Cosmos Left

Bill O'Reilly: Misinformer of the Year

December 9, 2004--Forget Karl Rove. The individual most responsible for the reelection of George W. Bush was Bill O'Reilly. While professing a fair and balanced approach that favored neither man, O'Reilly depicted Kerry as a UN-loving internationalist, mocked him in three "Almost Kerry" interviews for not showing up on The Factor, falsely claimed Kerry supported universal health care, asked if it was a "sin for Catholics to vote for Kerry," allowed the rightist Swift Boat Veterans to use The Factor to launch their scurrilous attacks on Kerry's Vietnam record, and argued that the Kerry/Edwards ticket wasn't macho enough to scare Osama bin Laden.

December 10-15, 2004--Don't believe for a minute the drivel being peddled by many liberals that Bush's victory signals a lasting political triumph for the right wing religious fanatics and Christian fundamentalists who fueled his reelection. The truth is just the opposite. They are  LOSING the culture war. Since the election, Bill O'Reilly has only stepped up his virulent crusade against secularism and progressivism, ranting nightly against godless forces like the ACLU that are hell bent on eliminating every vestige of Christianity and spirituality from public life.

O'Reilly's almost foaming at the mouth over the growing trend to secularize Christmas, which doesn't fit in with his agenda of falsifying American history and transforming the US into a theocratic state. On his December 3 radio show, a caller objected to "Christmas going into schools" and said he "grew up with a resentment because I felt that people were trying to convert me to  Christianity."

O'Reilly replied that the US is "a predominantly Christian nation" and that if the caller was "really offended, you gotta go to Israel," a blatantly anti-Semitic remark cut from the same cloth as some racist telling Blacks to go back to Africa.

Note the ignorance of and contempt for Jews displayed by O'Reilly in the Dec. 3 Radio Factor exchange:

Caller: "The thing is, is when you have...Christmas carols or gift exchanges being done in school, that kind of sets the kids up to being converted."

O'Reilly: "Yeah, but you give gifts on Hanukkah, don't you?"

Caller: "No, there's not really a Jewish tradition of giving gifts on -- "

O'Reilly: Well, the seven candles [sic], you get a gift every night, don't you?"

Caller: "Actually, the Jews give gifts on --"

O'Reilly: "All right. Well, what I'm telling you is I think you're takin' it too seriously. You have a predominantly Christian nation. You have a federal holiday based on the philosopher Jesus. And you don't wanna hear about it? Come on, -- if you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel then, I mean, because we live in a country founded on Judeo --and that's your guys' --Christian, that's my guys' philosophy. But overwhelmingly, America is Christian. And the holiday is a federal holiday honoring the philosopher Jesus. So, you don't wanna hear about it? Impossible."

Note how O'Reilly's tripping over his own contradictions. This time, O'Reilly realized that the "Judeo-Christian" mantra he's so used to mouthing refuted his false thesis that the US is a Christian nation. Hence the clumsy formulation that Judeo is "your guys' philosophy," while Christian is "my guys' philosophy!"

This outrageous statement prompted Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, to fire off a protest to O'Reilly that said in part: "...your remark plays into one of the oldest anti-Semitic canards about Jews, that they are not full citizens of a country and are not entitled to all of the rights afforded to the majority. The notion that religious minorities have no place in a Christian America and should leave may be acceptable for extremists, but it is unacceptable coming from a popular and respected media commentator."

But Mr. Foxman, this "popular and respected media commentator" IS an extremist. In fact, he's a fascist demagogue and one of the biggest threats to democratic rights in this country.

O'Reilly's typically intelligent reply was to label Foxman a "nut." But back in February and March, when the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was raging, O'Reilly was quick to cite this "nut" against critics of the movie who felt it was anti-Semitic. On his Feb. 26 program, O'Reilly had this to say: "So what you have is a controversy about anti-Semitism, which now Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL says the movie isn't anti-Semitic. And when he says it, you got -- I think you got to believe it, as opposed to sacrilege on the -- with 90 percent of Americans are Christians."

Actually, Foxman told ABC's World News Tonight on Feb. 16 that " I do not believe it's an anti-Semitic movie. I believe that this movie has the potential to fuel anti-Semitism, to reinforce it."

Dec. 15, 2004:

Things are really getting nasty between O'Reilly and Mediamatters.org, which continues to perform an outstanding public service by exposing O'Reilly's lies and contempt for facts and accuracy. When confronted with such a formidable adversary, O'Reilly can only resort to name calling. Incapable of responding to Mediamatters on the facts, O'Reilly delivered a typically awe-inspiring scholarly response that his Mediamatters opponents are "character assassins" and  "despicable weasels."

Mediamatters reminded us today that on his Dec. 14 Radio Factor program, O'Reilly attempted to deny his remarks were anti-Semitic by claiming, "And I've raised millions of dollars for Israel. You ought to check that."

Well, Mediamatters did just that, and discovered that the Jewish American newspaper The Forward reported back on April 2 that O'Reilly "exaggerated his role in a fundraiser for Israel....O'Reilly and his publicist told Business Week media editor Tom Lowry that the benefit he 'chaired' in Los Angeles had raised 40 million for Israel, a few inquiries into the event in question raises questions about the account given by O'Reilly....

"It turns out that O'Reilly was the paid keynote speaker, not the volunteer chair, of a February dinner that raised 3 million for the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. According to the federation's spokeswoman, Deborah Dragon, the event was part of the organization's annual campaign, which raises over 40 million, with some of the money going to help Israel. But the larger share is spent on local causes."

So much for O'Reilly's respect for the facts. But the larger point demonstrated by this episode is that the most virulent pro-Israeli Zionist and anti-Palestinian racist CAN STILL BE A REVOLTING ANTI-SEMITE. Bill O'Reilly is living proof that Zionism and Judaism are not one and the same.

For once he's absolutely correct. Who says we're not fair and balanced here? It IS easy to demonize those who joyfully kill. That's precisely why most of the world demonizes George W. Bush. That's why he will go down as one of the most loathed presidents in history. Here are just two manifestations of Bush sadistic glee over murdering human beings:

1) In 1999, Tucker Carlson asked then Governor Bush for his reaction to Texas Death Row Inmate Karla Faye Tucker's interview with Larry King. Bush proceeded to mock the condemned woman, pursing his lips together while whimpering, "Please don't kill me."

2) On the first night of the Iraq war, as the bombs were falling on Baghdad, Bush pumped his arms and shrieked, "Feels good!"

Bush is O'Reilly's kind of guy. O'Reilly has repeatedly called for the slaughter of Afghani and Iraqi civilians and celebrated the destruction of Falluja. Must be their shared Christian values. Actually, true Christians are appalled by the atrocities and savagery being inflicted on the Iraqi people by US and British imperialism. Those who claim to be Christians while supporting this madness have lost their souls.

Both of these cretins have a date with an international war crimes tribunal.--December 21, 2004.

Oct. 30-Nov. 3, 2004--The more George Bush suffers political blows from Washington's disastrous occupation of Iraq, the harder Bill O'Reilly spins to blunt the damage. For every lie that's exposed--the latest involving the 380 tons of missing explosives looted from the Al Qaqaa facility--O'Reilly leads the pro-Bush media stooges in covering up the lie by telling new ones.

O'Reilly lost no time parroting the White House line--the HMX, RDX and PETN explosives were removed before the invasion by Hussein, and this is another conspiracy by the NY Times, CBS, and the UN to embarrass and defeat Bush. O'Reilly even stated boldly that there was no story. It was all partisan politics by the liberals in the elite media and the United Nations.

As usual, O'Reilly denied his audience a multitude of facts that didn't make it on The Factor because they conflict with the host's reactionary, pro-war, pro-Bush agenda.

O'Reilly failed to tell his audience the following facts:

1) It was the puppet Allawi government in Baghdad that alerted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the missing explosives--which they say were removed AFTER US forces controlled Baghdad. This news was suppressed by the UN and the US until the NY Times published it on Oct. 25.

2) The IAEA monitored the Al Qaqaa facility before Washington invaded, but was barred from returning by Bush after his forces captured Baghdad. As late as mid-March 2003--a week before the invasion--the IAEA had sealed the missing explosives at Al Qaqaa.

3) The IAEA specifically warned Washington about safeguarding the munitions at Al Qaqaa after the Tuwaitha nuclear complex had been looted following the invasion. IAEA chief ElBaraedi told the UN in February and April that he was concerned about the vulnerability of the weapons at Al Qaqaa.

4) On Oct. 28, the IAEA insisted that the 380 tons of explosives had disappeared from Al Qaqaa AFTEr the US invaded.

5) Four Iraqis have testified that Al Qaqaa was looted in the days following a sweep by US forces in early April 2003 as they advanced toward Baghdad.

6) A news crew from KSTP-TV Minnesota that was embedded with the 101st Airborne on April 18, 2003, has produced a videotape showing soldiers breaking the locks to enter Al-Qaqaa as well as rows of boxes marked "Al-Qaqaa" and "High Explosives" on April 18, 2003. The soldiers are shown breaking IAEA seals of explosives clearly identified as HMX and RDX. The tape proves the explosives were left unguarded by occupation forces. Former chief weapons inspector David Kay stated, "with this one, it is game, set, and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken." And when the IAEA returned to Al Qaqaa in May 2003, all of the explosives were gone.

7) Soldiers in the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade who reached Al Qaqaa a day after the invasion received no orders to search the gigantic munitions storage facility, and looters were already throughout the complex, according to Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the 101st.

Additional facts are emerging every day. On Saturday, Human Rights Watch said it had warned Washington about the unguarded high explosives at Al Qaqaa in May 2003, but the officials were uninterested and the site was still not secured 10 days later.

So it was O'Reilly who jumped to conclusions in order to advance his not-so-secret agenda of spinning for Bush.

The significance of Al Qaqaa is that it proves still again that WMDS had nothing to do with Washington invading Iraq, that the war was based on a Big Lie, and that Bush KNEW Hussein had no WMDS. The missing HMX and RDX munitions can be used to detonate nuclear weapons, yet they were left unguarded and looted openly. American soliders received no orders to search Al Qaqaa because the US military didn't give a rat's ass about WMDs. Their eyes were on the prize--Baghdad and Iraq's oil.

O'Reilly doesn't touch this truth because it will only illuminate his role in faciliating Bush's lie about WMD that has resulted in the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers.

But the truth means nothing to Bill O'Reilly. His job is to minimize the political damage to George Bush and brainwash enough Americans to give this war criminal cover to "finish the job."

O'Reilly and other Bush apologists frantically pushed a Pentagon story about satellite imagery showing trucks outside one of the 56 Al Qaqaa bunkers before Hussein was overthrown. No sooner was this Pentagon yarn spun it was shot down by news that an IAEA map showed the trucks were nowhere near the bunkers containing the explosives.

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O'Reilly is working just as hard to cover up the GOP's attempt to steal the election by disenfranchising African American, Latino, and student voters. Already O'Reilly is whining that the growing complaints of foul play from Nevada to Ohio to Colorado to Florida will hurt the system's legitimacy and delay the inevitable outcome he desired in 2000--George Bush's victory.

Everyone knows what's happening. African Americans, Latinos and youth are registering in record numbers, and most will vote Democratic. The Republicans, aware of this, are doubling their efforts to use intimidation and fraud to suppress these votes.

But we didn't learn this from O'Reilly's interview with White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, who was invited on to discuss the conclusion by a Republican polling firm that Kerry may win because more minority voters may go to the polls. The closest O'Reilly and Bartlett came to reality was this pathetic exchange:

O'Reilly: "But I just wanted to point out that there is some angst about..."

Unfortunately, we never got a chance to learn if O'Reilly was referring to angst among Republican pollsters who think a large minority turnout will elect Kerry or angst among African Americans and others that their votes won't be counted again. We'll never know, because Bartlett interrupted O'Reilly to dodge whatever O'Reilly was asking.

Bartlett: "Well, I'll make--I just point out, don't take it from what I'm saying. Take it from what Senator Kerry's doing. He's spending every Sunday in African-American churches. He brings Bill Clinton into inner city Philadelphia."

So what? Kerry and Clinton are trying to mobilize the Black vote. What's your point, Bartlett? Democrats have been doing that since Roosevelt. The issue is what YOUR party is doing in places like Florida, where Jeb Bush's Dept. of Law Enforcement has been visiting the homes of elderly Black voters and frightening them with hostile interrogations.

The rest of the interview was completely worthless, O'Reilly tossing up softballs to Bartlett like how much sleep do the candidates get every night, how self-sacrificing Bush is for skipping a flu shot, and Bartlett guaranteeing a Ohio victory ("Wow, you and Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath," O'Reilly gushed.)

O'Reilly even managed to close the interview with a "missing weapons" joke a la Bush himself:

O'Reilly: "All right. So you didn't find any missing weapons in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or anything or nothing there?"

We don't know if O'Reilly was referring to the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the missing 380 tons of explosives from Al Qaqaa. Either way, it wasn't funny. 100,000 Iraqis and 1100 Americans are dead as a result of the Big Lie about WMD, and all Bush and O'Reilly can do is joke about it. Personally, I believe this arrogant, juvenile conduct should be a factor that earns them the severest sentence possible at the international war crimes tribunal that awaits these bastards.

If O'Reilly were a serious journalist, he would have grilled Bartlett on exactly what the Republicans have been doing across the country to generate all this angst. He could have asked Bartlett about Greg Palast's report that a secret document from Bush's Florida headquarters suggested a scheme to stop African Americans from voting. Two emails prepared for the Bush campaign contained a 15 page "caging list" of 1,886 names and addresses of mostly Black voters in Jacksonville, Florida.

Ion Sancho, an elections supervisor in Tallahassee, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day....Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day and discourage voters from voting."

O'Reilly could have asked Bartlett about Nevada, where a Republican connected outfit is reported to be trying to strike 17,000 voters from the registration rolls. He could have asked what Bartlett knew about Nathan Sproul, an Arizona Republican consultant whose firm has received half a million dollars from the Republican National Committee to do its special version of "voter outreach." Big surprise that Sproul and Associates is now being investigated for allegedly destroying Democratic registration forms.

You didn't hear O'Reilly ask Bartlett why Republicans wer planning to station thousands of "vote challengers" at the polls to intimidate African American voters in Kentucky, Arizona, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin. The GOP's illegal tactics ran into trouble in Ohio, where two federal judges just ruled that this practice of vote challenging was unconstitutional. No doubt they were two of those activist, far left, secularist judges bent on circumventing the will of the folks to impose their godless stamp on society. That's O'Reilly's version. Our version is that they were two judges with a modicum of respect for bourgeois democracy and constitutional rights who sense that pushing the "folks" too far will provoke a fightback that the system might not be able to contain.

