizing media figure in the country. Why should he be spared tough questions?

Dvorkin conceded that "Although O'Reilly frequently resorts to bluster and bullying on his own show, he seemed unable to take her tough questions. He became angrier as the interview went along. But by coming across as a pro-Franken partisan rather than a neutral and curious journalist, [???] Gross did almost nothing that might have allowed the interview to develop."

And just what is a "neutral and curious journalist," Mr. Dvorkin? Any high school newspaper editor could answer, "no journalist at all." Dvorkin reveals more about his own bankruptcy, and NPR's, with this bizarre statement. How can any journalist worth his mettle remain "neutral and curious" in the face of a powerful rightist demagogue who threatens his guests with physical violence? How could any journalist remain neutral and curious, given the lies and intellectual dishonesty that poured from O'Reilly's mouth during the NPR interview, as the above essay meticulously demonstrates?

The interview developed the only way possible--O'Reilly showing himself to be the cowardly ignoramus that he is.

Dvorkin continued, "By the time the interview was albout halfway through, it felt as though Terry Gross was indeed "carrying Al Franken's water," as some listeners say.

There you go again, Dvorkin. As some listeners say? Which ones, O'Reilly's deluded fanatics? Because they say so? What are you backing this up with?

"It was not about O'Reilly's ideas, or his attitudes, or even about his book. It was about O'Reilly as a political media phenomenon. That's a legitimate subject for discussion, but in this case, it was an interview that was, in the end, unfair to O'Reilly."

First, the interview was in part about O'Reilly ideas, attitudes, and even his worthless book. Second, if O'Reilly as a political media phenomenon is a legitimate subject for discussion, how in this case was it unfair to O'Reilly, in the beginning, middle or end?

Dvorkin doesn't attempt to explain this absurdity, beyond offering weakly, "because some listeners say so."

Dvorkin took a final swipe at Gross for reading an excerpt of People's critical review of O'Reilly's book, the one she attempted to read in O'Reilly's presence when he rudely walked out of the studio.

Dvorkin laments: "That was wrong. O'Reilly was not there to respond. It's known in broadcasting as the 'empty chair' interview, and it is considered an unethical technique and should not be used on  NPR."

Why? It was O'Reilly who ended the interview prematurely and left the chair empty. Gross would have given him a chance to respond. O'Reilly rudely interrupted Gross and prevented her from reading. As a listener, I wanted to hear the People review. I'm glad Gross read it. She had a right to, and we had a right to hear it.

This entire episode only reveals that NPR is not the "far left" entity that O'Reilly makes it out to be. In fact, when O'Reilly mischaracterizes the NY Times or NPR as "far left," he's only revealing the extent of his own right-wing ideological bias. Both NPR and the Times demonstrate how far liberalism has shifted to the right during the past few decades of capitalism's deepening crisis. The Times, NPR and the BBC have actually been slanting their coverage in support of the Iraq war. NPR's Terry Gross has engaged in crude red-baiting of ANSWER and other communist organizers of the antiwar demonstrations. The  Times supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, and its star correspondent Judith Miller has been a constant source of misinformation regarding weapons of mass destruction. Read David Lindorff's October 21 Counterpunch article, "God's On Our Side," for the latest example of the Times's alleged "far left" perspective.

************************&

October 21, 2003--Speaking of God on our side, Bill O'Reilly's no doubt very happy with the comments in June by Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the outspoken evangelical Christian who declared before a Christian group in Oregon that radical Islamists hated the US "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian . . . and the enemy is a guy named Satan."

Boykin told another group that when he faced those Somalian warlords in 1993, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

About Bush, Boykin said in  June: "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

With a little help from the Supreme Court, Boykin forgot to add.

There's more. Speaking to a church crowd in Oregon, Boykin said: "Why do they hate us?" [bin Laden, Hussein, and North Korea's Kim Jon Il] The answer to that is because we are a Christian nation."

He also told the Oregon audience, in language that O'Reilly fully endorses, "Don't you worry about what these courts say. Our God reigns supreme."

This is exactly O'Reilly's position. We're a Christian nation. We were founded on Judeo/Christian values. The secularists are the godless enemy, trying to rob us of "spirituality."

"Unless the White House is involved, this isn't a major story."

--Bill O'Reilly, 9/30/03

October 1, 2003--Except the White House is involved, O'Reilly, and only a shameless apologist for George Bush could utter the above words. In so doing, Bill O'Reilly has found one more way to crown himself the grand master of the spinmeisters.

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. "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.

"The haters have power right now in America."

Yes, and you're living proof of that, 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.

"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.

Only ideologically driven propagandists like O'Reilly actively push this discredited official version. Only a spinmeister like O'Reilly doesn't breathe a word about any of the above facts incriminating George Bush. Only a deranged partisan ideologue like O'Reilly  would try to convince his audience that most of the blame for September 11 rests with Bill Clinton.
As the chief executive of the US imperialist government, Bill Clinton does share political responsibility for September 11. And he no doubt coddled bin Laden because of Washington's cozy ties to Saudi Arabia, just as Bush did. Clinton couldn't "get" bin Laden for the same reasons Bush didn't--bin Laden was and no doubt still is a CIA asset.

But Clinton didn't enjoy extensive and profitable business ties with the bin Laden family as George Bush does. It wasn't Clinton whose struggling oil firm was bailed out by bin Laden's brother in law in the 1980s. It wasn't Clinton whose business interests intersected with the bin Ladens and the BCCI scandal. It wasn't Clinton who, according to French authors Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie in their book, "Forbidden Truth: US-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for bin Laden," stopped the FBI from investigating bin Laden because of Saudi oil ties. It wasn't Clinton who flew the bin Laden family out of the US back to Saudi Arabia right after September 11.

It was George W. Bush who did all of the above. And whatever can be said about Clinton's failure to nab bin Laden, by the time his term was over Clinton's national security advisor Sandy Berger specifically warned the incoming administration that something terrible was coming from Al-Qaeda. So did the Hart/Rudman report on terrorism that was given to Bush shortly after taking office. Bush and Cheney promptly blew off these warnings, saying they'd look into it.

Despite receiving multiple and specific warnings about what was coming on September 11, a military standdown was in effect on that morning, with no air defense in sight. NO ONE ELSE BUT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS CRIMINAL DERELICTION OF DUTY.

Just today, September 26, the Asia Times reports that a former top Indian intelligence officer says that the US Defense Intelligence Agency was aware that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was sponsoring the Taliban and Al Qaeda, BUT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION CHOSE TO IGNORE ITS FINDINGS.

None of this will ever be reported on The O'Reilly Factor, because the host is an apologist for the war criminals in the White House who sees fit to use his power and influence to cover up for their crimes. To use O'Reilly's own words, he is preventing the American people from getting at the murderers responsible for September 11.

*******************

September 25, 2003--Watching Bill O'Reilly interview National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice was like watching Leni Riefenstahl talk with Heinrich Himmler. Aside from O'Reilly's egging Rice on from the right and urging a military invasion of Iran, there is nothing about their exchange worth discussing here. The most significant thing about the interview is what O'Reilly DIDN'T ask Rice; the only question any self respecting genuine journalist must ask Rice:

Ms. Rice, why did you say right after September 11 that the only warnings the White House received about terrorist hijacking plots concerned traditional and conventional hijackings, when in fact Bush received specific and multiple warnings about a plan to crash hijacked commercial jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

"If Bush lied, I'll be the first to hang him."

--Bill O'Reilly, 7/7/03

July 10-12, 2003--Bill O'Reilly continues to reestablish himself as the most intellectually dishonest media whore in the US today. As the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction are exposed daily, as the horrifying disaster brought to the Iraqis by Bush becomes clearer, and as US soldiers die every day, O'Reilly is pathetically trying to deflect attention away from his own responsibility for those criminal policies and the lies he repeated on a nightly basis.

But we're not going to let him get away with it.

You know Bush is in trouble when Bill O'Reilly is forced to criticize him.

But O'Reilly is all over the place, reeling from the early fallout of the scandal beginning to envelop Bush. On July 7, Bush accused International Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff of being irresponsible for writing an "anti-American" piece that stated Bush should be impeached for lying about WMD. Here O'Reilly wields his typical McCarthyite tactic of accusing opponents who've criticized US policy of being traitors.

"Irresponsible! Incendiary!" O'Reilly screeched. "Pfaff's turning the Europeans against us!" Here O'Reilly is doing the same thing Southern racists like Bull O'Connor did against civil rights demonstrators--blaming all the turmoil on "outside agitators"--not the homegrown conditions that spawned racism.

Pfaff's column has not turned the world against the US. That feat was accomplished by Bush and Rumsfeld even before the first American soldier set foot in Iraq. The additional crimes by Washington in Iraq have only deepened the hatred of US imperialism by the world's toilers.

O'Reilly was on his own and thoroughly outclassed by both his guests on that segment--Alison Schafer, a journalism professor from American University, and James Goldsborough from the San Diego Union Tribune.

While O'Reilly hysterically screeched his McCarthyite invective at Pfaff for demanding Bush's impeachment without offering any proof he intentionally lied, Schafer and Goldborough calmly pointed out that Pfaff is far from alone in doubting Bush's credibility, in calling him a liar and demanding his impeachment. It is a growing sentiment in this country, and this is another example of how it is O'Reilly whose ideology and spin prevent him from seeing the reality unfolding before him.

"Irresponsible garbage! Left wing propaganda!" Typical of O'Reilly's scholarly and civil discourse. The contrast between O'Reilly's strident ideology and his guests' rational, factual demeanor was striking. Goldsborough calmly reminded his host that the whole nation was now raising questions about Bush's handling of the war, and 49% believe Bush lied.

This doesn't bode well for O'Reilly, and he knows it. He's defensive about admitting Bush lied, because if Bush lied, then so did O'Reilly, because he was enthusiastically backing Bush's invasion of Iraq, eagerly backing a bloody siege of Baghdad if that's what it took, blaming the Iraqi civilians in advance for not moving out of town in time.

Goldsborough had O'Reilly on the ropes. O'Reilly tried to end the segment with a counter that damned his own position: "If Bush lied, I'll be the first to hang him."

Get the noose ready, O'Reilly.

After three more days of the unfolding WMD scandal, O'Reilly was singing a slightly different tune. While he still blasted the "elite, left wing media" for already concluding Bush lied, O'Reilly charged Bush with "cherry-picking" the intelligence. Bush wasn't lying, O'Reilly tried to assure his equally troubled supporters in the viewing audience, he was merely engaging in "wishful thinking" about weapons of mass destruction. O'Reilly shamelessly apologizes for Bush out of self interest--he echoed Bush's lies on Iraq all along, and unequivocally urged Americans to trust Bush and give him "the benefit of the doubt"; this in the face of a long history of Washington's lies and fabrications to win public support for its military aggression.

It's getting so bad that O'Reilly even had to concede that Fox reporter Jim Angle--no Robert Scheer--called the Bush administration the most secretive he'd ever seen.

When in trouble, O'Reilly calls on right wing ilk such as Newt Gingrich for the political angle and Colonel David Hunt for military affairs, further proof that O'Reilly is not "independent" but a rightist ideologue himself. O'Reilly often claims that his occasional criticism of Bush proves that he is "independent" and not a conservative. But his criticism of Bush is almost always from the RIGHT, and for not "getting the job done"--the "job" being a right wing, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist agenda.

O'Reilly complained to Gingrich that Bush's sloppiness and secrecy are damaging US interests abroad, which is a "shame." Then whined that Bush was letting down the 70% of Americans who trusted him. And worst of all, Bush was making "those who backed him look bad"--meaning Bill O'Reilly.

O'Reilly then criticized Bush for not communicating his message effectively. Gingrich agreed that a major address to the nation by Bush was in order, and assured O'Reilly that their fearless leader will give a brilliant speech soon.

He's a great communicator, Gingrich claimed, which is why those 70% believed him in the first place. No, those Americans who believed Bush did so because they were bombarded daily by lies, misinformation and propaganda from the government and media mouthpieces like O'Reilly. Now the lies are unraveling and it's every man for himself. O'Reilly's blaming Bush; Bush is blaming the CIA; the CIA is blaming the Brits; the Defense Department blames the State Department, and on and on it goes.

What is unfolding will go down as one of the biggest scandals in US history, and O'Reilly is on the wrong side of it. No amount of deflecting blame on O'Reilly's part will obscure this fact.

Ask not for whom the hangman calls for, O'Reilly. He calls for thee.

June 17-18, 2003--Bill O'Reilly added his own nightmarish twist to this past Friday the 13th. Confirming his place as America's leading Orwellian propagandist, O'Reilly enlightened his viewers with a Talking Points Memo entitled, "The Enablers of Terror." Just listen to this latest masterpiece from O'Reilly.  Believe it or not, much of it rings true--if you substitute Bush or Sharon for "the terrorists."

O'Reilly: "It is simply disgraceful that the world will not unite against killers who target civilians, no matter what the cause.  That is barbaric and unacceptable behavior in this world."

It is disgraceful that the world has sat back open mouthed and watched Israel commit unspeakable atrocities against the Palestinians. It is barbaric that the world has not united against the Zionist killers who target Palestinian civilians. It is unacceptable that the American people have tolerated Washington's use of their tax money to fund Israel's terror.

"In a just world, the United States, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the Arab States and the United Nations would all join together to neutralize Hamas and other killers."

"No peace could ever be possible as long as barbarians can kill with impunity."

In a just world, Israel would not be allowed to steal Palestinian land and turn it into a prison for Palestinians. In a just world, a democratic, secular state of Palestine would replace the Zionist state of Israel. In a just world, the Palestinians would realize the sunshine of national liberation, relegating the nightmarish Zionist occupation of their land to the status of a distant memor.

"No peace could ever be possible as long as barbarians can kill with impunity."

It's true that no peace will ever be possible in the Middle East as long as barbarians like Sharon can kill Palestinians with impunity.

"We know that in the USA because of Al Qaeda. America has wiped out many of those killers and we are justified in hunting them down. The same is true of all terror groups. The world should have zero tolerance for these people....The United Nations would provide a peacekeeping force to separate the Palestinians and Israelis, while a combined world force would root out the terrorists."

The US government actually created Al Qaeda, training and arming them to commit terrorist acts against the pro-Soviet Afghan government during the 1980s, and again calling on their services in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

It is a slander against the Palestinian people to equate their national liberation struggle, which is indigenous to their fight against Israeli occupation, with Al Qaeda, which was an instrument of US imperialism.

Notice how O'Reilly has dusted off the United Nations from the trash can of history now that he's realized Washington needs to use the UN for its own purposes again. Listen as O'Reilly stamps his feet in frustration because the world refuses to agree with his cartoonish presentation of and solution to the problem.

The sole cause of the Middle East crisis, according to O'Reilly, rests with the killers in Hamas. That's it.  Get rid of the Hamas killers and presto, case closed, problem solved. All who disagree with that are enablers of terror, you see.

The source of all the violence and terrorism in the Middle East is Zionist Israel. The biggest enablers of this state terrorism are Washington and media cheerleaders like Bill O'Reilly. All acts of guerrilla warfare, including suicide bombings, are in reaction to Israel's barbaric oppression of the Palestinians, and pale next to the carnage caused by Israel's terror.

It is important to remember that Israel supported Hamas in the '70s to counter the influence of the secular, bourgeois nationalist leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Over the years Israel intelligence has no doubt infiltrated Hamas and served as agent provocateurs. Clear thinking people are starting to notice a pattern to Tel Aviv's violence: every time there is a diplomatic process involving the slightest Israeli concession, Israel assassinates Hamas leaders and whomever else gets in the way, guaranteeing a response by  Hamas and an escalation of the violence.

Israel has a long and sordid history of staging terrorist acts and blaming others, usually Arabs, of committing hoaxes and provocations, of spy rings in the United States, of carrying out assassinations in the US and elsewhere. A leopard doesn't change its spots. Recently Israel was exposed as creating fake Al Qaeda cells in the West Bank and Gaza.

None of this makes it on O'Reilly's Spin Zone. Nothing about how the social and economic system of capitalism and the imperialist domination of the region are at the root of the national oppression of the Palestinians by Israel. No mention of how the Israeli capitalist class used Zionism to establish a racist colonial settler state that would oppress the Palestinians as well as exploit Israeli workers. No mention of how US imperialism has used Israel as a beachhead against the Arab semi-colonial masses.

That's all too complex for O'Reilly. For an apologist for both capitalism and Zionism, it's much easier to reduce the entire crisis to the "killers" in Hamas.

The peace that O'Reilly, Bush, and Sharon speak of is the peace of the grave, the peace of the vanquished. Their goal is to completely crush the Palestinian resistance and force Palestinians to accept an apartheid-like bantustan masquerading as a "viable state."

They are dreaming. The Palestinian thirst for liberation and nationhood will never be extinguished. No two-state solution will satisfy the national aspirations of the Palestinian people.  There is no diplomatic solution to this crisis that can be imposed by imperialism.

The only answer is a democratic, secular state of Palestine with equal rights for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. An internationalist socialist program that unites Jewish, Christian and Muslim workers is the only realistic road forward.

**********************

June 7, 2003--Oh, this web of deceit they have woven and are entangled in. It's great watching Bill O'Reilly squirm as he struggles to cover for Bush's lies while deflecting attention away from his own participation in those lies.

The other night, while interviewing Barbara Walters about her upcoming interview with Hillary Clinton, O'Reilly reminded Walters how you can't say Bush has lied without backing it up.