And there's very little chance you'll hear on The Factor that according to Palast, the Kerry ticket is down by almost a million votes before Election Day even begins, because in key states like Florida, Ohio, and New Mexico, predominantly minority voters have been stricken from the registration rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked.

Palast writes in TomPaine that "Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling--ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that 'spoil votes'--John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes."

NOV. 3, 2004:

On Election Day Eve, a divided federal appeals court overruled the two district court decisions barring the GOP from challenging thousands of newly registered voters. Let the intimidation and voter suppression continue, ruled the court. These are O'Reilly's kind of judges--strict constructionists, the kind that think people today should be strictly governed by what the propertied elite wrote down 200 years ago.

As Election Night unfolds, it looks like it's coming down to Ohio and Florida, with Bush slightly ahead in both states. Not coincidentally, these are the two states most engulfed in election fraud and corruption. At this point, I wouldn't trust anything that comes out of either of those states, since both are awash in missing absentee ballots, delayed absentee ballots that won't be counted for days, inadequate voting machines, computer malfunctions, reports of Blackbox hacking of electronic machines, long lines, some with inadequate water in the searing heat of Florida.

Harvey Wasserman and bob Fitrakis from the Free Press focused on some of the shenanigans occurring in Ohio: Republicans sending letters challenging thousands of absentee ballots of Franklin County students; four counties will count the votes with machines made by Republican-connected Diebold, whose CEO is a huge Bush contributor who guaranteed to deliver Ohio to Bush--a feat that may be easy given the lack of a paper trail of votes; twenty Republican counties gave wrong information to former felons about their eligibility; 150,000 Cincinnati voters were moved from active to inactive status because they didn't vote in the last two federal elections; Republican Sec. of State Kenneth Blackwell has barred voters from casting provisional ballots in their own counties, and has required voter registration forms to be on 80-pound weight bond paper, which is an archaic law from pre-scanning days.

You will hear none of this from O'Reilly. He gave cover for Bush's theft of the 2000 election and he will deny the existence of voter intimidation and suppression this time. O'Reilly has nothing but contempt for the will of the people, for all his phony populist posturing. In that he is aligned with the propertied "Founding Fathers," who also feared the plebian majority and did everything they could to check the impulses of the propertyless masses. Hence O'Reilly's ringing defense of the Electoral College, another restraint on the popular will erected by the propertied elite that made up the Founding Fathers.

In the campaign's waning days, official Republicans whined about the massive voter registration and get out the vote campaigns directed toward young people by such groups as MTV, Rock the Vote, Puff Daddy's Vote or Die, and others. The country's only unofficial Republican--Bill O'Reilly--chose to express his contempt for the nation's youth by opining on his Oct. 28 Radio Factor: "Yeah, I think the stoned slackers'll go for Kerry. I think he'll carry ...the stoned slacker vote....Are they gonna get out? Are they gonna leave the bong and stand in line for an hour? I don't know."

This was a reiteration of an earlier similar slander against young people that O'Reilly directed at The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, when he characterized Stewart's audience stoned slackers. O'Reilly was visibly jealous of Stewart's popularity and connection with the younger set. His only response was to slander them.

Stewart recently made a name for himself when he excoriated Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, hosts of CNN's "Crossfire" program, for contributing to the debasement of public discourse. I'd have a lot more respect for Stewart if he went after Bill O'Reilly, whose "shut up" and bullying demeanor is far more offensive than the smarmy Begala and the bow-tie preppie Carlson.

As Election Night winds down, it looks like Bill O'Reilly can sleep well tonight. [If he doesn't, there's always the phone. . .] Bush looks like he wins in a squeaker, and O ' Reilly can sleep soundly knowing he did all he could to twist, lie, and spin for the man who truly has God on his side.

Bill O'Reilly should be gloating this week. He'll remind us how he predicted Bush would win Florida. O'Reilly's boss Rupert M urdoch will be happy with his star employee for helping to reelect Bush when he humiliated the Democratic nominee for not having the balls to appear on the Factor. O'Reilly will say that Kerry's cowardice cost him the election, in contrast to the resolute Bush who was a stand-up guy for sitting down with O'Reilly and answering his "tough questions."

Which brings us back to the unfinished essay below, "Bush Talks to O'Reilly--Reflections of a Diseased Body Politic." Given the apparent reelection of Bush, that title takes on added significance. In that spirit, we will finish that essay next.

Sept. 29-Oct. 9, 2004--The interview between Bill O'Reilly and President George W. Bush was billed as a meeting of two heavyweights. FOX tried to make it a major campaign event, and given the putrefaction of this campaign, it may very well have been. But the White House and FOX may have miscalculated here. Because the bizarre chemistry between Bush and O'Reilly is revealing more than they intended--the striking banality of their lightweight minds corresponds to the advanced state of degeneration and decay of US bourgeois democracy.

BUSH TALKS TO O'REILLY, PART ONE-MONDAY, SEPT. 27, 2004

O'Reilly: "Okay, first of all, I want to thank you for talking with me." [The ass-kissing and sucking up began early.] Bush gave his aw-shucks chuckle that became an annoying fixture of the conversation.

O'Reilly: "So few people will. [That's right. Most have too much dignity to lower themselves to his level.]

Bush: "Well, there's uh, it's a big gamble on my part." [There's some of that clarity and resoluteness that gives so many American men erections and is even snowing many women to believe this pathetic, cowardly scoundrel is actually protecting their kids. As for being a big gamble, that's just bullshit. Bush is well aware that O'Reilly's his biggest and most influential propagandist and apologist in the corporate media.]

Bush: "I, I enjoy, I enjoy how you interview people, and I uh, appreciate you giving me the chance to come on and have what we say in Texas, just a visit."

Sure sounds like Bush was bracing himself for a tough-nosed, hard-edged, no-holds-barred interview, doesn't it? A visit between two ideological blood brothers is more accurate.

O'Reilly's first question concerned the disaster in Iraq. He asked Bush for his reaction to a poll that showed only five percent of Iraqis view the US as liberators. "Are you surprised they don't appreciate the American sacrifice more?"

[Appreciate the American sacrifice? Bush's troops have killed 37,000 Iraqi civilians, littered the country with depleted uranium, tortured and murdered Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and throughout the country, and severely damaged much of Iraq's infrastructure. By what twisted standard should Iraqis APPRECIATE that? Both men reveal their lack of humanity, obliviousness and cruelty in this exchange.]

Then Bush sent into his Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of reality mode.

"I, I think they're beginning to, appreciate the sacrifice, because the country is getting better. [Yes, the beheadings and bombings are clear evidence of that.] It's tougher than heck right now, because Zarqawi and so many of these former Baathists are killing innocent Iraqis and killing our soldiers in order to try to get us to leave."[Yeah, it's been tough on the Iraqis, too, having Apache gungships and fighter jets dropping 2,000 pound bombs on their villages. Zarqawi has been Bush and O'Reilly's Islamic Flying Dutchman, the mastermind behind all the attacks on US forces. If Bush could only get Zarqawi, things would stabilize and freedom could be imposed on Iraq through the barrel of a gun. Just like the deaths of Hussein's sons would end the insurgency. Just like the capture of Hussein would end the insurgency. No, it's more than one man, Bush and your lapdog sitting across from you. It's the Iraqi people who have to be defeated. And you will fail in that objective. Future generations of a socialist humanity cleansed of filth like bush and O'Reilly will celebrate the heroic Iraqi resistance and curse the names of the American commander in chief and his chief propagandist in crime.

As for former Baathists terrorizing the Iraqi people, that would be Bush and O'Reilly's boy Allawi, who was a thug for Hussein before switching sides and blowing up cars in Baghdad for his long-time CIA masters during the early 90s. No word from O'Reilly on this little historical tidbit. Nor did O'Reilly challenge Bush on his statement that people are seeing progress in areas like electricity, schools and hospitals, which might have been in order since Bush just took $3.5 billion earmarked for just those social services and diverted it to security operations to crush the insurgency that is supported by the vast majority of Iraqis because they despise Allawi as much as they did Hussein.

SEPT. 30, 2004:

"Um, I also saw a poll where it said by far the vast majority of the Iraqis believe the world is getting better. And that's positive. In other words, people are beginning to see progress. Electricity is better, schools are opening, hospitals are running. Um, I think when it's all said and done, the Iraqis are going to look back and say thank God for America."

Bush is either totally delusional or as cold-blooded a liar as he is a killer. Iraq's electricity grids had not recovered from the devastation Bush's father inflicted on Iraq in 1991. And Bush just took billions allocated for electricity to spend on "security," that is, killing enough Iraqis to terrorize them into submission. Schools are opening for American soldiers to use as a base to kill the Iraqi fighters. Hospitals are running on empty because US forces are filling them with Iraqi casualties.

It's all been said and done already, Bush and O'Reilly. Iraqis have seen enough of Bush's "liberation" and are screaming at the top of their lungs for God to strike America to avenge the murders of their loved ones.

O'Reilly: "How long is it going to take before that happens, do you think?" This is O'Reilly's attempt at a tough question. What he's really telling Bush is that it's getting harder and harder to scam the folks that things will get better in Iraq when kidnappings and bombings and beheadings and chaos and barbarism are engulfing the country.

Bush then expressed optimism that the January elections will have a positive effect, because the "people want to vote." Bush has as much respect for the popular will in Iraq as he did for it in the state of Florida. The people wanted their votes counted to be counted, but all they got from Bush was, "Sorry, game over, I win." And Bill O'Reilly was right there spinning and covering up Bush's theft of the 2000 election.

O'Reilly continued to press Bush on the feasibility of elections in the midst of the ongoing chaos.

O'Reilly: "But can they vote when people are being blown up?"

Bush: "Yeah."

O'Reilly: "And these guys are threatening them, then they vote..."

Bush: "That's when you're supposed to vote."

There you have it. Two real giants educating us on the great questions of war, peace, and democracy.

It is humanity's misfortune that the two most ignorant and repulsive men in the world are also the two most powerful and bloodthirsty. If we lived in a sane world, both these bums would have gotten the hook right then and there. Bush for uttering this drivel, and O'Reilly for letting him get away with it.There you have it. Two real giants educating us on the great questions of war, peace, and democracy.

Bush: "You've got to stand tough with these terrorists. You cannot allow the terrorists to dictate whether or not a society can be free or not."

You invaded their world, Bush. Iraqi resistance is legitimate under international law and more importantly, the laws of the class struggle. One can easily turn your second sentence around and apply it to the US and its state terrorism against the people of Iraq.

If O'Reilly truly wanted to ask a tough question, he would have asked Bush to reconcile his rosy assessment that progress is being made with the far more pessimistic assessments by his own military and intelligence officers, including the following:

[CIA personnel]"are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper. There's no obvious way to fix it."

"Things are definitely not improving."

"It's getting worse. It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."

Bush initially had this to say about the CIA's pessimistic assessments: "The CIA laid out several scenarios. It said that life could by lousy. Life could be okay. Life could be better. And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."

When those ignorant remarks caused some dissension in an already pissed-off CIA, Bush quickly retracted that formulation: "I used an unfortunate word, 'guess.' I should have used 'estimate.'"

Kerry's not the only flip-flopper in this fraudulent campaign.

Next O'Reilly allowed Bush's erroneously upbeat picture of the disaster in Afghanistan to go unchallenged.

The best O'Reilly could come up with was, "The South Vietnamese didn't fight for their freedom, which is why they don't have it today."

To which Bush replied thoughtfully, "Yeah."

Try to keep up with the deep, profound thinking going on here between these two giants; the depth and mastery of the complex issues involved in the Vietnam war.

What O'Reilly really means here is that the bankrupt and weak South Vietnamese government of landlords and capitalists had no social base to do the fighting. Saigon was a puppet regime installed by the US to prevent a communist-led unification of the country. Most of the peasants in the South supported the Viet Cong and Hanoi because the communists had given them land. So there were South Vietnamese fighting for their freedom, O'Reilly, it just doesn't conform to your bourgeois conception of freedom. The South Vietnamese masses were fighting for their freedom--alongside the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in their struggle to kick out the foreign aggressors and free themselves from imperialist domination.

O'Reilly: "Do you think the Iraqis are going to fight for their freedom?"

Bush: "Absolutely."

OCT 1, 2004:

Earth to Bush and O'Reilly: THEY ALREADY ARE. And it's not just Saddam loyalists and Baathists, and foreign jihadists. It's the Iraqi people. It's young men who have seen their families blown to bits in front of their eyes by US bombs. They're fighting to kick American and British occupiers out of their country. And they don't need any "training" from the imperialist occupiers to achieve their objective. Iraqi puppets who sign up for the puppet army need training from their colonialist masters. The true Iraqis, the true Iraqi patriots and nationalists, have killed over 1,000 US troops while defending their sovereign nation against an illegal invasion by foreign armies--without any training.

Bush: No question in my mind, they will, you bet. I was with Prime Minister Allawi yesterday, he is a tough guy."

He's a murderous thug who credible reports say walked into a Baghdad jail a few months ago and shot six prisoners in the head point blank. Bush and O'Reilly's kind of guy. That's what they mean when they say Allawi is a "tough guy."

O'Reilly: "What happened to Saddam's chemical arsenal, do you know?"

Bush: "No, I don't. [One of Bush's shining moments in the interview. O'Reilly almost fell off his chair.] We thought we'd have stockpiles..." [Freudian slip? You do have massive biological and chemical stockpiles, don't you Bush? Or did you mean the WMD you su ccessfully tried to plant in Iraq last year? You know, a frameup? Fabricating evidence like US cops do all over the country?]

Bush: "...uh, we do know he had the capability of making weapons. And that capability could have been passed on to terrorists, and that was a risk, after 9/11, we could not afford to take."

Bush is a liar. And so is O'Reilly. One liar talking to another who helped him lie. Bush said before the war that he KNEW Hussein had stockpiles, but the truth is Bush KNEW Hussein's WMD were long gone. Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell said so before 9/11. They knew the WMD had been destroyed in the first gulf war and by Hussein after the war. They knew this was confirmed in 1995 by Hussein's son in law and defector Hussein Kamel, who headed up Iraq's WMD program, the one the US helped him set up to kill as many Iranians as possible during the 1980s war. The Bush gang knew that UN inspectors had further corroborated this information before Clinton pulled them out in 1998 for a preemptive air strike on Baghdad.