Proof that Bush has lied mounts with each passing day, yet O'Reilly, who boasts how he goes after the powerful and is looking out for "us," has not called Bush out on it. Last week, before the entire world, Bush specifically stated, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

He was referring to the now famous two tractor trailers that Washington claims were mobile bioweapons labs. Putting aside the controversy surrounding the trucks--they were trucks. NOT WEAPONS. There wasn't a trace of biological or chemical weapons detected on the trucks. Zero. Zilch. Nothing.

Now, even the CIA's initial claim that the trailers were producing biological germs is being challenged by CIA "dissenters," according to a 6/7/03 NY Times article. "I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter," said one of these dissenting intelligence analysts. The administration's public report "was a rushed job and looks political."

The Times article reports that these dissenting analysts say that these trailers lacked equipment for the steam sterilization needed for biological production, and that even if this problem was solved, the amount produced would be so small it would have to be taken elsewhere to be processed.

These dissenting analysts are now giving credence to Iraq's assertion that the trailers were used to make hydrogen for weather balloons.

The fact that this Times piece was co-written by Judith Miller, a long-time CIA mouthpiece, is most revealing. As the lies mount and the official story crumbles, the fingerpointing is escalating on both sides of the Atlantic. When Miller writes that a bitter debate is taking place within the intelligence community, and then she is the conduit for that story, it's cover your ass time at the CIA.

All of this is intriguing, but it's separate from the fact that Bush made another unchallenged bald-faced lie. He said they'd found weapons of mass destruction when they hadn't. But the damage was done. Many Americans believe that WMD have indeed been found in Iraq. Just as many believe Hussein was behind September 11.

The Big Lie has worked well, but it's in danger of coming apart. And Bill O'Reilly knows he'll have to pay the Piper too. Make a reservation for his place in the dock at the war crimes tribunal that awaits him.

***************************

June 7, 2003--Bill O'Reilly was walking on eggshells during his segment on the arraignment of Olympics bombing suspect Eric Rudolph last week. As O'Reilly gingerly explored the objects of Rudolph's right wing hatred--gays, Blacks, abortion--it was hard not to conclude: "Gee, Bill, sounds like you're right at home with Rudolph."

In a June 4 World Socialist Web Site article entitled: "The case of Eric Rudolph: Right-wing terrorism and the Bush administration," Patrick Martin makes a point that resonates with the O'Reilly segment: "The media is entirely silent on the larger issue: the role of the Republican Party in creating the political and moral atmosphere for right-wing terrorism, by whipping up hysteria over aboriton, homosexuality, gun control and similar issues,and pandering to racism and anti-Semitism."

One can substitute Bill O'Reilly for the Republican Party in that quote with fluidity.

June 17-18, 2003--Bill O'Reilly added his own nightmarish twist to this past Friday the 13th. Confirming his place as America's leading Orwellian propagandist, O'Reilly enlightened his viewers with a Talking Points Memo entitled, "The Enablers of Terror." Just listen to this latest masterpiece from O'Reilly.  Believe it or not, much of it rings true--if you substitute Bush or Sharon for "the terrorists."

O'Reilly: "It is simply disgraceful that the world will not unite against killers who target civilians, no matter what the cause.  That is barbaric and unacceptable behavior in this world."

It is disgraceful that the world has sat back open mouthed and watched Israel commit unspeakable atrocities against the Palestinians. It is barbaric that the world has not united against the Zionist killers who target Palestinian civilians. It is unacceptable that the American people have tolerated Washington's use of their tax money to fund Israel's terror.

"In a just world, the United States, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the Arab States and the United Nations would all join together to neutralize Hamas and other killers."

"No peace could ever be possible as long as barbarians can kill with impunity."

In a just world, Israel would not be allowed to steal Palestinian land and turn it into a prison for Palestinians. In a just world, a democratic, secular state of Palestine would replace the Zionist state of Israel. In a just world, the Palestinians would realize the sunshine of national liberation, relegating the nightmarish Zionist occupation of their land to the status of a distant memor.

"No peace could ever be possible as long as barbarians can kill with impunity."

It's true that no peace will ever be possible in the Middle East as long as barbarians like Sharon can kill Palestinians with impunity.

"We know that in the USA because of Al Qaeda. America has wiped out many of those killers and we are justified in hunting them down. The same is true of all terror groups. The world should have zero tolerance for these people....The United Nations would provide a peacekeeping force to separate the Palestinians and Israelis, while a combined world force would root out the terrorists."

The US government actually created Al Qaeda, training and arming them to commit terrorist acts against the pro-Soviet Afghan government during the 1980s, and again calling on their services in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

It is a slander against the Palestinian people to equate their national liberation struggle, which is indigenous to their fight against Israeli occupation, with Al Qaeda, which was an instrument of US imperialism.

Notice how O'Reilly has dusted off the United Nations from the trash can of history now that he's realized Washington needs to use the UN for its own purposes again. Listen as O'Reilly stamps his feet in frustration because the world refuses to agree with his cartoonish presentation of and solution to the problem.

The sole cause of the Middle East crisis, according to O'Reilly, rests with the killers in Hamas. That's it.  Get rid of the Hamas killers and presto, case closed, problem solved. All who disagree with that are enablers of terror, you see.

The source of all the violence and terrorism in the Middle East is Zionist Israel. The biggest enablers of this state terrorism are Washington and media cheerleaders like Bill O'Reilly. All acts of guerrilla warfare, including suicide bombings, are in reaction to Israel's barbaric oppression of the Palestinians, and pale next to the carnage caused by Israel's terror.

It is important to remember that Israel supported Hamas in the '70s to counter the influence of the secular, bourgeois nationalist leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Over the years Israel intelligence has no doubt infiltrated Hamas and served as agent provocateurs. Clear thinking people are starting to notice a pattern to Tel Aviv's violence: every time there is a diplomatic process involving the slightest Israeli concession, Israel assassinates Hamas leaders and whomever else gets in the way, guaranteeing a response by  Hamas and an escalation of the violence.

Israel has a long and sordid history of staging terrorist acts and blaming others, usually Arabs, of committing hoaxes and provocations, of spy rings in the United States, of carrying out assassinations in the US and elsewhere. A leopard doesn't change its spots. Recently Israel was exposed as creating fake Al Qaeda cells in the West Bank and Gaza.

None of this makes it on O'Reilly's Spin Zone. Nothing about how the social and economic system of capitalism and the imperialist domination of the region are at the root of the national oppression of the Palestinians by Israel. No mention of how the Israeli capitalist class used Zionism to establish a racist colonial settler state that would oppress the Palestinians as well as exploit Israeli workers. No mention of how US imperialism has used Israel as a beachhead against the Arab semi-colonial masses.

That's all too complex for O'Reilly. For an apologist for both capitalism and Zionism, it's much easier to reduce the entire crisis to the "killers" in Hamas.

The peace that O'Reilly, Bush, and Sharon speak of is the peace of the grave, the peace of the vanquished. Their goal is to completely crush the Palestinian resistance and force Palestinians to accept an apartheid-like bantustan masquerading as a "viable state."

They are dreaming. The Palestinian thirst for liberation and nationhood will never be extinguished. No two-state solution will satisfy the national aspirations of the Palestinian people.  There is no diplomatic solution to this crisis that can be imposed by imperialism.

The only answer is a democratic, secular state of Palestine with equal rights for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. An internationalist socialist program that unites Jewish, Christian and Muslim workers is the only realistic road forward.

**********************

June 7, 2003--Oh, this web of deceit they have woven and are entangled in. It's great watching Bill O'Reilly squirm as he struggles to cover for Bush's lies while deflecting attention away from his own participation in those lies.

The other night, while interviewing Barbara Walters about her upcoming interview with Hillary Clinton, O'Reilly reminded Walters how you can't say Bush has lied without backing it up.

Proof that Bush has lied mounts with each passing day, yet O'Reilly, who boasts how he goes after the powerful and is looking out for "us," has not called Bush out on it. Last week, before the entire world, Bush specifically stated, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

He was referring to the now famous two tractor trailers that Washington claims were mobile bioweapons labs. Putting aside the controversy surrounding the trucks--they were trucks. NOT WEAPONS. There wasn't a trace of biological or chemical weapons detected on the trucks. Zero. Zilch. Nothing.

Now, even the CIA's initial claim that the trailers were producing biological germs is being challenged by CIA "dissenters," according to a 6/7/03 NY Times article. "I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter," said one of these dissenting intelligence analysts. The administration's public report "was a rushed job and looks political."

The Times article reports that these dissenting analysts say that these trailers lacked equipment for the steam sterilization needed for biological production, and that even if this problem was solved, the amount produced would be so small it would have to be taken elsewhere to be processed.

These dissenting analysts are now giving credence to Iraq's assertion that the trailers were used to make hydrogen for weather balloons.

The fact that this Times piece was co-written by Judith Miller, a long-time CIA mouthpiece, is most revealing. As the lies mount and the official story crumbles, the fingerpointing is escalating on both sides of the Atlantic. When Miller writes that a bitter debate is taking place within the intelligence community, and then she is the conduit for that story, it's cover your ass time at the CIA.

All of this is intriguing, but it's separate from the fact that Bush made another unchallenged bald-faced lie. He said they'd found weapons of mass destruction when they hadn't. But the damage was done. Many Americans believe that WMD have indeed been found in Iraq. Just as many believe Hussein was behind September 11.

The Big Lie has worked well, but it's in danger of coming apart. And Bill O'Reilly knows he'll have to pay the Piper too. Make a reservation for his place in the dock at the war crimes tribunal that awaits him.

***************************

June 7, 2003--Bill O'Reilly was walking on eggshells during his segment on the arraignment of Olympics bombing suspect Eric Rudolph last week. As O'Reilly gingerly explored the objects of Rudolph's right wing hatred--gays, Blacks, abortion--it was hard not to conclude: "Gee, Bill, sounds like you're right at home with Rudolph."

In a June 4 World Socialist Web Site article entitled: "The case of Eric Rudolph: Right-wing terrorism and the Bush administration," Patrick Martin makes a point that resonates with the O'Reilly segment: "The media is entirely silent on the larger issue: the role of the Republican Party in creating the political and moral atmosphere for right-wing terrorism, by whipping up hysteria over aboriton, homosexuality, gun control and similar issues,and pandering to racism and anti-Semitism."

One can substitute Bill O'Reilly for the Republican Party in that quote with fluidity.

May 22-24, 2003--Beneath the bluster and triumphalism of Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the capitalist swine running this country is a palpable concern that the Teflon around Bush may not last. When the lies are collapsing, send in the biggest liar of them all to shore them up--Bill O'Reilly. When prominent right wingers are under attack, send in the most prominent Bonapartist attack dog.

The mythology erected around the April 2nd "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch from an al-Nasiriyah hospital is unraveling, and that won't do in the Spin Zone of the Pentagon's biggest media cheerleader, O'Reilly. Once again the focus of O'Reilly's wrath is Robert Scheer of the LA Times, whose May 21 column discusses BBC's report that the Pentagon staged Lynch's rescue.

Typically, O'Reilly ignores the facts and resorts to rhetoric and name-calling. Scheer is a "radical...who many perceive to be a hater of the USA." Yes, Scheer is a left-wing social democrat. So what, O'Reilly? Scheer doesn't need COSMOS LEFT to defend him, but he does not "hate the USA." He hates the policies of the US government, which represents a small clique of billionaires, not the American people.

O'Reilly employs this slimy McCarthyite tactic against Hollywood whipping posts like Tim Robbins, whom he falsely accuses of signing statements that say America is a terrorist "nation." What all of these petitions do say is Washington has committed acts of state terrorism from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Korea to Vietnam to Nicaragua to Cuba to Chile to Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq, to name a few countries whose civilians have been killed by US attempts to influence, intimidate, or coerce them.

O'Reilly told his audience that Scheer was simply parrotting "antiwar," "anti-American" publications like the Toronto Star and the BBC, whose correspondents were reporting that Iraqi forces had left the hospital the day before the Special Forces got there, that Lynch had been well cared for by Iraqi doctors, that those doctors had tried to drive her in an ambulance to an American outpost but were fired upon, and that the staged operation by US soldiers had terrified patients and victimized the medical personnel who saved her life.

This version of reality horrifies O'Reilly, who as the loudest media war propagandist had faithfully peddled the Pentagon's official story that Lynch was in danger in Iraqi custody and had been saved in a daring, Rambo-style rescue operation. If the BBC version is accurate, O'Reilly laments, "it will be a terrible scandal." Yeah, and your lies would be right in the middle of it, O'Reilly.

O'Reilly's already uncomfortable over the phantom weapons of mass destruction and the growing Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. So his "Talking Points" memo tried throwing dust in everyone's eyes by formulating it as "Somebody's Lying"--Scheer or Bush.

O'Reilly announced that he does not know the truth behind the Lynch incident. Incredibly, O'Reilly says we have no reason to doubt the mission's original report. But if it turns out the US is lying, "it will be a terrible scandal." Indeed.

Big mystery who's lying in O'Reilly's mind. It's Scheer, the US-hating radical, who "despises Bush" and has an anti-American agenda. It's the BBC, another anti-American outfit with an axe to grind. It's the Toronto Star, one more anti-American rag in the sophisticated mind of Bill O'Reilly.

Journalists who are independent and courageous enough to do their job and expose Washington's lies are labeled "anti-American" in O'Reilly's Spin Zone.
O'Reilly leaves out another source for the demythologization of Jessica Lynch's rescue--distinguished journalist Richard Lloyd Parry, who first reported on the subject in the April 16 issue of The Times [UK].

That's the Toronto Star, the BBC, Robert Scheer, and Richard Lloyd Parry. O'Reilly can't get away with dismissing the whole world as "anti-American." The BBC, the Star, and Parry relied on interviews with multiple eyewitnesses who were on the scene at the hospital on April 2. O'Reilly is actually accusing those Iraqis of lying, which is easy in O'Reilly's Spin Zone, since he views Iraqis as subhuman anyway.

O'Reilly whined that "Nowhere in his column does Scheer do any original reporting." Of course he doesn't. It's a column, fool. By definition he's not doing any original reporting.

With all of these anti-American mouthpieces ganging up on him, O'Reilly turned to his new favorite military hack for assistance--Col. David Hunt. Col. David  Hackworth, O'Reilly's previous number one hack, lost O'Reilly's confidence ever since he revealed that Washington, not Iraq, used depleted uranium shells in the first gulf war.

A real heavyweight, this Col. Hunt. He's so tough that he almost unraveled as soon as the interview began. "It's outrageous. I'm on national television. I should calm down."

But he never did. Hunt huffed and he puffed during the entire segment. This guy's a lifer; the very fact that he had to deal with this debacle so devastating to the integrity of his cherished institution clearly unnerved Col. Hunt.

For all his noise, however, Hunt did very little to factually refute what's been reported by Parry, the BBC and the Toronto Star. Hunt concedes the BBC was correct in reporting that US soldiers "flex cuffed" hospital personnel, justified by Hunt because the soldiers had a right to "find out if you're good or bad."
 
Neither Hunt nor O'Reilly provided the audience with even one quote from the BBC report or from Parry's April 16th article; not one sentence from the Iraqi doctors whose account provided the foundation for the reports by Parry, the BBC, the Toronto Star, and now the Washington Post, as columnist Richard Cohen reported May 23.

What Hunt benignly refers to as "flex cuffs" Dr. Harith describes as American soldiers handcuffing four doctors and two civilian patients, one of whom was incapacitated and connected to a drip. "They were doctors, with stethoscopes around their necks," Dr. Harith said. "Even in war, a doctor should not be treated like that."

One can only surmise that with all their sophisticated training, US Special Forces must not have been equipped to discern if doctors with stethoscopes around their necks and patients hooked to a drip were good guys.

What is indisputable from all the accounts is that all Iraqi forces had left the day before, leaving the hospital unguarded. US forces assaulted a defenseless hospital, terrorizing doctors and patients alike. This was not how the Pentagon initially presented it.

What is also clear is that Lynch received life-saving medical care from Iraqi doctors. This too contradicts Washington's story that Lynch's life was threatened while in Iraqi custody. In fact, the Iraqi doctors had bonded with Lynch and sheltered her from Iraqi forces.

Iraqi intelligence agents told the hospital's doctors that Lynch would soon be taken to Baghdad. When she stabilized, they ordered the doctors to move her to an other hospital. Instead, Dr. Harith instructed the ambulance driver to take her to an American checkpoint. When he did, US soldiers fired at them.

Hunt denies the ambulance was fired upon, and claims that the ambulance was offering $10,000 for information on Lynch. COSMOS LEFT has not heard this story anywhere else. It smacks of Pentagon disinformation coming from the lying mouth of a military hack like Hunt, who also made the false statement that Iraqi forces were guarding the hospital at the time of the "rescue," which they were not.

Col. Hunt tried to cover up for the embarrassment by repeating, "It's an assault. . .It's an assault, for their protection and Jessica's." While in one breath he denied reports that "our guys trashed the hospital," in the next he admitted "They kicked a door in. There were shots fired."

Yes, there were shots fired. On an unguarded hospital with no Iraqi forces in sight because they had left a day before. Hunt says nothing to refute this fundamental fact. "They were in and in three minutes they were out." Yes, because there was no one inside but terrified doctors and patients, despite Hunt's lie only minutes before that "the hospital was guarded by both Iraqi uniformed soldiers and the Fedayeen."

Iraqi forces HAD been guarding the hospital, but not on the day of the raid. And as Parry reported on April 16th, local Baathists fleeing al-Nasiriyah for Baghdad stopped at the hospital for Lynch. But Dr. Harith moved her to another section of the hospital, and other doctors told the Iraqi soldiers they thought Jessica might have died and didn't know where she was.