And we've just learned from leaked documents that Tony Blair was told by his aides that intelligence about Iraq's WMD was bogus and that there was no link between Hussein and 9/11. If O'Reilly were a tough journalist, he would have raised these legitimate issues. But since O'Reilly has apologized for Bush on WMD by repeating the mantra that Bush was told by Blair that Saddam had them, it's no s hock O'Reilly failed to ask Bush about this. After all, O'Reilly's professional hide is more important than seeking the truth.

For obvious reasons, neither Bush nor O'Reilly said a word about how the White House manipulated, fabricated and politicized WMD intelligence to suit their preconceived plans to invade Iraq and seize its oil reserves. To do so wo uld expose their lies in front of their world, and as ignorant and short-sighted as these bourgeois scoundrels are, they're not that stupid.

O'Reilly: "'The Wall Street Journal' says, and that's a conservative paper, [O'Reilly isn't, except he's always agreeing with it] that uh, the Defense Department and the Pentagon wasn't [sic] aggressive enough in getting al-Sadr and then crushing Falluja."

Bush: "Yeah." [Another shining moment.]

O'Reilly: "Is the Journal wrong?"

Bush: "I, I think this, I think that the, government of Iraq, Allawi, did a good job in Najaf with Sadr. In other words, they now control the shrines, and they did so in a way that he, Allawi, thought would be best for the political process. ...there's a dual track here. There's a political process going forward, and a security operation going forward. And the two must be parallel, and uh, Allawi made the decision that the best operation in Najaf uh would be to, the way he handled it, and uh, if they're saying that may last fall we should have moved on Sadr, it's a judgment call that you know history will have to look back on."

Oh, history's already looking at it, Bush. Your illegal, preemptive wars of aggression and atrocities against civilian populations have already been duly noted by history and the international consciousness of humanity today.

O'Reilly: "Falluja? Should we have crushed it when we could have?"

This one question captures the softball, sycophantic dynamic of the entire interview. Real tough question there, O'Reilly. Its premise is exactly the same as Bush's--America's right to invade a defenseless, disarmed country for its resources and strategic value, and to drown in blood any legitimate attempt to resist by the people being invaded.

Bush: "Well, there again, there was a dual track with uh, a political process going forward, a lot of people on the ground there thought that if we'd have gone into Falluja at the time, the uh, interim government would not have been established, and if the government would not have been established, we wouldn't have been able to transfer sovereignty. I happen to think the transfer of sovereignty is a key moment in this, history of a free Iraq. The reason I believe that is that the Iraq people are going to follow uh Iraqi leadership, not U.S. leadership...."

What Bush is trying to say is that the attempt to impose a puppet regime which would allow Washington to control Iraq's oil is being prevented by a growing Iraqi insurgency that has the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. The "transfer of sovereignty" proved nothing. The rebellion has grown in intensity since that "key moment in the history of a free Iraq." The Iraqi people are going to follow a geniune Iraqi leadership, not Allawi, a Baathist thug and CIA asset who has no legitimacy, credibility, or moral authority with the Iraqi people.

The discussion moved on to Bush's Top Gun moment on the USS Lincoln last May.

O'Reilly: "The mission accomplished statement in May 2003, if you had to do it all over again, would you not have done it?"

Bush: "Uh, well first of all, the statement said, 'thank you for be, serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, thank you for being on one of the largest, longest cruises [??] in our nation's history. Thank you for serving our country, and we've still got tough work [a portent of things to come in the first debate!] in Iraq. Now I'm, I'm going to go and thank our troops every chance I get."

O'Reilly: "But the press spinned it, you know how they spinned it."

Bush: "Well, they spin everything."

O'Reilly: "Me too."

How touching. But while Bush and O'Reilly are having their ideological love fest, Iraqis, Americans, and others are dying because of the lies that Bush told and O'Reilly facilitated, and once again Bush is lying about Mission Accomplished and O'Reilly is letting him get away with it.

We won't let them rewrite their own sordid history. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on board the USS with a huge banner reading "Mission Accomplished" in the background. The following month Bush told US troops in Qatar: "America has sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that MISSION HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED." [emphasis added]

Media Matters for America reports that O'Reilly also parroted the initial White House line that they didn't even put up the "Mission Accomplished" Banner. O'Reilly said on his radio show that "nobody knows who put that sign up... and the best intelligence that I have is the military put it up."

But according to an April 16 Associated Press article, "Bush said in October that the White House had nothing to do with the banner; a spokesman later clarified that the ship's crew asked for the sign and that the White House staff had it made byma private vendor." Bush advisor Karl Rove told the AP: "I wish the banner was not up there."

O'Reilly: "Would you do it again?"

Bush: "You mean have the sign up there?"

O'Reilly: "No, no, but go in there with the flight jacket."

Bush: "Absolutely."

O'Reilly [in disbelief]: "You would."

Bush: "Of course. I'm saying to the troops, on this carrier and elsewhere, thanks for serving America. Absolutely."

It's a neck-and-neck right now as to which of these numbskulls is the most clueless.

O'Reilly [still in disbelief]: "Okay."

Bush: "And by the way, those sol, those uh sailors and airmen, loved seeing the Commander in Chief....These kids had been on a very long cruise. [??] They'd been on a cruise to both, in two theaters of war now, Afghanistan and Iraq. I flew out there, and said, thanks. Thanks on behalf of a grateful nation. You bet I'd do it again."

They'd been on a cruise? A very long cruise in two theaters of war? A cruise? What an inappropriate term in this context! When I think of cruise, I think of luxury liners to the Bahamas or Nassau during which passengers are pampered and stuff themselves like pigs--not working class kids facing death in the harsh mountains of Afghanistan and the fires of hell in Iraq's sands.

Perhaps that military tough guy was using military slang to connote a tour of duty. Webster's Ninth defined cruise this way: 1) to sail about touching at a series of ports--No, no military there;

2) to be on one's way--Ditto;

3) to travel for the sake of traveling--definitely not military; 4a) to go about the streets at random but on the lookout for possible developments--No, but we're getting closer to Bush; 4b) to search for a sexual partner--now we're getting somewhere. Bush's thief brother Neil didn't even have to search for a sexual partner in Bangkok--she just showed up at his hotel door; 5) to fly an airplane or drive a car; 6) to approach and suggest sexual favors to. Bingo. Neil Bush. Perhaps one degree of sibling separation explains George W's infatuation with the word "cruise" during the interview.

On the next two issues--Iran and militarizing the Mexican border--O'Reilly showed his "independence" from Bush BY ATTACKING HIM FROM THE RIGHT.

O'Reilly: "Iran. Uh, said yesterday, hey, we're going to develop this nuclear stuff, we don't care what you think. You ready to use military force against Iran if they continue to defy the world on nuclear?"

OCT. 6, 2004:

This nuclear stuff. Defy the world on nuclear. Notice the level of political sophistication and the sheer command of the issue's complexity that O'Reilly exhibits. You'd never know it from O'Reilly's 6th grade level of discourse [and that's an insult to a lot of 6th graders], but there's a distinction between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Iran admits it's building a nuclear power plant at the port city of Bushehr, and IT HAS THE SOVEREIGN RIGHT TO DO SO. While Iran denies it has intentions of building nuclear weapons, IT HAS THE SOVEREIGN RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, including nuclear weapons.

Surrounded on all sides by US forces and bases, and faced with saber rattling and threats from Washington that preemptive strikes and nuclear attack, Iran has every right to defend its sovereignty with a nuclear arsenal. And so does North Korea. It wasn't North Korean that invaded the United States in the early 1950s to prevent America from becoming one country again and slaughtered millions of Americans in the process. It wasn't North Korea that has occupied the southern half of the US since then with nuclear submarines nearby ready to incinerate one of our cities.

And it wasn't Iran that overthrew a democratically elected American government in 1954 and then installed a brutal dictator to help Iran plunder the US for several decades.

Iran and North Korea have learned the lesson of Iraq. If you do everything Washington asks and completely disarm yourself like a fool, then the US will invade and plunder your nation. But if you stand up to the imperialists and defend yourself with bad-ass weapons of your own, that may just force the American bullies to back down.

People of Iran, Bush and his lackeys like O'Reilly are after your oil, just as they were after Iraq's oil. And they hate you for overthrowing the US puppet Shah in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a huge strategic blow to US imperialist interests in the region. Now they want it back. The working people of I ran know that Bush and Sharon are conspiring to launch an attack on Iran's nuclear reactor plants. But they will not back down. They will join the anti-imperialist front against US and Israeli aggression.

The Iranians and the North Koreans also don't need to be lectured about the evils of nuclear power by the only government in the world that has actually used atomic weapons and openly threatens to use them again--even against non-nuclear nations. When the US dismantles every nuclear warhead and weapon in its arsenal, then the rest of the world will follow. As for nuclear reactors, semi-colonial countries have the right to build them in order to overcome backwardness and enter the 21st century. When socialist revolutions in the advanced countries begin the process of transitioning to renewable energy sources and pursuing research into nuclear fusion, then we can dispense with the far more dangerous nuclear fission reactors currently in existence.

But in the context of world politics today, Marxists oppose the attempt by imperialist nations to monopolize energy resources and denying semi-colonial nations the right to seek nuclear power.

There was one humorous note at the conclusion of Part 1. At one point while they were discussing illegal immigration and militarizing the border, Bush expressed mild irritation at O'Reilly's hogging the conversation.

"It's working a little better, they're doing a pretty good job down in Arizona, which is the main border crossing, but I was trying to get my words here for a minute."

That was about as close as we could get to Bush telling O'Reilly to "SHUT UP! Can the president get in a few words here? Eh, eh."

Just as O'Reilly and Bush were conspicuously silent on the suffering being inflicted on Iraqi civilians by US forces in Falluja, Sadr City, Samarra, so they were mum about the toll of abuse and brutality being inflicted on immigrants by the Border Patrol every day.

Oh, they talked about it on the surface--O'Reilly clamored for militarization of the Mexican border while Bush argued the Border Patrol was doing fine. But they didn't mention the 275 immigrants who died trying to cross the border last year. They didn't mention the walls Washington has built along the border, the increased border guards, and the Black Hawk helicopters being used to hunt and terrorize undocument workers. Nor did O'Reilly bring up the increasing use of well armed paramilitary vigilante groups that are hunting undocumented immigrants.

Bush and O'Reilly bicker over the best way to regulate the capitalist exploitation of Mexican cheap labor in the United States. Revolutionary socialists reject that entire framework. We call for open borders and welcome our brothers and sisters from the south of the border and anywhere else. If capital can go anywhere in the world, than so can working people. And when they come here they strengthen the US working class with their infusion of combativity and class co nsciousness. Immigrant workers change the face of the US working class. They provide a glimpse of the working class that will dislodge the capitalists from power and establish a workers and farmers government that will begin the construction of the socialist order.

OCT. 7, 2004:

PART 2-TUESDAY, SEPT. 28, 2004

The second installment began with Bush and O'Reilly treating us to a lesson in economics 101. The latter asked Bush how the federal government will ever pay off the federal deficit.

Bush: "By being fiscally wise and growing our economy."
[Sloganeering. Sound bite. Mantra.]

O'Reilly: "Do you think it can be paid off in our lifetime, though?"

Bush: "The deficit, yeah. You mean, for,---have the revenues exceed the expenses in the budget? [Uh, oh.]

O'Reilly: "See, we have a big deficit here..."

Bush: "You're talking about the debt or the deficit?"

O'Reilly: "The deficit."

Bush: "Yeah."

Yeah. You know, the federal budget deficit caused by your
massive tax cuts for the rich that morphed a $281 billion surplus into a $521 billion deficit, which threatens social programs for working people, puts upward pressure on interest rates, leaves less money to pay down the national debt owed to big banks and investment companies.

You know, Bush, the US Treasury that you've looted for your Wall Street friends to pave the way for privatizing Social Security. Of course, that means you have only one way to go now--gore the hides out of the working class by balancing the budget on our backs.

Bush: "...of course I think we can balance the budget--as a matter of fact, I put out a hand, a budget that says we'll cut it in half in five years, now, that's going to mean that the Congress has got to be fiscally wise, with our money."

Remember, this man knows what he's talking about. Aside from running every company he's owned into the ground (and getting richer along the way), Bush is the guy who said, "I know it's a budget. It's got numbers in it."

OCT. 9, 2004:

Bush then assured O'Reilly that with his help Congress is becoming fiscally wise because they are developing "a budget that trunked [??] discretionary spending." The idiot meant "trumped" discretionary spending, which means this club of multimillionaires is working hard to slash social services that working people need.

Bush then repeated the bosses' mantra that tax cuts were needed to combat the recession and "grow the economy."

O'Reilly: "But I'm rich and I'm getting a tax cut from you. Tax cuts for the rich, what do you th ink when you hear that?"

Bush: "I think that--if you're going to have tax cuts, everybody who pays taxes ought to get relief. I think..."

O'Reilly: "Even the bad guys like me?" [Especially bad guys like you, O'Reilly.]

Bush: "I think that--I think 35% percent is enough for anybody to pay in federal taxes. I also know that when you're talking about tax, taxing the rich, really what you're talking about is taxing many small business owners...They pay tax at the individual income tax rate, and so when you hear the politicians saying taxing the rich, you're talking about job creators as well."

Oct. 12-26, 2004--Bush's tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited the capitalist class, the exploiting rich, the well off who live off the labor of working people, including parasites like Bill O'Reilly who are paid millions to misinform and disorient the masses. Many workers are too poor to pay federal income taxes, although are still fleeced by the myriad of payroll, sales, excise and other regressive taxes. Most workers paid a couple of hundred dollars less in federal taxes from the Bush tax cuts, but this windfall will be more than offset by higher state and local taxes, fewer social services, undermining of Social Security and Medicare, higher interest rates, and other adverse effects that comes when the rich loot the US Treasury.

Bush's tax cut legislation had a clearly defined modus operandi--use modest reductions for working and middle class families in the form of child tax credits and a tax break for two-income married couples as a cover for massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

A study by the Citizens for Tax Justice (funded in part by the AFL-CIO) found that the tax rate for 275 of the biggest US corporations fell 20 percent since 2001, this with a rise in pretax profits of 26 percent. 82 of those companies paid no federal income taxes in at least one of the first three years of Bush's administration. 28 companies paid nothing for all three years. Corporate tax receipts are at their lowest level in 20 years. Those 275 companies raked in more than $1.1 trillion during that time span, paying only $200 billion in corporate income taxes--an 18.4% tax rate--one half the 35 percent rate corporate income is supposed to be taxed and the figure Bush mentioned to O'Reilly above. And loopholes and subsidies cut taxes for these large corporations by $175 billion over the three years, half of the tax cuts going to 25 firms.