In his attempt to counter the charge that the rescue was staged, Hunt kept saying that American forces "did kill people on the outside." This guy should have been Clinton's lawyer. Outside where? Three miles away? Americans were killing Iraqis all over the place. Hunt is trying to divert attention away from the fact that the hospital was unguarded.

Hunt and O'Reilly kept this information from the audience because it did not fit into their prowar Spin Zone. And that's not all this reactionary duo censored from viewers. They left out that Abdul Razaq, a hospital administrator who sought shelter from the bombardment in Lynch's room, was seized and held captive for three days in an open air prison camp, where his skin turned black.

They left out that US soldiers cut open the special bed made for patients with bed sores that had been provided to Lynch. They left out that the Americans dug up the graves of dead US soldiers outside the hospital. They left out that while US troops filmed the "rescue," among the many scenes not shown to the press at US Central Command was the one showing terrified doctors and patients being handcuffed and interrogated.

They left out Dr. Harith's testimony that "I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle. . . .There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stabl wound--only RTA, road traffic accident. They want to distort the picture. I don't know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury."

Hunt's major point in his attempt to refute the charge that Lynch's rescue was staged is that US forces used live bullets, not blanks as Hunt claims was reported. This smacks of a red herring defense by Hunt. The case against the Pentagon does not rest on whether live ammunition or blanks were used by US Special Forces. Even if they used live ammunition, the Lynch operation was a fraud, because Washington's initial story was that the hospital was teeming with Fedayeen who hit the Americans with heavy fire as they risked their own lives to save Jessica's.

O'Reilly and Hunt failed to inform their viewers about what BBC actually reported is that the US military were told by an Iraqi waiter from a nearby restaurant that Iraqi forces had already abandoned the hospital. What gives credence to the "staged" charge is that the Americans launched their operation at night with guns blazing, and filmed it with special night vision cameras.

A Dr. Anmar Uday told the BBC: "We heard the noise of helicopters. We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. They cried, 'Go, go, go', with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show--an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors."

O'Reilly and Hunt also neglected to tell viewers that BBC correspondent John Kampfner asked the US deputy assistant secretary of defense to release the full tape of the rescue instead of the edited version in order to reconcile the discrepancies. Kampfner reports that the official denied his request and refused to talk about any Iraqi resistance the Americans faced at the hospital.

Further, it is not hallucinatory to suggest that the Pentagon has a keen eye on public relations and is inherently averse to working with Hollwood to manipulate public opinion. World Socialist Web Site writer Julie Hyland, in a May 23 article called "BBC documentary exposes Pentagon lies: The staged rescue of Private Jessica Lynch," reports that in 2001, Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of Black Hawk Down, and Bertram van Munster, the brains behind the reality show Cops, met with Rumsfeld and other officials at the Pentagon to discuss a proposed reality show called Profiles From the Front Line, which was to follow US soldiers in Afghanistan.

Kampfner reports: "It was perfect reality TV, made with the active cooperation of Donald Rumsfeld and aired just before the Iraqi war. The Pentagon liked what it saw."

O'Reilly and Hunt were also curiously silent on how Lynch has been confined to a private Walter Reed hospital room under an around-the-clock guard. They said nothing about the fact that soldiers from Lynch's 507th Maintenance Company have been warned not to talk. One soldier said, "It's almost 'say a word and you'll be shot at dawn.'" The same goes for the medical staff at Walter Reed.

Even more suspicious is Washington's evolving tale that Lynch suffers from amnesia about her ordeal. First it was amnesia, than partial amnesia; the latest is that Jessica has only forgotten the ambush episode. Between the debriefings and this "amnesia," it is doubtful we'll ever hear Private Lynch's version of the events.

This controversy surrounding the Lynch operation is important because her "rescue" occurred at an uncertain time during the war when public sentiment had not yet solidified behind Bush. The intense media hype over the supposedly daring rescue played no small role in wrapping up "public opinion"--such as it exists--in a big yellow bow for Bush.

This is why O'Reilly and Hunt are so strident. They know they're at the center of the lies surrounding this war. But O'Reilly and Hunt's huffing and puffing, how-dare-you criticize the military tactics did not refute the emerging facts that expose the lies of the Pentagon and its propagandists.

O'Reilly and Hunt, short on the facts, were reduced to name-calling and rhetoric. He's a liar; she's anti-American. That's what their arguments came down to,along with O'Reilly absurdly proclaiming there's no reason to doubt the mission's original report.

Oh Really, O'Reilly?

To the contrary, we have far more reason to believe those Iraqi medical eyewitnesses than we do the US military, who reported that: Basra had fallen when it hadn't; that an uprising was taking place there that didn't; that Tariq Aziz was dead when he wasn't; that they fired on the Palestine Hotel in self defense when they didn't; that the missiles which landed in Baghdad markets were Iraqi; and even that Private Lynch had bullet and stab wounds, to name just a few of Washington's lies.

O'Reilly and Hunt were kindred spirits in calling the Iraqi people thugs, criminals and "roving bands of brigands," and in urging Bush to shoot looters dead, impose martial law complete with a 9pm curfew, disarm Iraqis and throw anyone with a gun into a prison camp. They should be thrilled over a May 25 Guardian report that up to 3,000 Iraqis have been bound, gagged, hooded and beaten at US compounds near the Baghdad airport, and that the US has denied the Red Cross access to them.

Let liars like O'Reilly and Hunt reveal themselves before the world every night. It'll all be evidence against them in the war crimes tribunals that await these scoundrels.

****************************

May 25, 2003--Poor William Bennett. Life has been so tough for the former secretary of education and drug czar since his high-roller gambling habit was exposed that he apparently needs Bill O'Reilly to defend him. According to O'Reilly, Bennett's been the victim of a "witch hunt." Why, poor Bill Bennett can't leave his house without hearing snide comments, O'Reilly informs us.

Oh Really, O'Reilly?

Our collective hearts should bleed for this sanctimonious hypocrite who got rich in part from lecturing working people about morality.

No, shed no tears for William Bennett. Bennett is not being persecuted by any "witch hunt." He is one of the most powerful, well connected individuals in this country, rich enough to lose millions without dipping into the "milk money," unlike millions of lower income gamblers who are specifically targeted by casinos in a sordid con job that generates onerous debts and addiction to gambling.

There's a pot-calling-the-kettle-black pattern to O'Reilly's demagoguery lately. The fascist talk show host calls the American Civil Liberties Union "fascist." The witch hunter characterizes the justifiable political criticism levied against Bennett's rank hypocrisy as a "witch hunt."

Bennett's job is not threatened. His voice has not been silenced. His wealth has not been reduced. What evidence does O'Reilly offer to prove Bennett's been persecuted by a witch hunt? Snide comments when he leaves his house, and being called a villain and a menace constitute a witch hunt in O'Reilly's twisted world.

O'Reilly and Bennett are kindred spirits of reaction. They are two of the most prominent conservative mouthpieces in the nation. They rank as the two leading front men in the capitalists' culture war against the working class. O'Reilly and Bennett are the self appointed watchdogs of public morality. When one gets into trouble and suffers profound political embarrassment because his hypocrisy is exposed before the world, the other rushes to his defense in an almost touching display of right wing solidarity.

O'Reilly, fearful that his ideological brother's moral and political credibility will be damaged, pleads pathetically to his legions of reactionary zombies: "Don't destroy him--he's not a villain or menace."

Oh, but he is, as are you, O'Reilly, and every person of conscience on this planet exalts when your ilk squirms in disgrace.

What binds O'Reilly and Bennett together ideologically is they both serve as apologists for capitalism and class rule. As World Socialist Web Site writer Kate Randall wrote on May 9, 2003, "Bennett has made an industry out of moral proselytizing as a crude cover for maintaining this social inequality."

O'Reilly does this every single night on his program. He agrees with Bennett when the latter rails against the "Left" for saying that the decline of the family unit and other social problems are connected to poverty and inequality.

No, it's not capitalism that's behind our social ills, these two self-appointed guardians of morality lecture us. It's promiscuous Blacks, rap music, remnants of the immoral and hedonistic '60s, marijuana, and all the stupid jerks who don't listen to paragons of virtue like O'Reilly and Bennett.

We can learn so much about morals from O'Reilly, who preaches that "a moral code needs to be instilled in children to MAKE them survive." [emphasis added] The same moral code that moved O'Reilly to threaten to break Jeremy Glick into little pieces for disagreeing with him. The same moral code that inspired O'Reilly to say that parents shouldn't have to ruin childhood for their kids by having to explain homosexual behavior to him.
Bill O'Reilly should be the last person parents look to for moral guidance. For all his ranting and raving, O'Reilly pushes more pornography into people's faces than Larry Flint. [See "The Twisted Mind of Bill O'Reilly" below.]

O'Reilly's passionate defense of fellow rightist William Bennett only further undermines O'Reilly's assertion that he's not a conservative, but an "independent" with no ideological spin allowed. This is a laughable claim not taken seriously by anyone with a brain, but O'Reilly has continued to deny his conservatism and affinity for Republicans with a straight face.

Until now.

In another recent segment in which O'Reilly zoomed to the defense of still another conservative ideologue under siege, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, COSMOS LEFT distinctly heard O'Reilly admit he IS a conservative, albeit in a backhanded manner.

**********************

May 26, 2003--When Bill O'Reilly heard that a group of Black law students at the University of Georgia Law School were objecting to Clarence Thomas speaking at their graduation ceremony, once again he raced to the rescue of a besieged right winger.

O'Reilly condescendingly asked his guest, a representative of the Black law students, how they could possibly oppose the selection of Thomas, an African American Supreme Court justice?

Unfortunately, the student, seemingly nervous from stage fright, did a less than stellar job in articulating a political response that illuminated Thomas's extreme right judicial ideology. She could only manage a vague reply that Thomas was too controversial.

O'Reilly, sensing blood, lunged in for the kill. "That's too general, controversial. Be a little more specific, please."

The student continued to fumble the ball, much to O'Reilly's delight. Another straw person to chew up and spit out, and make Black people look bad in the process. Let's follow up with another Jesse Jackson, he must have told his staff later.

Instead of focusing on Thomas's ultraright legal and political views that make him so controversial, the law student only criticized the narrow selection process, in which three conservative students picked Thomas to speak, rather than opening up the decision to the broader student body.

The Univ. of Georgia law student should have told O'Reilly that Black law students at the school objected to Thomas because of his extreme right legal and political views; his consistent participation in the ultraconservative bloc of Rehnquist and Scalia, which puts Thomas on the other side of women's rights, labor rights, voting rights and civil rights; opposing any extension of these rights to the oppressed and exploited, while supporting the strengthening of the repressive state powers and the weakening of the Bill of Rights.

As "strict constructionists," the unholy triad of Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas believe that laws in 2003 should be interpreted exactly how the Constitution written over 200 years says they should be interpreted; a perspective that is hostile to the gains and victories won by workers, women, and oppressed nationalities over that 200-year period.

Further, in not providing specific criticisms of Thomas's ultrarightist views, the student allowed O'Reilly to erroneously charge that Thomas was being persecuted for his "controversial" views

But the objections to Thomas and the controversies surrounding him go deeper than his reactionary views. Many Black students are profoundly embarrassed by Clarence Thomas's pathetic performance on the Supreme Court. Contrary to O'Reilly's spin that Thomas is some kind of distinguished jurist, Thomas is widely known as a buffoon who rarely asks questions or participates in any way during the Court's sessions. Basically, Thomas sits there like a bump on a log and mumbles, "What HE said," meaning whatever Scalia has just opined.

Clarence Thomas also embarrasses Black law students for the strident manner in which he opposes affirmative action, when he personally benefitted from it as much as anyone.

We'll leave aside the character flaws of Thomas that were raised in the Anita Hill controversy 12 years ago which is still generating embarrassment and resentment.

O'Reilly just can't hide his racism when he ventures into these matters. At the beginning of the segment, he condescendingly informed the law student that Clarence had been a "poor boy."

Wetbacks, stealing hub caps, poor boy. No, O'Reilly's not a racist. Neither is Bush. And Santorium isn't a homophobic. But Sharon is a man of peace.

The big news from this segment, however, is that during the exchange between host and guest, the latter said, "There's nothing wrong with being a conservative."

O'Reilly's voice can distinctly be heard in reply: "Thank you."

There you have it. O'Reilly acknowledging that he is indeed a conservative. Not an independent with no "spin zone." A conservative with a conservative spin zone.

Perhaps after being forced to defend two prominent right wingers in Bennett and Thomas, O'Reilly couldn't hold back a rare burst of honesty.

*****************

May 22-24, 2003--Beneath the bluster and triumphalism of Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the capitalist swine running this country is a palpable concern that the Teflon around Bush may not last. When the lies are collapsing, send in the biggest liar of them all to shore them up--Bill O'Reilly. When prominent right wingers are under attack, send in the most prominent Bonapartist attack dog.

The mythology erected around the April 2nd "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch from an al-Nasiriyah hospital is unraveling, and that won't do in the Spin Zone of the Pentagon's biggest media cheerleader, O'Reilly. Once again the focus of O'Reilly's wrath is Robert Scheer of the LA Times, whose May 21 column discusses BBC's report that the Pentagon staged Lynch's rescue.

Typically, O'Reilly ignores the facts and resorts to rhetoric and name-calling. Scheer is a "radical...who many perceive to be a hater of the USA." Yes, Scheer is a left-wing social democrat. So what, O'Reilly? Scheer doesn't need COSMOS LEFT to defend him, but he does not "hate the USA." He hates the policies of the US government, which represents a small clique of billionaires, not the American people.

O'Reilly employs this slimy McCarthyite tactic against Hollywood whipping posts like Tim Robbins, whom he falsely accuses of signing statements that say America is a terrorist "nation." What all of these petitions do say is Washington has committed acts of state terrorism from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Korea to Vietnam to Nicaragua to Cuba to Chile to Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq, to name a few countries whose civilians have been killed by US attempts to influence, intimidate, or coerce them.

O'Reilly told his audience that Scheer was simply parrotting "antiwar," "anti-American" publications like the Toronto Star and the BBC, whose correspondents were reporting that Iraqi forces had left the hospital the day before the Special Forces got there, that Lynch had been well cared for by Iraqi doctors, that those doctors had tried to drive her in an ambulance to an American outpost but were fired upon, and that the staged operation by US soldiers had terrified patients and victimized the medical personnel who saved her life.

This version of reality horrifies O'Reilly, who as the loudest media war propagandist had faithfully peddled the Pentagon's official story that Lynch was in danger in Iraqi custody and had been saved in a daring, Rambo-style rescue operation. If the BBC version is accurate, O'Reilly laments, "it will be a terrible scandal." Yeah, and your lies would be right in the middle of it, O'Reilly.

O'Reilly's already uncomfortable over the phantom weapons of mass destruction and the growing Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. So his "Talking Points" memo tried throwing dust in everyone's eyes by formulating it as "Somebody's Lying"--Scheer or Bush.

O'Reilly announced that he does not know the truth behind the Lynch incident. Incredibly, O'Reilly says we have no reason to doubt the mission's original report. But if it turns out the US is lying, "it will be a terrible scandal." Indeed.

Big mystery who's lying in O'Reilly's mind. It's Scheer, the US-hating radical, who "despises Bush" and has an anti-American agenda. It's the BBC, another anti-American outfit with an axe to grind. It's the Toronto Star, one more anti-American rag in the sophisticated mind of Bill O'Reilly.

Journalists who are independent and courageous enough to do their job and expose Washington's lies are labeled "anti-American" in O'Reilly's Spin Zone.
O'Reilly leaves out another source for the demythologization of Jessica Lynch's rescue--distinguished journalist Richard Lloyd Parry, who first reported on the subject in the April 16 issue of The Times [UK].

That's the Toronto Star, the BBC, Robert Scheer, and Richard Lloyd Parry. O'Reilly can't get away with dismissing the whole world as "anti-American." The BBC, the Star, and Parry relied on interviews with multiple eyewitnesses who were on the scene at the hospital on April 2. O'Reilly is actually accusing those Iraqis of lying, which is easy in O'Reilly's Spin Zone, since he views Iraqis as subhuman anyway.

O'Reilly whined that "Nowhere in his column does Scheer do any original reporting." Of course he doesn't. It's a column, fool. By definition he's not doing any original reporting.

With all of these anti-American mouthpieces ganging up on him, O'Reilly turned to his new favorite military hack for assistance--Col. David Hunt. Col. David  Hackworth, O'Reilly's previous number one hack, lost O'Reilly's confidence ever since he revealed that Washington, not Iraq, used depleted uranium shells in the first gulf war.

A real heavyweight, this Col. Hunt. He's so tough that he almost unraveled as soon as the interview began. "It's outrageous. I'm on national television. I should calm down."

But he never did. Hunt huffed and he puffed during the entire segment. This guy's a lifer; the very fact that he had to deal with this debacle so devastating to the integrity of his cherished institution clearly unnerved Col. Hunt.

For all his noise, however, Hunt did very little to factually refute what's been reported by Parry, the BBC and the Toronto Star. Hunt concedes the BBC was correct in reporting that US soldiers "flex cuffed" hospital personnel, justified by Hunt because the soldiers had a right to "find out if you're good or bad."
 
Neither Hunt nor O'Reilly provided the audience with even one quote from the BBC report or from Parry's April 16th article; not one sentence from the Iraqi doctors whose account provided the foundation for the reports by Parry, the BBC, the Toronto Star, and now the Washington Post, as columnist Richard Cohen reported May 23.