Belying the Bush/O'Reilly myth that tax cuts will "grow the economy," the study found that these 25 firms actually lowered their investments 27% during that 3-year time period. And despite booming profits, tax revenues are lower than they were in 2000, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Personal and corporate income taxes are lower even though personal income and corporate profits are much higher. Military spending rose 12.3% in 2004, which was faster than Medicare and Medicaid and three times more than other discretionary programs. Bush and his allies are looting the US Treasury to line the pockets of the rich and finance a murderous military machine whose job is protect US corporate profits, not fight terrorism or protect the American people.

The Detroit News just reported that Bush's tax cuts for the richest 1% will cost $148 billion this fiscal year--twice as much spent on job training, college Pell grants, public housing, child care, insurance for low-income kids, low-income energy subsidies, and welfare.
The title of an Oct. 13 NY Times says it all: "How a New Tax Bill Gave Business More and More", including a $43 billion tax cut on foreign profits of multinational corporations.

Most small businesspeople--let alone workers--don't have loopholes and shelters to shield their income like Bush, Cheney, and O'Reilly do. Small business owners are at the mercy of the laws of capitalism. They are not independent of or immune from cyclical or structural cycles of the capitalist mode of production. They are squeezed by high taxes and restrictive credit. In the long run, the small business owners will be better off throwing in their lot with the revolutionary industrial proletariat which will guarantee markets and cheap credit.

OCT. 13, 2004:

As for Bush's demagogic comments regarding small business taxes and sub-chapter S corporations, it depends what you mean by small business. We learned from the second debate that Bush's definition of "small business" is so broad that he would have qualified as a small business in 2001 for receiving $84 in business income for his shares in an oil and gas firm that later became a timber company. Bush's claim that Kerry's tax plan would raise taxes on 900,000 small business owners is false according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which estimates only about 471,000 small business people who earn more than 50% of their income from their small business would pay more. Many small business owners making more than $200,000 drive most of their income from other investments, not their small business.

Bush's tax cuts, and everything else about his domestic policies, are designed to enrich the capitalists and their upper middle class allies at the expense of workers and family farmers. While Bush eliminated the estate tax and cut taxes on capital gains and dividends, measures that slashed the taxes on the rich by hundreds of billions of dollars, his new tax rules target the working poor by auditing their claims for tax credits.

A socialist workers government's position on taxes would be simple: you work for a living, you don't pay taxes. The first $200,000 dollars would not be taxed. Incomes from $200,000 to $2 million would be taxed at a heavily progressive graduated rate. Incomes above $2 million would be taxed 100%. It's not utopian to believe that the vast majority of people in this country--the working class--would enthusiastically support such a plan, that would, along with the abolition of the imperialist war machine, the reallocation of the war budget for social needs, and the expropriation of the banks, insurance companies, and large capitalist enterprises would fund free education for all, universal health care, full employment, decent affordable housing, pensions, vaccines, a national power grid, a national public health infrastructure, and all the other pressing social needs that capitalism is incapable of providing.

But let's return to this riveting discussion by two multimillionaires as they chat about the moral obligations of providing health care for all the people.

O'Reilly: "Do you think the federal government has a moral obligation to pay Americans' health bills?"

Bush: "A moral obligation to pay, now, I think the federal government has an obligation to help those who cannot help themselves."

Oh, this is rich--and I don't mean O'Reilly's pal Frank. O'Reilly's mean-spirited and miserly vindictiveness gives Bush the chance to resurrect his compassionate conservative costume, just in time for Halloween.

O'Reilly: "Even if they're alcoholics or drug addicts..."

Here we see the benefit of O'Reilly's Catholic upbringing and values. Notice how he's embued with the spirit of Christ--the compassion, the mercy, the sympathy for the afflicted and our less fortunate brothers and sisters.

Bush doesn't answer the question directly, choosing to babble and regurgitate whatever sound bites he can remember from Karen Hughes and Karl Rove.

"That's why, well that's why I've put community centers, and that's why I am for -- [What am I for? Come on Karl, the microchip earpiece is on...There we go...] providing places where people can get preventative care, as well as primary care--without going to emergency rooms and hospitals. That again is a wise use of taxpayers' money."

Translation: Serious cutbacks here. No ER's, no hospitals, but vague talk about preventative care and community centers, because the bottom line is cutting taxes on the rich so they don't have to put back into society what they've plundered through the system of private profit and free enterprise--capitalism.

OCT. 14, 2004:

The conversation turned to Bush's biggest domestic "accomplishment"--Medicare reform and its prescription drug plan for seniors.

Bush: "Secondly, I believe that the federal government must help seniors. It's an obligation we took on when Lyndon Johnson was the President. And the Medicare proposal that I,--the Medicare bill I signed--is one that modernizes Medicare, gives seniors more choices. It says there'll be a prescription drug benefit for seniors....I think we also ought to help the people who are uninsured find insurance by doing practical things such as allowing small business to pool risk across jurisdictional boundaries, these are called association health plans, so they can buy insurance at the same discount big companies can."

O'Reilly: "But aren't we becoming an entitlement society here with the government helping, and I understand, I mean, you've got to be a compassionate person, whether you're a Democrat or Republican. But it, the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger, now we're in prescription drugs, we're in..."

Bush: "Well, let me stop you on the prescription drugs just for a second. Prescription drugs is a part of medicine. [No, really?] And we provide it, we said to the seniors, we'll provide you medicine. We would put, we'd put the money up to, for heart surgery, we wouldn't put the money up for the prescription drug coverage necessary to prevent the heart surgery from happening in the first place. So that's a wise use of modernizing Medicare. I think it's going to save us [capitalists] money in the long term. I know it's going to provide our seniors better coverage and care, and seniors are going to have a choice in this plan. [Really? By specifically forbidding Medicare from bargaining to negotiate discount prices from drug makers?] In other words, we've introduced market reform into Medicare for the first time, and that's why it was opposed by my opponent, and many people who believe we ought to nationalize healthcare. This is you--what you're talking about is an issue in this campaign, and that is do we increase the reach of the federal government to the lives of our citizens?"

O'Reilly: "Right."

Yes, the ideological blood brothers of the right agree completely that increasing the reach of the federal government is good when it's dragging you off to Iraq to kill and die for oil, or when it's telling women they can't have abortions, or when it's spying on us to restrict our capacity to politically organize against Washington's antilabor policies of war, repression, and austerity.

Bush's Medicare "reform" is a reactionary class warfare piece of legislation designed to boost the profits of pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, insurance companies, and for-profit hospitals at the expense of the working people and the US Treasury. Estimates project the new plan will increase Medicare payments to private health plans by 46$ billion over 10 years, and that drug companies would rake in $100 billion more than the estimate given by Congress.

When Bush speaks of "modernization," he really means paving the way for privatizing Medicare. He means further shifting the burden of paying for health care from the capitalists to the working class. His plan mandates deep cuts in reimbursements to health care providers like nursing homes and home health care agencies, which will cause many to drop Medicare patients.

Bush's drug prescription plan is limited in scope and designed to coerce seniors to switch to HMOs and other managed care options. It will force most Medicare patients to shell out thousands of dollars a year for prescription drugs. It also pays $70 billion in direct disbursements and $16 billion in new tax incentives to private sector firms already providing drug coverage.

So much for Bush's highly touted Medicare bill. It's a fraud, like everything else about him, designed to line the pockets of his capitalist friends in the insurance, HMO, and drug industries while emptying the pockets of older workers. It's such a fraud that the American Association of Retired persons, which endorsed the legislation--is in deep trouble with many of its members, who are outraged over the obstacles, limitations, and flaws in the new Medicare scheme, including Bush's drug discount card, which is being roundly criticized as a joke.

Bush: "My answer is no [to increasing the government's reach to help people]. We shouldn't. On healthcare, for example. I believe that we ought to have health savings accounts and expand them and provide incentives to small business, to provide health savings accounts for their uh employees. I believe low-income working Americans ought to be given a tax credit to apply to a health savings account, all aimed at making the decisions between uh, uh between the doctor and patient are central to the healthcare decision-making process."

The early returns are coming in on Bush's health savings accounts and they're as dismal as those for the drug discount cards. An Oct. 13 NY Times article read "Bush Health Savings Accounts Slow to Gain Acceptance" told why--they suck. Only a small fraction of employers are offering the schemes because they're perceived as too new and untested and accordingto nonpartisan healthpolicy experts, they "may simply not be financially feasible for middle income families." You know, the folks O'Reilly looks out for; the folks Bush says he'll save from John Kerry.

"People with chronic conditions will not be able to save anything," says Anne K. Gauthier, vice president of Acadmey Health, a nonprofit research group.

Uwe E. Reinhardt, an economist from Princeton University, agreed that health savings accounts were a "bum deal" for people with chronic illnesses. But "for chronically healthy people, it's another 401(k) savings account, and Wall Street is licking its chops at the prospect of managing the money."

Just as Wall Street vultures are licking their chops at another Bush scheme that promises huge profits for them--privatizing Social Security.

O'Reilly: "Here, I asked your wife this qu estion. Why is the cou ntry so divided? All the polls show divided on Iraq. Divided on the presidential race. Why? You ran on a uniter, not divider, ticket. [And like so many other fools, you actually believed him.]

Bush: "Right. Well, it was pretty divided in the 2000 elections, [Laughter] I recall."

O'Reilly: "Yeah."

Bush: "Well it's just--it's just one, a period of history, you know, and I'm doing my best to bring people together. We've been united at times during my presidency. We were united after September the 11th, we were united going into Afghanistan."

O'Reilly: "But why did it go, why did it go out, is there one thing that's polarized the nation?"

OCT. 15, 2004:

Bush: "I, well, you know, we'll see how polarized it is on Election Day, for starters. [Incoherent babbling; didn't even attempt to answer the question.] But, if I,--the Iraq war was a,--is a polarizing event, because a lot of people didn't see the wisdom of going into Iraq."

That's right. And history has already proven we were right. It was only an act of wisdom for the US ruling class, who saw a golden opportunity to seize a prized piece of oil-rich real estate with no Soviet Union around to stop them. To most of us invading Iraq made no sense, and we see no wisdom in the bloody carnage and barbarism being inflicted on Iraqis so US corporations can plunder Iraq. Our ranks have swelled as every reason Bush and O'Reilly gave for the war has been exposed as a lie-WMDs, Sept. 11 ties, and liberating the Iraqi people.

The polarization that these two Ivy League geniuses were groping to explain is the deepening CLASS polarization that is well on its way toward preparing the coming socialist revolution in the United States. And Bush and O'Reilly are a lot more aware of this class component to the polarization than they are letting on.

O'Reilly: "The big mac world picture. [??] The big picture about fighting terrorism through Iraq."

Oh yes, explain to us again the big picture about fighting terrorism in Iraq when the country was secular before the invasion, Hussein was a bitter enemy of Bin Laden, there was no collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and no connection between Iraq and Sept. 11, while AFTER the invasion terrorism has swept Iraq and every jihadist in the world wants to go to Iraq to defend their Muslim brothers against the American infidels.

Bush and O'Reilly never mention that the Bush/Cheney think tanks openly talked throughout the '90s about their plans to invade Iraq to seize its oil.

Bush: "Well I think, uh, yeah, I mean, there was, I believe that we have to take threats seriously before they fully materialize, I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein. Everybody saw a threat in Saddam Hussein. My opponent saw a threat in Saddam Hussein."

If O'Reilly was a serious, professional, hard-nosed journalist, he would not allow Bush to continue getting away with the above lies that have been definitively exposed. But, since O'Reilly helped tell those lies and disorient the US public, that's not going to happen.

OCT 16, 2004:

Bush saw no threat in Hussein because he no longer posed a threat to US or Israel hegemony on the Middle East, as Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell had stated in 2001. Hussein had been disarmed by the first gulf war and the UN arms inspectors led by Scott Ritter. After 12 years of sanctions and bombs, Iraq's sovereignty had been raped enough for the country to be left defenseless and ripe for an invasion by US and British imperialist bullies. Oh, it's true that when it was the most powerful and secular Middle East Arab nation, Iraq did pose a threat to US/Israeli domination of the region. As long as Hussein was useful to Washington and Tel Aviv by attacking the Iranian revolution, he was armed to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons to kill as many Iranians as possible. But once the capo Hussein got too big for his britches and tried to grab more than what was approved by the US don, he was dispensable. Besides, as the Project for a New American Century explicitly stated, control of Iraq was more important than the issue of Hussein's rule.

Bush is right in the sense that Kerry, like Clinton before him who signed the Iraqi Regime Change Act, viewed Hussein as a threat to US imperialist domination in the Middle East. But while Clinton enforced sanctions that killed over a million Iraqis, enforced an illegal no-fly zone over Iraqi airspace in a low-level air war for eight years, he held back from the kind of all-out invasion that Cheney and Wolfowitz urged him to conduct in 1998 because he knew that wouldn't pass the "global test" and would thus threaten long-term US interests.

It's not true, however that everyone saw a threat in Saddam Hussein in the sense that Washington meant in its public relations drive to win support for the war--that Hussein had vast stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and a reconstituted nuclear program ready to go. Bush and O'Reilly have been rewriting history by consistently ignoring the raging debates and conflicts within the military and intelligence communities concerning WMD in Iraq, particularly the CIA and State Department.

Bush and Rice told the American people definitively that the aluminum tubes Hussein had purchased could only be used in nuclear weapons programs, when they were well aware that many energy Department experts were saying the tubes were for conventional artillery rockets.

And they were.

OCT. 20, 2004:

The October 6 report by Bush's chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, confirmed that most of the biological and chemical weapons that Washington provided Hussein in the 1980s to kill Iranians were destroyed in 1991 as a result of the gulf war and the weapons inspections carried out in its aftermath. The last research facility was dismantled in 1996. Scott Ritter was right. Hussein's brother in law and boss of Iraq's WMD programs, Kamel, was right when he told the US government there were no WMD left. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and O'Reilly were wrong. And they lied. And tens of thousands died from this illegal, preemptive invasion of a sovereign, defenseless country. And that is a war crime for which all of the above individuals will be prosecuted.