What Hunt benignly refers to as "flex cuffs" Dr. Harith describes as American soldiers handcuffing four doctors and two civilian patients, one of whom was incapacitated and connected to a drip. "They were doctors, with stethoscopes around their necks," Dr. Harith said. "Even in war, a doctor should not be treated like that."

One can only surmise that with all their sophisticated training, US Special Forces must not have been equipped to discern if doctors with stethoscopes around their necks and patients hooked to a drip were good guys.

What is indisputable from all the accounts is that all Iraqi forces had left the day before, leaving the hospital unguarded. US forces assaulted a defenseless hospital, terrorizing doctors and patients alike. This was not how the Pentagon initially presented it.

What is also clear is that Lynch received life-saving medical care from Iraqi doctors. This too contradicts Washington's story that Lynch's life was threatened while in Iraqi custody. In fact, the Iraqi doctors had bonded with Lynch and sheltered her from Iraqi forces.

Iraqi intelligence agents told the hospital's doctors that Lynch would soon be taken to Baghdad. When she stabilized, they ordered the doctors to move her to an other hospital. Instead, Dr. Harith instructed the ambulance driver to take her to an American checkpoint. When he did, US soldiers fired at them.

May 10-13, 2003--The more Bill O'Reilly rants against pedophiles, pornography, and homosexuality, the more he sounds like those anti-porn zealots posing as feminists who used to set up tables around New York City and assault passersby with graphic bondage photos. While professing to take a holier-than-thou moral stance against porn's immorality, THEY are pushing the pornography into everyone's face. It's the Catherine Dworkin devotees at the anti-porn tables waving pictures of women in chains who are publicizing graphic sexual photos. Parents walking by the tables with their children must be embarrassed by the open display of sado-masochistic images. These phony feminists who are quick to accuse pornographers of exploiting and objectifying women are themselves spreading the smut.

That's what's it been like listening to the O'Reilly Factor lately. Sex, sex, and more sex; a convenient way for O'Reilly to divert attention away from the unfolding Iraqi debacle. Lately it's been pedophiles--the "conversations with a pedophile" book and another published by the University of Minnesota; a sex course taught by a Kansas University professor; and a Russian female pop group called TATU, who drew O'Reilly's wrath for their "lesbian act" and were labeled "trollops" by this pillar of Irish Catholic morality.

O'Reilly's inquisition of the Kansas University students about the details of their sex education class bordered on voyeurism. A while back, there was a similar case at Indiana University that O'Reilly zeroed in on like a dirty old man. This constant obsession with child molestation is getting offensive. In the course of pushing his reactionary culture-war agenda, O'Reilly is himself a pornographer, just like his kindred spirits at the anti-porn tables in Grand Central Station.

The constant harping against liberal sexual mores, declining moral standards, and Sodom and Gomorrah was the stock-in-trade of the Nazis during the 1930s. O'Reilly, too, leads the way in railing against the immoral liberal elites who are incapable of arresting the inexorable moral decay that accompanies capitalism in its death agony.

When O'Reilly seizes on topical news stories he's like a bulldog who refuses to release meat from its jaws. Two recent controversial stories involving young people are the latest examples: 1) the all-white high school prom in Georgia and 2) the North Glenwood, Illinois hazing incident involving high school junior and senior girls.

O'Reilly must be the only person on this planet who is shocked that a whites-only social event transpired in Georgia, even in 2003. The all-white prom has instantly transformed O'Reilly into a civil rights crusader. In this world of Orwellian nightmares and Alice in Wonderland inversions of reality, a world where Top Gun Bush struts like a demented Caesar and calls Ariel Sharon a man of peace, where war criminals Bush and Blair are in the running for Nobel Peace Prizes, Bill O'Reilly is now a civil rights advocate.

An all-white Georgian prom provides O'Reilly an easy, safe, convenient cover to pose as a friend of African Americans. O'Reilly truly goes out on the limb here: Opposing segregated proms is like coming out against Mother's Day.

No, something else is at work here. Right wing radio personality Neil Boortz may be onto it: O'Reilly's been taking some hits lately for a racist remark he made at an inner-city charity event. (The kids who were being honored were late, and O'Reilly remarked they were probably stealing hub caps.) Like Lott, Santorium and Bob Ryan, O'Reilly joined the growing list of racists and bigots who just can't restrain themselves.

When Boortz suggested that O'Reilly seized on the prom issue to show he really isn't a racist, O'Reilly exploded in rage. "You're a vicious son of a bitch," he fumed, forcing his censors to bleep the expletive from the live telecast. Boortz obviously struck a nerve deep inside Bill O'Reilly.

O'Reilly, of course, is one of the most prominent racists in the United States. It's not just the continuous vitriol he spews against Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and every other Black leader who isn't an Uncle Tom. It's not the ongoing diatribes about those unruly inner city kids in public schools, his ahistorical tirades against reparations, nor his opposition to every social program aimed at remedying the historical consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, racism and discrimination. It's not that he called Mexicans "wetbacks."

It's his denial that racism exists that proves O'Reilly's a racist. It's his assertion that the playing field is now level; that racism is a thing of the past. Institutionalized racism has been eradicated in O'Reilly's myopic world. Capitalism now provides equal opportunities for all Americans. If you're unemployed, it's your fault. If racists exist, it's because there are jerks like the Georgian white high schoolers who had their own prom, and there will always be jerks.

As proof, O'Reilly cites a census survey showing that Black couples make 80% of what white couples do. The 20% difference is explained by the fact that more Blacks live in the south, where salaries are lower, according to O'Reilly. That tells O'Reilly American capitalism is fair and works. If only Blacks had the same family values as whites, O'Reilly is saying, there would be 100% equality in the US.

As usual, O'Reilly's wrong on the facts. Blacks in the South make more than they do in the Northeast. And a single Black mother makes qualitatively less money than a single white mother. So the problem is more complex than is presented inO'Reilly's cartoonish version. Figures don't lie, but liars can sure figure, and these days Bill O'Reilly is one of the most notorious liars in America.

Racism, of course, is built into the capitalist system, and since capitalism is still around, it's safe to say racism is too. Indeed, despite the gains won by Blacks, every social and economic indicator reveals Blacks are still worse off in the US--infant mortality, poverty, unemployment, health, housing, education, and lifespan.

Obviously, the very occurrence of an all-white prom in Georgia reveals how deep-seated racism is in Bill O'Reilly's America. Those kids were no doubt emboldened by the visibility of racists in Washington brought on by the ascension to power of Bush, Lott, and the ultraright, fascistic elements around them.

The fact that O'Reilly indignantly denies that Bush is a racist is further confirmation that O'Reilly is one himself.

Of course, Blacks HAVE made real gains in recent decades, but you'll never learn why from Bill O'Reilly. A little historical tidbit called the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT forced concessions from the racist power structure of the capitalist class. They were not granted by a beneficent government. They were won in struggle through marches, boycotts, sit-downs, freedom rides, civil disobedience, and urban rebellions. Civil rights demonstrators were met with Bull O'Connor's dogs, firehoses, clubs, bullets, prison bars, and lynchings.

All this is missing from Professor O'Reilly's bizarre history class. In this simpleton's twisted mind, people just stopped being jerks, as if by magic. Now there are only a few jerks left, you see, and rest assured they will be castigated by this self-appointed guardian of the public morality, especially after getting his ass in the stirs with that hubcap remark.

O'Reilly's a racist because he is a shameless apologist for capitalism--the very wellspring of racism. Since the American capitalistic system is fair and works, according to O'Reilly, and institutionalized racism is a figment in the mind of Black folk, then it follows that any problems Blacks are having now are their fault.

And O'Reilly is shameless in spewing forth this racist garbage on a nightly basis. Blacks are amoral and promiscuous; the adults can't maintain two parent homes; the kids are out of control in the public schools; Blacks aren't condemning rap music enough; they're looking for slavery reparation handouts. There's no racism, no racial profiling, no brutality and murderous violence at the hands of racist, trigger happy cops meting out capitalist justice on behalf of the exploiting rich. The problem lies with African Americans.

O'Reilly is only the latest in a lone line of racist crackers who, as Malcolm X said, try to turn the victims into the criminals. He's employing the same sordid technique against Iraqis these days. It's their fault their country is in ruins, O'Reilly lectures. It's their fault chaos reigns in Iraq. They should be helping America liberate them, O'Reilly hisses, instead of being ungrateful for all the trouble Washington has gone to free them from the tyranny it imposed on them.
Even as O'Reilly tries not to be a racist, he undermines the effort by pumping it with a reactionary, pro-war content, in the process revealing the true reason he is upset with those white Georgian students: they are undermining the war against terrorism. There's no time to be divisive now, according to O'Reilly. It's bad public relations. We're all Americans. We're one big happy family. No time for segregation any more, crackers.

O'Reilly, the  master of spin in the No-Spin Zone, is actually spinning the whites-only prom to fit into his pro-war, jingoistic agenda.

The second issue obsessing O'Reilly is the disturbing hazing incident involving high school girls from Glenview, Illinois. This case, unlike the Georgia prom, has attracted international publicity from the lurid video that shows Glenbrook North seniors inflicting cruel and violent punishment on their junior year classmates.

O'Reilly feigns shock at the repulsive spectacle of high school girls humiliating their classmates by beating them up and pouring feces and urine on them. For O'Reilly, this is just another opportunity for the country's self-appointed schoolmaster to punish wayward youth who are embarrassing America. More stupid jerks undermining the war effort. He just can't fathom where this behavior came from.

Where indeed? The clueless O'Reilly is neither intellectually nor politically equipped to make the connection that is screaming to be made. The US government, with Bill O'Reilly's unqualified support, is humiliating the people of Iraq on a daily basis. Two weeks ago US soldiers forced Iraqi men suspected of looting to strip naked and run through the streets.

Racists, sadists, and gangsters are running this country. As O'Reilly himself complains, standards are declining and bad behavior is being rewarded. George Bush and Bill O'Reilly are the poster boys for this disturbing trend. Both men are cowards who derive pleasure from humiliating the defenseless with mean-spirited cruelty. The Glenview tragedy is nothing but a reflection of George Bush and Bill O'Reilly's America.

It is not ours.

Not the kind of democracy and liberation O'Reilly approves of: Karbala, Iraq, Shiite anti-US, anti-Israel protest, April 23, 2003

April 22-25, 2003--Poor Bill O'Reilly. He's upset that so many Shiites in Iraq have been demonstrating in the streets of Baghdad, Karbala, and other Iraqi cities against the US occupation of their country. The nerve of those fanatics! We liberated them, didn't we? How ungrateful can those Islamic zealots be, O'Reilly whines pathetically.

It is beyond the comprehension of O'Reilly's small mind that the fact the Shiites are glad Hussein's overthrown does not mean they support a foreign army on their soil. It does not mean they want a US-backed puppet like Chalaba, convicted for fraud in Jordan, ruling them. Nor does it mean the Shiites, or the rest of the Iraqis, want another dictator installed by the US like Hussein, whom Washington saddled on them four decades ago. And the fact that the US recently bombed pro-Iranian Shiites in Iraq may not be appreciated by this community.

But to O'Reilly and his right wing military guests, the sight of Shiites marching to Karbala under anti-US signs, and the image of Shiites in the face of US soldiers telling them to get out, is horrifying. It completely undercuts the 15 minutes of political capital (apologies to Andy Warhol) Washington was able to extract from the statue toppling and scenes of friendly Iraqis welcoming their "liberators."

This forced O'Reilly to come right out and say that this is an occupation of a sovereign nation. It forced him to admit that this "liberation" is, well, a qualified one. We'll liberate you on our terms, O'Reilly lectured the Iraqi people, Shiites and others. And term number one is: you can't have the kind of government you want. We didn't invade and liberate your country so you could establish an Islamic state.

There you go again, O'Reilly, speaking on behalf of US imperialism. Contrary to the lie tacked-on by Bush as the war began that it was to liberate Iraq's people, the last thing Washington wants is the Iraqis deciding what kind of government they'll have. A Shiite Islamic state hostile to Zionist Israel's brutal war against Palestinians is out, as far as Bush is concerned.

This is a colonial occupation, just as O'Reilly openly said it was. This is the moral fabric of the social, economic and political order O'Reilly cheers on. On April 23rd O'Reilly continued his racist tirade against the Iraqi people, denouncing the Shiite demonstrators as deranged fanatics for their self-flagellation rituals. Throughout his anti-Muslim diatribe his producers graphically splashed the resulting bloody scenes to back up O'Reilly's intimation that they're all a bunch of backward savages who need to be "civilized" by Western Judeo-Christian values.

O'Reilly, relishing his role as US imperialism's watchdog, advised Bush to keep an eye on these Shiite masses, because "you have to have the stick." O'Reilly consummately expresses the imperialists' arrogant paternalism toward the childish colonial masses, in the manner of a human scolding a dog.

O'Reilly's extreme nationalism and coarse jingoism illuminate his utter contempt for the Iraqi people. He is forced to concede before the world that far from being a freedom loving democrat, he is a brutish thug. O'Reilly is simultaneously a self appointed cop and guardian of public morality. He decides what is best for the Iraqis. They have to accept his judgment, meaning his masters in Washington. Similarly on the domestic front, O'Reilly decides what is acceptable, responsible contempt. This individual accumulates more power by the day, which makes him more dangerous and threatening to our democratic rights.

On Tuesday, O'Reilly lamented a column by Salon editor Gary Kamiya entitled "Liberation Day," which confessed a secret feeling that the war go wrong for the US, and that it would be politically better to the extent the Iraqis fought back and Arab nationalism was stoked.

O'Reilly was seething but he adopted an "I told you so" posture: "I told you weeks ago that some Americans were rooting against their own country, that their ideology was so ingrained it was better for them if things went badly in Iraq, even though that would have caused more American casualties."

O'Reilly then put his slick hat on after remembering what his lawyers advised him and pontificated that this kind of fanaticism occurs in far right circles as well. And besides, it disqualifies people from being taken seriously.

O'Reilly claimed that if you elevate your ideology above "the well being of your countrymen, you deserve no place in the public arena." You'll never get elected, you've lost all credibility.

Here's the kicker: "As Americans, we should all be in this together, and differences of opinion for are good. But fanaticism really has no place in a free society, and hoping for stronger Iraqi resistance is certainly fanaticism."
Oh Really, O'Reilly?

To the contrary, fanaticism does have a place in a free society; otherwise the society is not free! Even conservative icon Barry Goldwater, whom O'Reilly no doubt admires, proclaimed, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." And Abraham Lincoln, far closer to the revolutionary democratic ideals of the American Revolution than Goldwater, said that the people have a revolutionary right to change an unjust, oppressive government.

Society is certainly not free if overpaid windbags like Bill O'Reilly get to decide what has a place in a free society, that's for sure. But let's return to Kamiya, whose Salon article got under O'Reilly's skin, despite his claim to take it in stride.

Kamiya's impulse to root against Washington when it goes to war is on the right track. As Kamiya himself noted, a number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people shared identical feelings. On one level, many people of conscience in the world sense that a victory for Washington is not necessarily a victory for the people, that Washington is a marauding bully, that too easy a victory will only feed the rulers' blood lust, that it would be good if someone, anyone, stands up to the advancing imperialist war machine.

However, Kamiya's liberal politics prevents him from thinking the issue through and articulating a cogent, internally consistent analysis. He ends up repudiating such feelings, conceding he's in a moral and political dilemma over Iraq. Kamiya remains very much within the bourgeois political framework. He ends up writing a muddleheaded piece that has no answers because Kamiya isn't clear about his "we's" and "thems". He says to Iraqis: "We smashed your country and we killed your people and we freed you from a monster: We are bound together now by blood."

American and Iraqi workers are bound by class ties, but that's not what Kamiya is talking about here. It's not 'we' [American workers] who smashed Iraq and killed its people. "They" invaded Iraq--the US capitalist class and its government.

As usual, O'Reilly engaged in journalistic deception, taking one of Kamiya's sentences out of context and neglecting to mention Kamiya disavowed those impulses. That makes it easier for O'Reilly to use Kamiya as his straw man. Kamiya's so soft O'Reilly finds room to praise him for his honesty.

O'Reilly would be more honest if he took on Columbia University professor Eugene DeGenova, who at a Columbia antiwar event wished that Iraq would turn into a million Mogadishus. Now this is the kind of ideologue O'Reilly should be going after. Gary Kamiya is just a confused liberal.

O'Reilly chided Kamiya for not explaining his views on The Factor, but given O'Reilly's treatment of past guests like Jeremy Glick who truly represent a different point of view, Kamiya can't be blamed for his decision. To its credit, Salon backs Kamiya's refusal to appear on The Factor, and instead has challenged O'Reilly to debate Kamiya via email, where O'Reilly can't cut the mike from someone he disagrees with.
Kamiya the straw man is not politically equipped to explain revolutionary defeatism, and, since O'Reilly didn't snare DeGenova for an explanation of his "million Mogadishus" comment, COSMOS LEFT will explain to Bill O'Reilly what he thought Kamiya was trying to say.

DeGenova was paraphrasing Che Guevera's "one, two, many Vietnams" while attempting to articulate the classic Leninist position of "revolutionary defeatism." Following Lenin and the Bolsheviks' strategy during World War I, communists in every capitalist nation call for the political and military defeat of those capitalist governments. When a capitalist regime is defeated in war, the capitalist class is weakened, and the workers who are exploited by those capitalists are in a stronger position to make a socialist revolution.