O'Reilly then baited Bush to publicly attack his French imperialist rival, Jacques Chirac, for not supporting the US invasion of Iraq.

Bush: "Well, the, in the first resolution that took place ... the resolution said, disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences, and France voted aye. When it came time, after diplomacy had failed, to define serious consequences, that's where we had a divergence of opinion. I believe when international bodies speak, they ought to, -- they ought to mean what they say. And I believe when a President speaks, he ought to mean what he says."

OCT. 23, 2004:

And I believe that comment sent George Orwell spinning in his grave. When Bush speaks without a prompter or prepared speech, we don't know what he means or says, and neither does he. But let's be fair, when Bush gets on a rhetorical flourish and swears he won't retreat from Iraq, that's one time you can believe him.

Bush is lying. Diplomacy hadn't "failed" because the US hadn't tried diplomacy, rejecting all requests by Baghdad to negotiate. But arms inspections and the first gulf war had destroyed Iraq's WMD arsenla that Washington made possible in the 1980s. Duelfur's report confirmed that the inspectors destroyed all of Iraq's WMD after 1991. Hussein was telling the truth. Bush had lied. Iraq's national sovereignty had been sufficiently raped by US and British imperialism, with the complicity of the "world community", to render Iraq defenseless. Which made it an irresistible target for a bully and punk like Bush.

NOt only were there no WMD stockpiles as Bush and O'Reilly had told us, but Duelfur's report concluded that Hussein had no plans nor the means to reconstitute the weapons programs. Yes, Hussein was maneuvering to remove the harsh and lethal economic sanctions on his country. So what? What leader, even a bad one, wouldn't want to "liberate" his country from illegal and immoral sanctions that were killing hundreds of thousands of your citizens?

COSMOS LEFT reiterates that Iraq has a sovereign right to defend itself from imperialist attack by any means necessary, including WMD. North Korea, Iran, Brazil, and every other semicolonial nation oppressed by imperialism have the right to enrich uranium for nuclear power AND nuclear weapons. The government that should unilaterally dismantle its nuclear arsenal is the only government that's dropped atomic bombs on human beings--Washington.

O'Reilly baited Bush on Jacque Chirac's refusal to "help out" in Iraq. Bush reminded him that Chirac supported the US in Aghanistan and helped keep Haiti under imperialist control after Washington kidnapped Aristede and installed murderous pro-imperialist thugs in his place.

O'Reilly: "You think it was political, you think he's playing to his left-wing base in France?"

Chirac has no "left-wing base" in France. He has been a rightist Gaullist for his entire political career. This is one of the many lies and distortions O'Reilly continues to repeat in the No Spin Zone on a nightly basis. It was not in Bush's interest to correct O'Reilly on this point, assuming he was able to. So Bush simply danced around the issue: "Well, you'd better get him on your show "Factor," because I don't want to put words in his -- I'll tell you this....[Here comes the cliched mantra] If Saddam Hussein were in power today, we'd be a heck of a lot worse off. [No, YOU, Cheney, Halliburton, Bechtel, Big Oil, would be worse off. Iraqis, Americans, and the entire world would be better off.]

"This is a guy that had the capability of making weapons. [No, to win public support for the war you had long planned, you said he HAD biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons and was about to hand them over to Al Qaeda.] I believe he was trying to delay and hope that the world would turn its head once again, and remember, [Here comes another cliched mantra] there was what, seventeen different UN resolutions..."

O'Reilly: "Oh, it's ridiculous. I, mean..."

Bush: "That had been totally ignored."

O'Reilly: "On that one, I'm with you." [That's right. O'Reilly was with Bush telling lies before the war and he's still with Bush, urging him to drown Falluja in blood. That's why O'Reilly will be next to Bush in the dock at the war crimes tribunal that awaits them.]

OCT. 26, 2004:

Bush: "He would have been completely strengthened if the United States and the world had not acted."

First, Iraq was disarmed and defenseless. And Bush knew it. That's why he invaded. But he lied to the American public that Iraq was armed to the teeth and itching to hand over WMD to Al Qaeda. Second, it was the US and Britain--not the world--that "acted" by illegally invading a sovereign nation. The world loudly opposed this criminal aggression, evidenced by the massive global mobilizations that occurred on February 15, 2003.

O'Reilly: "Well what about the guys who died in the first Gulf War, when you sign a cease-fire that he disobeyed seventeen times."

Well that's a new one. No WMD, no 9/11 connection, no liberating the Iraqi people, so let's throw up a new reason for invading: revenge for those Americans killed in the first gulf war--another act of criminal aggression that was based on lies designed to camouflage the true objective of conquering Iraq to seize its oil and dominate the Middle East.

Bush: "Absolutely."

O'Reilly: "We're supposed to let those guys just be buried in the sand and not do anything? Look I'm, everybody knows I'm with you on that one."

Revenge for the guys buried in the sand, O'Reilly? All 148 of them? As opposed to the 150,000 Iraqis who died? Who did the invading? Who was the aggressor? Did Iraq bomb the US? Did Iraq bury its soldiers on American soil?

O'Reilly attempts to deliver a history lesson by shamelessly exploiting those Americans who lost their lives in the gulf war. But he leaves out the lie concocted by a US advertising firm that Iraqi soldiers were murdering babies in incubators. Or the lie that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops were massing on Saudi Arabia's border. Lies told by the same media owned by the same corporations that profited from that war.

O'Reilly will repeat the lie that Washington attacked Iraq in 1991 to dislodge Hussein's troops from Kuwait. But you've never heard O'Reilly tell his viewers how Bush suckered Hussein into invading Kuwait by instructing US ambassador to Iraq April Glispie that America had no problem with the incursion. The capo in Baghdad tried to grab too much booty. The Don in Washington set him up for the hit. The prize for US imperialism was Iraq's oil and strategic position. The capo had to go.

But the first time around in early 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union was not yet a reality. The risk was too great to take Baghdad, much as some US rulers wanted to. By 1998, it was clear to the think tanks around Cheney and Bush, and the factions of the US capitalist class they represent, that no nation or group of nations could militarily stop Washington from seizing Iraq's prized real estate. They openly pined for a "Pearl Harbor-type event" that could terrorize Americans into blindly supporting the type of global war drive needed to establish total US hegemony. On September 11, 2001, they got what they wished for.

How convenient, as the Church Lady used to say.

O'Reilly then t ook the conversation in a different direction.

"All right. In light of the CBS document fiasco, do you think you get a fair shake from the network news and the elite media like the "New York Times?"

Oh Really O'Reilly?

In light of how CBS originally planned to run a very different 60 Minutes segment, one that investigated the infamous forged documents that convinced Bush and Blair that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger, but at the last minute ran the Bush National Guard/Memogate story instead, I'd say Bush gets more than a fair shake from the network news and especially the New York Times, which O'Reilly consistently characterizes as a "far left," anti-Bush newspaper; this the paper that supported the Supreme Court's suppression of the vote and installation of Bush in 2000 and refused to challenge Bush's legitimacy; the paper that's been downplaying the significance of Bush's radical rightist agenda; the paper that fell right in step with the rest of the capitalist press in anointing Bush as another Churchill in the wake of 9/11; the paper that endorsed the invasion of Afghanistan and allowed reporter Judith Miller to spread the government's propaganda that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons.

OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

The bombthrowers keep on coming.

O'Reilly Calls Ex-NewsMax Columnist "Liberal"

So what does that make O'Reilly?

Oct. 13-14, 2004--Looks like those paragons of virtue and morality over at FOX News are having problems this week. First the Federal Communications Commissions proposed a record $1.2 million indeceny fine against the network for a racy episode of its reality program, "Married by America," which included sexy Las Vegas stripper scenes at bachelor and bachelorette parties designed to "pander to and titillate the audience."

It gets better. Today we learned that Bill O'Reilly filed suit against one of his associate producers and her lawyer in New York State Supreme Court in Nassau County, alleging they threatened to hit him with sexual harassment charges unless he paid them $60 million in "hush money."

The suit states that Benedict Morelli, the attorney for associate producer Andrea Mackris, threatened to sue FOX over offensive comments made to her by O'Reilly. Morelli showed the network a draft of his client's complaint that included lengthy quotes allegedly made by The Factor host. O'Reilly's suit charged that the length of the quotes and the "specific verbiage" suggested that Mackris had taped O'Reilly.

OCT. 14, 2004:

Things are heating up. Just hours after O'Reilly filed his suit, Mackris filed her sexual harassment lawsuit against him in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. She alleged O'Reilly harassed her with unsolicited and sexually offensive comments, several times during unsolicited phone sex conversations that included vibrators, masturbation, threesomes, and fantasies about having sex with her in the shower.

The folks from thesmokinggun.com sent COSMOS LEFT the 23-page complaint filed by Mackris in court yesterday. O'Reilly's lawyers are right. Mackris must have taped him. The allegations so specific and detailed that she must have taped him.

O'Reilly opened Wednesday's show with a Talking Points memo entitled "Turbulent Times," in which he refused to acknowledge, discuss, or deny the sexual harassment charges against him. He played the victimized celebrity card, claiming he was threatened because he was famous. O'Reilly equated the unmentioned sexual harassment allegations with death threats from psychos.

"The lawyers here at FOX News have been great in dealing with these situations, but there comes a time when enough's enough. So this morning I had to file a lawsuit against some people who are demanding $60 million or they will 'punish' me and FOX News....I really can't say anything else. I don't want to waste your time with this. The justice system has the case. We'll see what happens. But in the end, you should know this is all about hurting me and the FOX News Channel."

Perhaps. But Ms. Mackris has also filed a lawsuit, and she'll have her day in court as well. Where those tapes, if they exist, may be heard.

O'Reilly's chief lawyer Ronald M. Green released this statement: "We are denying that there is anything Bill O'Reilly has been accused of doing or saying that could rise to the level of unlawful conduct."

That sure sounds like legalistic double talk from a lawyer whose client is guilty.

O'Reilly's lawyers seem worried. Stephen Gillers, vice dean at New York University Law School, told Bill Carter of the NY Times that "suing an opposing lawyer over an effort to settle a case for money is extremely unusual," wrote  Carter. 

 "Telling someone you will seek legal redress unless they are willing to pay a certain cost is not within the extortion statutes, as long as you have a plausible basis for your legal claims," Gillers is quoted as saying. "Fox is being so aggressive it suggests to an outsider that Fox and Mr. O'Reilly are quite worried about this lawsuit."

O'Reilly's preemptive suit against Mackris suggests that his lawyers are employing a "best defense is a good offense" strategy.

Mackris alleges that O'Reilly boasted of threesomes with Swedish stewardesses involving his "amazing" physical endowment and of bringing a woman to her first orgasm as he spoke to her on the phone. The author of The O'Reilly Factor for Kids also allegedly told Mackris he was looking forward to having sex with "hot" Italian women when he visits the Vatican while his wife is pregnant.

Mackris worked for O'Reilly from April 2000 until January 2004, when she left FOX for CNN. She alleges that the sexual harassment began in May 2002. After learning that Mackris was unhappy in her new job at CNN, O'Reilly pestered her to go out to dinner with him. Mackris consented, but only if they kept it professional. Mackris claims that she told O'Reilly she would return to his show only if he behaved himself, reminding him of the other women he had allegedly harassed and warning that they "might tell someone."

O'Reilly allegedly replied:

"If any woman ever breathed a word I'll make her pay so dearly she'll wish she'd never been born. I'll rake her through the mud, bring up things in her life and make her so miserable that she'll be destropyed. And besides, she wouldn't be able to afford the lawyers I can or endure it financially as long as I can. And nobody would believe her, it'd be her word against mine and who are they going to believe? Me or some unstable woman making outrageous accusations. They'd see her as some psycho, someone  unstable. Besides, I'd never make the mistake of picking unstable crazy girls like that.

"If you cross FOX NEWS  Channel, it's not just me, it's [FOX President] Roger Ailes who will go after you. I'm the street guy out front making loud noise about the issues, but Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day BAM! The person gets what's coming to them but never sees it coming. Look at Al Franken, one day he's going to get a knock on his door and life as he's known it will change forever. {O'Reilly's coming unhinged--he's paraphrasing Bill Clinton!} That day will happen, trust me.....Ailes knows very powerful people and this goes right to the top."

Mackris asked: "Top of what?" O'Reilly replied: "Top of the country. Just look at who's on the cover of his [Franken's] book  [Bush and Cheney], they're watching him and will be for years.  [Al Franken's] finished, and he's going to be sorry he ever took FOX NEWS Channel on."

Sounds like Bill O'Reilly's in a heap of trouble. Maybe he should call in Rush Limbaugh and William Bennett to help him sort things out.

Oct. 25, 2004--A typically clueless O'Reilly fan wrote in an email that O'Reilly "has too much sense to get involved with a producer." Like his hero, this reader lets his ideology and dogma get in the way of the facts. He was directed to O'Reilly's own words from the Oct. 18th The Radio Factor, in which the host had this to say about his legal troubles with Ms. Mackris:

"Listen, I have to say this -- I had to protect my family, this is my fault. I was stupid, and I'm not a victim, but I can't allow certain things to happen. And I appreciate your support, we get thousands of letters, but I'm not -- I am stupid. I am a stupid guy, and every guy listening knows how it is. That we are very stupid at times."

The clearly rattled O'Reilly seems to be admitting that every sleazy remark Mackris alleges he said was actually said. He's obviously trying to connect with the macho men in his audience, playing the "all men are dogs/aren't we all just dogs/you understand this dog, right, dogs?"

So there must be tapes that will corroborate Mackris' allegations for O'Reilly to be conceding so much on his radio show. We don't know what went on between O'Reilly and Mackris, although the tapes, if real, gives us more than a glimpse. It's possible that the phone sex in question was consensual, at least in the beginning. That's a matter for the trials, if there ever are any, given recent reports that settlement talks are in progress--another sign O'Reilly may be guilty as sin.

Nothing in Mackris' complaint should come as a surprise. The ugliness, viciousness, sexism, and arrogance that permeates the 22 page complaint should not come as a surprise to anyone. It's been there for all to see throughout his eight years on the air. COSMOS LEFT has chronicled O'Reilly's brutal, sadistic, bullying persona for more than two years on this page. In essays such as "Bill O'Reilly: Homophobe, Smut Peddler, and Losing the Culture War," we pointed out the hypocrisy behind O'Reilly's prurient obsession with sado-masochism, homosexuality, and teen sexpots like Britney Spears as he bombarded the television screen with graphic sexual images even as he railed against promiscuity and declining sexual values.

Anyone can be embarrassed by the sexual skeletons hidden in nearly everyone's closets. But O'Reilly truly deserves whatever humiliation and loss he endures from this episode, because this is the pious hypocrite who appointed himself guardian of the public morality. He was the first one to villify Ludicris or Enimem for not living up to O'Reilly's moral standards, and we find out that O'Reilly's not the pillar of virtue he makes himself out to be. He's a lecherous, crude, sexist bully who just had to get his rocks off calling his producer.

If O'Reilly had an overwhelming impulse for phone sex, there's a multibillion dollar industry just waiting to accommodate him. But no, that's too classy and costly for this cheapskate. He had to pursue a phone sex relationship with a subordinate at work. This is exactly what O'Reilly excoriated Bill Clinton for on a nightly basis--exploiting a younger woman on the job, wielding his position of power over a vulnerable subordinate for sexual favors.

Oct. 17-22, 2004--With the evidence mounting that the 2004 presidential election is already every bit as corrupt as the 2000 debacle, including Republican-connected firms throwing out Democratic registrations, a clueless Bill O'Reilly can only stare dumbly into the camera and wonder, "More Election Irregularities Ahead?"

No, not ahead, you idiot, right now, and last week, and in 2002, and in 2000 when Bush suppressed the vote count and stole the election with the help of the Supreme Court, spineless Democrats, and a servile, kept press, including O'Reilly.

O'Reilly has a vested interest in covering up the fraudulent and corrupt character of US bourgeois democracy. His lying about the present campaign is an extension of his lies regarding the 2000 election. The very title of his segment shows he's ignored the widespread abuse and irregularities that are engulfing this campaign before the elections. As Bush was stealing the 2000 election before our eyes, O'Reilly was telling us everything was fine, nothing was wrong, no rights were violated, no votes were suppressed, no one was disenfranchised, there's no history of discrimination or disenfranchisement, no elections are perfect, Bush won, Gore should quit whining and go home. then when the media consortiums concluded that Gore would have easily won a recount that included overvotes as well as undervotes, which is what the Florida Supreme Court was about to order before the US Supreme Court intervened, O'Reilly distorted the conclusions and lied to his viewers that the study said Bush would have won anyway.

The very fact that O'Reilly was forced to devote a segment to the growing scandal involving "election irregularities" reflects the pervasive corruption that is engulfing this campaign the corporate media can no longer avoid it.

O'Reilly's spin revealed the bias he brings into this discussion--those complaining are Democratic partisans, sore losers, and whiners who just can't accept the fact that no elections are perfect and that moaning about it only undermines the legitimacy of the political system. Only it's not the moaning that's doing the undermining, it's the very workings of this bankrupt, decaying bourgeois democracy that is taking care of that.

O'Reilly: "In an 'Unresolved problem' segment, it's almost beyond annoying, but some Americans are still running around saying that President Bush stole the election in the year 2000, even though the Supreme Court, as you know, made the final call."

What we know is that the Supreme Court's "final call" helped Bush steal the election by stopping the recount in Florida, preventing the voice of the people from being heard by taking the election out of the hands of the people and giving it to Bush. What we know is that the Supreme Court is full of corrupt judges so closely connected to Bush they would have recused themselves from the case if they had an ounce of integrity.

Read Vincent Bugliosi's "The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose our President" for an excellent legal analysis of the Supreme Court's "final call."

O'Reilly: "Now some left wing Web sites, Jesse Jackson, and other staunch Democrats are setting up a scenario by which the election will be challenged if John Kerry happens to win."

O'Reilly is referring to a coalition of 60 liberal, nonpartisan and independent groups that include churches, unions, civil rights organizations and civic associations that are amassing 25,000 poll watchers to monitor voting locations.

OCT. 18, 2004:

O'Reilly brought in Dr. Nate Persily, an "election law expert" and professor at the University of Pennsylvania to make sense of the growing chaos. Persily gave at best a superficial summary of the crisis of US bourgeois democracy, scratching the surface of the corruption that has become too rampant to hide, giving O'Reilly the chance to gloss over the fraud and express his contempt for the most basic of democratic rights--the right to vote.

A sample of this illuminating discussion:

O'Reilly: "What are they suing about?" [Why don't your viewers know about it yet?]

Persily: ....A lot of it is over the law that was passed in order to solve some of the problems that happened in the 2000 election...."

O'Reilly: All right, well, explain it to us. What was passed and what are the problems?"

Persily: "The Help America Vote Act was passed to solve some of the problems from last time.... And one of the main problems with that act is it gave people the right to cast a provisional ballot. And a provisional ballot is what you cast when you show up on Election Day and the precinct person says you know, you're not on the rolls. [Which is what happened to thousands of Floridians in 2000, although O'Reilly never told his viewers this.] And so you have to write the right to cast a provisional ballot which is segregated until they vcan verify whether yo're actually registered to vote or not...."

O'Reilly: "So what's wrong with that?"

Persily: "The problem is that it gives you the right to cast a provisional ballot, but doesn't tell you if you have the right to have it counted...."

O'Reilly: "If you're legit, then it's counted, right?"

Uh, no, it's not, which was the main lesson of the 2000 election, but that objective fact has never made it into the No Spin Zone.

Persily: Well, actually, that's what the people are suing about right now. The Democrats have gone to court in about four states, maybe more now, saying that one of the problems is that the state laws are saying that if you show up at the wrong precinct, your provisional ballot won't be counted."

O'Reilly: "OK, well so what? If you're at the wrong precinct, you're at the wrong precinct?"

Notice the contempt for working people's right to vote just oozing from this great lover of "democracy." But he's just warming up.

Persily: "Well, part of the difficulty is that a lot -- let's take Florida, for example. A lot of these precincts have been blown away because of the hurricanes and a lot of people are going to be going into the wrong precinct. And they're still registered voters in the state. So what they're saying is that they should be counted."

O'Reilly: "Yes, well look, this is just insane. [Insane. Demanding that every vote should be counted is insane to the guy looking out for the folks.] No election is ever going to be perfect. And you can't be saying well, you know, there's a hurricane two months ago and I don't know where the precinct place is we can't have a vote. Come on."

Not content with showing his contempt for workers' right to vote, O'Reilly manages to insult hurricane victims and trivialize their plight. And this clown's looking out for the kids? Bill O'Reilly's the biggest THREAT to children since Janet Reno, who will be most known for the death sentence she pronounced on 84 people in Waco, Texas: "My only concern is the children. Send in the tanks!"

Neither O'Reilly nor Persily mentioned the fact that the provisional ballot issue is a nationwide problem, including Ohio, where the Republican Secretary of State told election boards to deny anyone who shows upat the wrong polling station the ability to cast a provisional ballot. Democrats sued and won, arguing that such a ruling discriminates against minority and poor voters, who move the most.

O'Reilly neglected to mention that the very need for provisional ballots arose from the 2000 debacle in Florida when thousands of voters were erroneously removed from the registration rolls.

O'Reilly: "Isn't it the responsibility of the citizen to figure out where they are, to figure out if they're registered, to go in, cast a vote so the ballot is quick. Isn't that the responsibility of the citizen, doctor? So what is all of this?"

Now he's shifting the blame to the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised. It's their fault. What's that you said, Malcolm X? How capitalists and their stooges like O'Reilly try to turn the victims into the criminals?

Persily: "Well, no, that's one small part of the whole story here. And everyone is trying to obviously create a situation where as many of their supporters end up getting into the polling place."

Well, isn't that the point of elections, Doctor? To try to get as many of your supporters to the polls? This guy's got a PhD? There is a separate issue when one party disenfranchises tens of thousands of voters who will likely vote for the other party, or when one party trashes the registration records of the other party's members.

O'Reilly: "All right. So you think this is just a big scam?"

Now O'Reilly's reduced the legitimate complaints of voter disenfranchisement to a "big scam."

Persily: Well, some of it is--that's certainly part of it, politically motivated. But it's on both sides. The Republicans have come in with their own lawsuits."

O'Reilly: "So Jackson's running around saying that millions of blacks were disenfranchised to vote last time. Do you believe that?"

Persily: "They might have been. I don't really..."

O'Reilly: "You don't know?"

Persily: "Certainly the case with respect to the felon disenfranchisement list...

O'Reilly: "So if you're a felon, you might have been..."

No, if you're not a felon but you're African American, the firm hired by Jeb Bush/Kathryn Harris before the 2000 election said you and 40,000 other African Americans in the same boat were felons and removed from the registration rolls. British investigative journalist Greg Palast reported that Gov. Bush was warned this disenfranchisement was happening but ordered it to proceed anyway.

According to Palast and others, Gov. Bush has brazenly returned to the scene of the crime to repeat the same felonious disenfranchisement of Black voters that helped elect his brother in 2000. In an upcoming Harper's article, Palast shows Bush is off to a "head start" on the balloting even before a vote is cast. Palast projects that 180,000 votes will be cast but not tallied, over half of which will be Democratic, African American precincts. In another repeat of 2000, 27,000 African American votes will be lost due to computer malfunctions (and tampering).

Palast will document that 1) Jeb Bush illegally invalidated more than 50,000 registrations, then hid the evidence from federal investigators until Palast forced its discovery; 2) Touch-screen voting machines lacking paper trails will give Bush a lead in the thousands before a single vote is cast; 3) Thousands of Gulf War veterans who were illegally struck from the voter rolls in 2000 are still fighting for restoration on the rolls.

Amazingly, an alleged technical error resulted in the removal of the names of thousands of Latinos who really were felons from the list. While Blacks usually vote Democratic were illegally added to the felon list, the mostly Cuban Hispanics were mysteriously removed from the list they were supposed to be on. For the record, COSMOS LEFT opposes all of the remaining reactionary state laws that bar felons from voting. This is just one of an endless series of obstacles placed in the way of voting by US bourgeois democracy. But one is blind not to notice the manipulation of felon lists to disenfranchise African American voters in Florida.

It would be asking too much of O'Reilly to report on such facts. As an ideological spinmeister for the White House, he's not in Palast's league as a serious investigative journalist.

O'Reilly and Persily also did not mention that Jeb Bush and Kathryn Harris's successor, Glenda Hood, fought a lawsuit by US Rep. Robert Wexler that would have demanded a paper trail for the new computer voting machines. Bush won, so Florida is one of many states in which the vote counting companies are Republican connected with proprietary rights over the machines that prevent verification of the vote by a paper trail.

Persily to his credit did try to get a word in edgewise and enlighten O'Reilly about the disenfranchisement of Black voters: "No, no, no. they were over in clusive. There were some people who were not felons who were then on rolls. but then again, you know, there are other places where..."

Time to interrupt, O'Reilly decided.

"Yes, because they did a study in Florida. And they said no black people were disenfranchised."

Who did a study? O'Reilly cites one he pulls from the air and doesn't substantiate it. Palast and others documented that over 90,000 were disenfranchised when they were wrongly tagged as felons in 2000, and he's already projecting the same fate for another 200,000 in in the upcoming election. Let's see that study O'Reilly's referring to. It'a good bet it's flawed and skewed to be a cover-up. I'll take Palast's research over O'Reilly's phantom study any day.

O'Reilly's resumed his arrogant contempt for voting rights: "I don't know. If it's a very, very close race, you expect to hear next morning chads and this and that. You expect it right?"

Persily: "All kinds of problems I mean, new theories, things that are different from the last time."

O'Reilly: "Right. Aliens kidnapped me and I couldn't -- I was disenfranchised by the aliens."

Real intelligent, O'Reilly. It gets tiresome watching him spit on American history; trivializing the long and bloody history of the racist capitalist power structure preventing Black Americans from voting, long after slavery was abolished. Poll taxes, guns, dogs, fire hoses were turned loose on Blacks. Florida has a particularly notorious history using racist terror to deny Blacks voting rights.

And there was O'Reilly joking about aliens, insulting every African American and working person in this country with his juvenile ignorance.

O'Reilly: "Now, do the Republicans do this too?"

Persily: "Sure, sure."

O'Reilly (incredulously): "They do?"

Persily: "Republicans..."

O'Reilly: "Are they just as guilty as the Democrats?"

Persily: "Well..."

O'Reilly: "All we hear about is Jackson and the boys." [Now O'Reilly is equating Jesse Jackson with a mob boss. Capone and the boys. Tony Soprano and his crew.]

OCT. 22, 2004:

"....But what have the Republicans done? I mean, we were hammering the Democrats. Are the Republicans trying to get people off the rolls? Stop people from -- what are they trying to do?"

What unprincipled, dishonest journalism. HE was hammering the Democrats for complaining about and taking legal action against what O'Reilly and Persily danced around--the GOP's blatant vote-rigging, fraud, and getting people off the rolls--Black people, an oppressed national minority whose fight for voting rights has been at the center of US politics for over a century. O'Reilly implied that the Democrats were the ones engaging in fraud, but that's not what he was hammering them on.

What he SHOULD have hammered the Democrats on was their efforts to keep Ralph Nader and socialist parties off the ballots in many states. That's the division of labor between the two capitalist parties: the Democrats bar third party and socialist alternatives from the ballot, while the Republicans disenfranchise African Americans, cheat Democrats by throwing out votes, rigging machines and absentee ballots--particularly military ballots-- miscount the votes, and suppress the vote count.

If the above-described division of labor sounds heavily tilted in the GOP's favor, it is. The Republicans are the alpha party. They get the lion's share of the ill-gotten booty reaped from the electoral corruption.

This electoral system is rotten to the core; a fitting reflection of the advanced disease state of US capitalist democracy. This country can't even hold an election and count the votes. The working class is disenfranchised even before we go to the polls. No political party represents us. We have no voice in this political system. Bill O'Reilly is defending a dying bourgeois democracy. Out of the titanic class battles ahead, American workers will forge a new and more vibrant democracy--socialist democracy.

Persily gave a meaningless, mealy-mouthed, almost incoherent reply to O'Reilly's asking what the Republicans had done.

O'Reilly attempted to sum up their riveting discussion:

"So, would this be accurate before we leave? Democrats want as many people as possible to get in there, even if they're felons or axe murderers, it doesn't matter. And Republicans are saying, you know, we would like to have some regulation. Is that accurate?"

O'Reilly interprets the Democrats' attempt to register African Americans and minorities--their long-time base--as an attempt to register the scum of the earth, including axe murderers. In other words, Black Americans are felons and axe murderers. Republicans want some regulation. Gee, axe murderers or regulation? Sounds like a fair and balanced presentation to me.

Persily: "That's one part, but that's only one-tenth of the number of lawsuits that are out there."

O'Reilly: "All right. We'd have to have a telethon to go over all of it....We know and we will predict after the election there will be this chaos."

He's a regular Nostradamus, that O'Reilly. But the ch aos has already begun and is being widely reported. Here's a sampling of recent news headlines that O'Reilly may have seen before issuing his seer-like vision of chaos: "Problems Reported with Some Florida Early Ballots" (AP); "Dirty Tricks Return to the Sunshine State" (The Guardian, UK); "US Troops Experience Difficulties Voting" (Knight Ridder Newspapers); "Campaiagn 2004: Voter Registration Workers Cry Foul" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); "Desperate Measures" (William Rivers Pitt-Truthout); "As early balloting begins: tensions build over Bush vote-suppression drive" (World Socialist Web Site); and "Journalist seeks temporary restraining orders against use of voting machines & absentee ballots" (Online Journal).

Oct. 30-Nov. 3, 2004--The more George Bush suffers political blows from Washington's disastrous occupation of Iraq, the harder Bill O'Reilly spins to blunt the damage. For every lie that's exposed--the latest involving the 380 tons of missing explosives looted from the Al Qaqaa facility--O'Reilly leads the pro-Bush media stooges in covering up the lie by telling new ones.

O'Reilly lost no time parroting the White House line--the HMX, RDX and PETN explosives were removed before the invasion by Hussein, and this is another conspiracy by the NY Times, CBS, and the UN to embarrass and defeat Bush. O'Reilly even stated boldly that there was no story. It was all partisan politics by the liberals in the elite media and the United Nations.

As usual, O'Reilly denied his audience a multitude of facts that didn't make it on The Factor because they conflict with the host's reactionary, pro-war, pro-Bush agenda.

O'Reilly failed to tell his audience the following facts:

1) It was the puppet Allawi government in Baghdad that alerted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the missing explosives--which they say were removed AFTER US forces controlled Baghdad. This news was suppressed by the UN and the US until the NY Times published it on Oct. 25.

2) The IAEA monitored the Al Qaqaa facility before Washington invaded, but was barred from returning by Bush after his forces captured Baghdad. As late as mid-March 2003--a week before the invasion--the IAEA had sealed the missing explosives at Al Qaqaa.

3) The IAEA specifically warned Washington about safeguarding the munitions at Al Qaqaa after the Tuwaitha nuclear complex had been looted following the invasion. IAEA chief ElBaraedi told the UN in February and April that he was concerned about the vulnerability of the weapons at Al Qaqaa.

4) On Oct. 28, the IAEA insisted that the 380 tons of explosives had disappeared from Al Qaqaa AFTEr the US invaded.

5) Four Iraqis have testified that Al Qaqaa was looted in the days following a sweep by US forces in early April 2003 as they advanced toward Baghdad.

6) A news crew from KSTP-TV Minnesota that was embedded with the 101st Airborne on April 18, 2003, has produced a videotape showing soldiers breaking the locks to enter Al-Qaqaa as well as rows of boxes marked "Al-Qaqaa" and "High Explosives" on April 18, 2003. The soldiers are shown breaking IAEA seals of explosives clearly identified as HMX and RDX. The tape proves the explosives were left unguarded by occupation forces. Former chief weapons inspector David Kay stated, "with this one, it is game, set, and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken." And when the IAEA returned to Al Qaqaa in May 2003, all of the explosives were gone.

7) Soldiers in the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade who reached Al Qaqaa a day after the invasion received no orders to search the gigantic munitions storage facility, and looters were already throughout the complex, according to Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the 101st.

Additional facts are emerging every day. On Saturday, Human Rights Watch said it had warned Washington about the unguarded high explosives at Al Qaqaa in May 2003, but the officials were uninterested and the site was still not secured 10 days later.

So it was O'Reilly who jumped to conclusions in order to advance his not-so-secret agenda of spinning for Bush.

The significance of Al Qaqaa is that it proves still again that WMDS had nothing to do with Washington invading Iraq, that the war was based on a Big Lie, and that Bush KNEW Hussein had no WMDS. The missing HMX and RDX munitions can be used to detonate nuclear weapons, yet they were left unguarded and looted openly. American soliders received no orders to search Al Qaqaa because the US military didn't give a rat's ass about WMDs. Their eyes were on the prize--Baghdad and Iraq's oil.

O'Reilly doesn't touch this truth because it will only illuminate his role in faciliating Bush's lie about WMD that has resulted in the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers.

But the truth means nothing to Bill O'Reilly. His job is to minimize the political damage to George Bush and brainwash enough Americans to give this war criminal cover to "finish the job."

O'Reilly and other Bush apologists frantically pushed a Pentagon story about satellite imagery showing trucks outside one of the 56 Al Qaqaa bunkers before Hussein was overthrown. No sooner was this Pentagon yarn spun it was shot down by news that an IAEA map showed the trucks were nowhere near the bunkers containing the explosives.

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

O'Reilly is working just as hard to cover up the GOP's attempt to steal the election by disenfranchising African American, Latino, and student voters. Already O'Reilly is whining that the growing complaints of foul play from Nevada to Ohio to Colorado to Florida will hurt the system's legitimacy and delay the inevitable outcome he desired in 2000--George Bush's victory.

Everyone knows what's happening. African Americans, Latinos and youth are registering in record numbers, and most will vote Democratic. The Republicans, aware of this, are doubling their efforts to use intimidation and fraud to suppress these votes.

But we didn't learn this from O'Reilly's interview with White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, who was invited on to discuss the conclusion by a Republican polling firm that Kerry may win because more minority voters may go to the polls. The closest O'Reilly and Bartlett came to reality was this pathetic exchange:

O'Reilly: "But I just wanted to point out that there is some angst about..."

Unfortunately, we never got a chance to learn if O'Reilly was referring to angst among Republican pollsters who think a large minority turnout will elect Kerry or angst among African Americans and others that their votes won't be counted again. We'll never know, because Bartlett interrupted O'Reilly to dodge whatever O'Reilly was asking.

Bartlett: "Well, I'll make--I just point out, don't take it from what I'm saying. Take it from what Senator Kerry's doing. He's spending every Sunday in African-American churches. He brings Bill Clinton into inner city Philadelphia."

So what? Kerry and Clinton are trying to mobilize the Black vote. What's your point, Bartlett? Democrats have been doing that since Roosevelt. The issue is what YOUR party is doing in places like Florida, where Jeb Bush's Dept. of Law Enforcement has been visiting the homes of elderly Black voters and frightening them with hostile interrogations.

The rest of the interview was completely worthless, O'Reilly tossing up softballs to Bartlett like how much sleep do the candidates get every night, how self-sacrificing Bush is for skipping a flu shot, and Bartlett guaranteeing a Ohio victory ("Wow, you and Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath," O'Reilly gushed.)

O'Reilly even managed to close the interview with a "missing weapons" joke a la Bush himself:

O'Reilly: "All right. So you didn't find any missing weapons in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or anything or nothing there?"

We don't know if O'Reilly was referring to the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the missing 380 tons of explosives from Al Qaqaa. Either way, it wasn't funny. 100,000 Iraqis and 1100 Americans are dead as a result of the Big Lie about WMD, and all Bush and O'Reilly can do is joke about it. Personally, I believe this arrogant, juvenile conduct should be a factor that earns them the severest sentence possible at the international war crimes tribunal that awaits these bastards.

If O'Reilly were a serious journalist, he would have grilled Bartlett on exactly what the Republicans have been doing across the country to generate all this angst. He could have asked Bartlett about Greg Palast's report that a secret document from Bush's Florida headquarters suggested a scheme to stop African Americans from voting. Two emails prepared for the Bush campaign contained a 15 page "caging list" of 1,886 names and addresses of mostly Black voters in Jacksonville, Florida.

Ion Sancho, an elections supervisor in Tallahassee, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day....Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day and discourage voters from voting."

O'Reilly could have asked Bartlett about Nevada, where a Republican connected outfit is reported to be trying to strike 17,000 voters from the registration rolls. He could have asked what Bartlett knew about Nathan Sproul, an Arizona Republican consultant whose firm has received half a million dollars from the Republican National Committee to do its special version of "voter outreach." Big surprise that Sproul and Associates is now being investigated for allegedly destroying Democratic registration forms.

You didn't hear O'Reilly ask Bartlett why Republicans wer planning to station thousands of "vote challengers" at the polls to intimidate African American voters in Kentucky, Arizona, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin. The GOP's illegal tactics ran into trouble in Ohio, where two federal judges just ruled that this practice of vote challenging was unconstitutional. No doubt they were two of those activist, far left, secularist judges bent on circumventing the will of the folks to impose their godless stamp on society. That's O'Reilly's version. Our version is that they were two judges with a modicum of respect for bourgeois democracy and constitutional rights who sense that pushing the "folks" too far will provoke a fightback that the system might not be able to contain.

And there's very little chance you'll hear on The Factor that according to Palast, the Kerry ticket is down by almost a million votes before Election Day even begins, because in key states like Florida, Ohio, and New Mexico, predominantly minority voters have been stricken from the registration rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked.

Palast writes in TomPaine that "Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling--ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that 'spoil votes'--John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes."

NOV. 3, 2004:

On Election Day Eve, a divided federal appeals court overruled the two district court decisions barring the GOP from challenging thousands of newly registered voters. Let the intimidation and voter suppression continue, ruled the court. These are O'Reilly's kind of judges--strict constructionists, the kind that think people today should be strictly governed by what the propertied elite wrote down 200 years ago.

As Election Night unfolds, it looks like it's coming down to Ohio and Florida, with Bush slightly ahead in both states. Not coincidentally, these are the two states most engulfed in election fraud and corruption. At this point, I wouldn't trust anything that comes out of either of those states, since both are awash in missing absentee ballots, delayed absentee ballots that won't be counted for days, inadequate voting machines, computer malfunctions, reports of Blackbox hacking of electronic machines, long lines, some with inadequate water in the searing heat of Florida.

Harvey Wasserman and bob Fitrakis from the Free Press focused on some of the shenanigans occurring in Ohio: Republicans sending letters challenging thousands of absentee ballots of Franklin County students; four counties will count the votes with machines made by Republican-connected Diebold, whose CEO is a huge Bush contributor who guaranteed to deliver Ohio to Bush--a feat that may be easy given the lack of a paper trail of votes; twenty Republican counties gave wrong information to former felons about their eligibility; 150,000 Cincinnati voters were moved from active to inactive status because they didn't vote in the last two federal elections; Republican Sec. of State Kenneth Blackwell has barred voters from casting provisional ballots in their own counties, and has required voter registration forms to be on 80-pound weight bond paper, which is an archaic law from pre-scanning days.

You will hear none of this from O'Reilly. He gave cover for Bush's theft of the 2000 election and he will deny the existence of voter intimidation and suppression this time. O'Reilly has nothing but contempt for the will of the people, for all his phony populist posturing. In that he is aligned with the propertied "Founding Fathers," who also feared the plebian majority and did everything they could to check the impulses of the propertyless masses. Hence O'Reilly's ringing defense of the Electoral College, another restraint on the popular will erected by the propertied elite that made up the Founding Fathers.

In the campaign's waning days, official Republicans whined about the massive voter registration and get out the vote campaigns directed toward young people by such groups as MTV, Rock the Vote, Puff Daddy's Vote or Die, and others. The country's only unofficial Republican--Bill O'Reilly--chose to express his contempt for the nation's youth by opining on his Oct. 28 Radio Factor: "Yeah, I think the stoned slackers'll go for Kerry. I think he'll carry ...the stoned slacker vote....Are they gonna get out? Are they gonna leave the bong and stand in line for an hour? I don't know."

This was a reiteration of an earlier similar slander against young people that O'Reilly directed at The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, when he characterized Stewart's audience stoned slackers. O'Reilly was visibly jealous of Stewart's popularity and connection with the younger set. His only response was to slander them.

Stewart recently made a name for himself when he excoriated Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, hosts of CNN's "Crossfire" program, for contributing to the debasement of public discourse. I'd have a lot more respect for Stewart if he went after Bill O'Reilly, whose "shut up" and bullying demeanor is far more offensive than the smarmy Begala and the bow-tie preppie Carlson.

As Election Night winds down, it looks like Bill O'Reilly can sleep well tonight. [If he doesn't, there's always the phone. . .] Bush looks like he wins in a squeaker, and O ' Reilly can sleep soundly knowing he did all he could to twist, lie, and spin for the man who truly has God on his side.

Bill O'Reilly should be gloating this week. He'll remind us how he predicted Bush would win Florida. O'Reilly's boss Rupert M urdoch will be happy with his star employee for helping to reelect Bush when he humiliated the Democratic nominee for not having the balls to appear on the Factor. O'Reilly will say that Kerry's cowardice cost him the election, in contrast to the resolute Bush who was a stand-up guy for sitting down with O'Reilly and answering his "tough questions."

Which brings us back to the unfinished essay below, "Bush Talks to O'Reilly--Reflections of a Diseased Body Politic." Given the apparent reelection of Bush, that title takes on added significance. In that spirit, we will finish that essay next.

One by one, every lie uttered by O'Reilly regarding Iraq, WMD, 9/11, Zarqawi, and Guantanamo Bay has been exposed. And still he repeats them as he thirsts for more blood. An international war crimes tribunal awaits him. This cretin has no remorse, no conscience, no decency. A just sentence would be life with hard labor. In an orange jumpsuit.--Oct. 6, 2004

C. W. Mining sues the Militant, Workers World, the United Mine Workers Journal, and others for reporting the truth about miserable conditions in the Co-Op mines.

Bill O'Reilly hurls defamation charges against anyone who passionately demolishes O'Reilly or George Bush on the facts. The Kingston family that owns C.W. Mining is doing what O'Reilly has publicly threatened to do--use a defamation lawsuit as a legal club to bludgeon the democratic rights of working people.

O'Reilly's not looking out for "the folks." He's looking out for the rich, of which he is one. He shares the Kingstons' anti-union politics and aversion to "entitlements"--meaning health insurance and pensions for workers who've toiled their whole lives enriching the bosses.

Sept. 15-27, 2004--Bill O'Reilly is well aware that even IF the CBS documents chronicling Bush's National Guard delinquency and insubordination turn out to be inauthentic, defenders of Bush's National Guard record still have to explain volumes of unimpeachable documentation and eyewitness testimony that point to the inescapable conclusion that Bush used his father's connections to get into the Guard, play hooky from Guard duty, and then get out to go to Harvard Business School with an honorable discharge that means nothing.

O'Reilly's answer? Readers will notice it dovetails with the arrogance reflected in the title of the essay below: "O'Reilly Denies Cheney threatened US, Then Shrugs, 'So What if He did?'"

SEPT. 16, 2004:

O'Reilly's dishonest modus operandi in CBS's "Memo Gate" is the same he's been using in the Swift Boat travesty--pretending he's fair and balanced while allowing his show to be used as a springboard for anti-Kerry and anti-Rather forces and spinning for Bush as fast as he can. While O'Reilly claims he's being fair to CBS and Dan Rather in not joining the chorus of "right-wing talk radio" condemning Rather, he simultaneously echoes the rest of the corporate media in reporting as fact that the documents are bogus.

"Big Bang Surrounds Authenticity of CBS Documents"
"For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. [CBS]
"Game over."
"The evidence is overwhelming."
"CBS has lost the battle, no matter what the truth of the situation. The public is a big issue crowd. They hear the explosions and the big bang surrounds the authenticity of the documents, not the old story of President Bush's Guard service."
"THE PERCEPTION IS THAT CBS WAS NOT FAIR. THE GUARD STORY DOESN'T MATTER ANY MORE."

Can you hear Karl Rove chortling? He's shown he's a master at having others do his dirty work for him. And few are as effective in snowing the people as Bill O'Reilly.

Before concretely examining how O'Reilly spins and lies for Bush on the National Guard scandal, let's review the compelling evidence that Bush gamed the system to get in and then out of the Guard without doing his time, evidence so compelling that CBS is defending the content of its 60 Minutes report despite the doubts over the Killian memos' authenticity.

The memos in dispute were somehow obtained from the personal files of Bush's Guard commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984. In one of the memos, Killian orders Bush to be suspended from flight status for failure to perform" up to U.S. Air Force and National Guard standards and for failure to take his annual physical exam "as ordered."

Killian also wrote that he was getting pressure from above to sugarcoat Bush's evaluation, and that Col. Buck Staudt, head of the Texas National Air Guard and a close confidante of the Bush family, had squeezed him to be lenient with Bush. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," Killian wrote in 1973.

These memos are not the originals but are copies allegedly taken from Killian's files and given to CBS for their 60 Minutes broadcast. CBS has not yet revealed the source, but there has been speculation that it was retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has accused Bush people of destroying part of Bush's National Guard record because they were politically humiliating. Burkett was the guy had overheard a telephone conversation in 1997 in which Bush aide Joseph Allbaugh asked Gen. Daniel James, head of the Texas National Guard, to sanitize Bush's files in preparation for Bush's reelection campaign as governor.

In a Sept. 14 piece, "Why Bush Left Texas," The Nation's Russ Baker writes: "A months-long investigation, which includes examination of hundreds of government released documents, [not in dispute], interviews with former Guard members and officials, military experts and Bush associates, points toward the conclusion that Bush's personal behavior was causing alarm among his superior officers and would ultimately lead to his fleeing the state to avoid a physical exam he might have difficulty passing. [Because of massive cocaine ingestion, no doubt. More on that soon.] His failure to complete a physical exam became the official reason for his subsequent suspension from flying status."

So far the content of Killian's disputed memos are being corroborated by the evidence available. But there's more.
Baker wrote: "Questions have been raised about these memos, but the criticism of them appears at this time speculative and inconclusive, while their substance is consistent with a growing body of documentation."

Of course, to hear O'Reilly tell it, it's all over and the evidence is in. Rather was had. The documents are a hoax. Bush wins. Let's move on. Not so fast, slick Willie.

SEPT. 18, 2004:

While O'Reilly bashes CBS for being had by a hoax that has not been proven, consider the overwhelming evidence that corroborates the substance of the CBS story and more:

The Dallas Morning News reported that Marian Carr Knox, the one-time secretary for Killian, said while she didn't remember typing the memos revealed by CBS, they accurately reflect Killian's views of Bush at the time and those type of documents would have been in his personal file. Knox told the Morning News: "The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones....I probably typed the information and somebody picked up the information some way or another."

Not a word about this in the No-Spin Zone.

Then there's Killian's superior officer, Colonel Bobby Hodges, who also stated that the memos represented Killian's feelings about Bush. Hodges had originally backed CBS, according to the NY Times, then changed his mind because "network producers never showed him the do cu ments but only read them to him over the phone." But when Hodges saw the documents, he deemed them forgeries. "I thought they were handwritten notes. But Hodges went on to say this: "He [Hodges] said he had not authenticated the documents for CBS News but had confirmed that they reflected issues he and Killian had discussed--namedly Mr. Bush's failure to appear for a physical, which military records released previously by the White House, led to a suspension from flying."

Not a word about this in the No-Spin Zone.

USA Today reported that Richard Via, a former Texas National Guard officer, said that "the documents were fakes but that their content reflected questions about Bush that were discussed at the time in the hangar at Ellington Air Force Base, where he had a desk next to Killian's.

O'Reilly's viewers missed out on this tidbit as well.

Despite the misleading reporting by O'Reilly and others that the verdict's already in that Killian's documents are frauds that were generated on a word processor, not the IBM Selectric. But it's been established that the Times New Roman and Times Roman fonts were created back in 1931 and were available on 1970s typewriters. Media Matters reports that IBM hired Stanley Morison, the designer of Times New Roman and adviser to Monotype Corporation, to adapt the font for this Selectric typewriter.

In the early '90s Microsoft hired Monotype Typography to design fonts for Windows, including Times New roman. That may explain the symmetry with Microsoft Word typefont that some say prove the documents are fakes. The NY Times reported on Sept. 11 that "documents from the period show the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969."

Nothing from The Factor on these revelations either. O'Reilly was too busy helping to create the impression that the documents have already been judged fakes. Game over. CBS loses. Bush wins. Ah, the life of O'Reilly.

O'Reilly also had nothing to say about a Sept. 10 CNN report about professor Yoshi Tsurumi, who claims that when Bush was his student at Harvard Business School in 1973, he told Tsurumi that his father pulled strings to get him into the coveted Texas Air National Guard--coveted because that was the ticket to stay out of Vietnam.

Tsurumi told CNN: "Bush admitted to me that to avoid the Vietnam draft, he had his dad--he said 'dad's friends'--skip him through the long waiting list to get into the Texas National Guard."

"So what?" O'Reilly arrogantly asked one night recently. "So what if Bush got preferential treatment? That's news?"

Well, to a lot of working class Guardsman who aren't members of blue-blooded political dynasties, the fact that the man so quick to send them to fight in an illegal and barbaric war in Iraq used his daddy's connections to get him into and out of the Guard is making their blood boil.
No blood for oil.

During an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer, author Kitty Kelley, author of "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty," used Tsurumi's statement that Bush informed him that "his father used pull to get him into the National Guard" as back-up for the "pattern of connections that the family has used."

This is interesting in light of O'Reilly's refusal to invite Kelley onto The Factor. Not that it was his decision. No, this one he left up to his viewers, which really means his most fanatical fans, because they are the ones who overwhelmingly respond to his poll questions. Here is the essence of O'Reilly's view of democracy--asking his most rabid right wing followers if the author of an anti-Bush book should be invited on The Factor. That's like asking Likud Party members if Arafat should be invited to speak at their conference.

Factor viewers responding to O'Reilly's exercise in democracy voted no to inviting Kelley on the program--no doubt the result O'Reilly desired and manipulated to obtain. While appearing to be democratic and responsive to the m asses, O'Reilly gets the added advantage of censoring Kitty Kelley's anti-Bush message, which, as we've seen from Tsurumi's reference, is relevant to the National Guard story.

It just doesn't fit O'Reilly's spin, which is to deflect all damaging criticism of Bush and reelect him.

SEPT. 20, 2004:

O'Reilly has hardly mentioned if at all the testimony of former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, who says he pressured his friend Brig. Gen James Rose, the head of the Texas Air National Guard, to find a position for George W. Bush in the Guard at the request of Houston businessman and Bush family friend Sidney Adger, who has since died. This refutes the pathetic attempt by right-wing demagogues like FOX's Sean Hannity to throw dust in people's eyes by saying that since the Bush family didn't directly ask for help, influence peddling didn't occur.

Of course the Bushes didn't intervene directly; like the Corleone Family in The Godfather movies, they had "buffers" do their dirty work.

A few more items O'Reilly either ignored or lied about, courtesy of MediaMatters.com:

1) Bush didn't fulfill the "military service obligation" that he signed. The US News and World Report, whose documents have NOT been challenged reported on Sept. 20 that: "Because Bush signed a six-year 'military service obligation', he was required to attend at least 44 inactive-duty training drills each fiscal year beginning July 1. Bush Bush's own records show that he fell short of that requirement, attending only 36 drills in the 1972-73 period, and only 12 in the 1973-74 period. The White House has said that Bush's service should be calculcated using 12-month periods beginning on his induction date in May 1968. Using that frame, however, Bush still fails the Air Force obligation standard."

2)Bush didn't comply with time limits on making up the missed drills. From the US News and World Report: "During the final two years of his obligation, Bush did not comply with Air Force regulations that impose a time limit on making up missed drills."

3) Bush didn't make up five months of missed drills. Again, according to US News, whose documents are not in question, Bush "apparently never made up five months of drills he missed in 1972, contrary to assertions by the administration. White House offficials did not respond to the analysis last week but emphasized that Bush had 'served honorably.'"

4) Bush twice signed papers pledging to fulfill requirements; both times he violated that pledge. The Boston Globe reports: "He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice." The authenticity of these documents and the Boston Globe's coverage have also not been challenged.

5) Bush failed to show up for a required physical, and was prevented from flying as a result. The Globe wrote: "While Bush was in Alabama, he was removed from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical in July 1972. On May 1, 1973, Bush's superior officers wrote that they could not complete his annual performance review because he had not been observed at the Houston base for the prior 12 months."

6) Somehow Bush escaped punishment for his truancy. The Globe wrote: "The reexamination of Bush's records by the Globe, along with interview with military specialists who have reviewed regulations from that era, show that Bush's attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974. But they did neither. In fact, Bush's unit certified in late 1973 that his service had been 'satisfactory'--just four months after Bush's commanding officer wrote that Bush had not been seen at the unit for the previous 12 months."

SEPT 21, 2004:

Fasten your seatbelts as O'Reilly spins Bush's absence from duty between May and October 1972 in Alabama. On his Sept. 9 Radio Factor program, O'Reilly had this to say on Bush's move from Texas to Alabama to work on the Senate campaign of Winton Blount:

"In May of '72 Bush stops flying and he fails to take a required physical exam in August, and is officially suspended from pilot status. In September of the same year, 1972, he gets approval to transfer to an Air National Guard unit in Alabama where he works for an unsuccessfully senatorial campaign of Republican Winton Blount.

"All right so you--he's not in any trouble here. He--he's getting his transfer and all of that, but he has--because he had to stop flying, he doesn't have pilot status, but there's no trouble."

Ah, but there was. At least there should have been. And there would have been if Bush were a working class guy, the kind O'Reilly claims he's looking out for. Because Bush left Texas without permission and was absent from duty between mid-April and late October of 1972.
No shock we've head nothing from O'Reilly about former lieutenant Colonel Bob Mintz and the Texans for Truth group, which is offering $50,000 to anyone who can prove Bush showed up for drills in the Alabama Air National Guard during this time frame.

Losing pilot status is trouble. Bush lost it because he failed to show up for his physical exam, no doubt because he was full of cocaine, which is why Kitty Kelley's book is not meaningless gossip but germane to this whole controversy.

As usual, O'Reilly's got his facts wrong. Bush was notified of his suspension on Sept. 5, not May as O'Reilly stated. O'Reilly leaves out the fact that Bush first tried to transfer to the 9921 Air Reserve Squadron, a nonflying reserve unit classified as a "stand-by reserve unit." In other words, Bush asked to be transferred to a unit for which he was ineligible. Senior Guard officials in Denver rejected Bush's request, ruling he had to stay with a "ready reserve unit," which mandates monthly attendance.

That's when Bush skipped his physical exam. Notice how the tough, hard-nosed, skeptical O'Reilly has never told his viewers that Bush never mentioned the m issed physical exam or the suspension in his 1999 book, "A Charge to Keep." Instead, Bush offered this: "I was almost finished with my commitment in the Air National Guard, and was no longer flying because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter."

Except that he still had nearly two years left when he skipped his physical. In the past Bush aides have said he missed his physical because he was waiting for his own doctor. But exams are done by military doctors, not physical physicians. Later Bush aides said he didn't take the physical because the F-102 was not flying in Alabama. But Bush's second transfer request was made in September--two months after the missed July exam.

This matter the missed physical and the resulting suspension is integrally related to the CBS Memo-gate scandal and the authenticity of Lt. Col. Killian's documents evaluating Bush. Remember that the disputed Killian document was an Aug. 1, 1972, memo in which Killian ordered Bush suspended from flight status due to failure to perform USAF/TEXAng standards and failure to meet an annual physical examination...as ordered."

Well, Bush was suspended a month later for just that reason. This explains CBS's initial defiant confidence in its report. It jived with all other evidence available, including government-released documents and reporting by the Boston Globe and U.S. News and World Report, none of which has been challenged.

Sept. 21 FLASH: Yesterday CBS admitted they had been duped and could not confirm the authenticity of the Killian documents. O'Reilly could barely restrain his glee, looking very much like the cat that swallowed the canary. There's a changing of the media guard. CBS and the elite media are out. FOX, talk radio, and the Internet are in. Bush wins. FOX wins. FOX--that "little scrappy cable network" as O'Reilly falsely described it--is actually a multibillion dollar empire with close political connections to the White House. FOX has joined the ranks of the elite media. And, like MSNBC, which is owned by military contractor GE, FOX is profiting immensely from this brutal colonialist war in Iraq.

The Memo-Gate They Should Have Investigated is How Bush Used the Forged Niger Uranium Documents to Dupe the Nation!

Sept. 24, 2004--On a recent broadcast of The O'Reilly Factor, a guest alluded to the political problems facing Vice President Dick Cheney as a result of the Halliburton scandal.O'Reilly looked directly into the camera and with the best poker face he could muster asked dumbly, "Scandal? What scandal?"

Nothing could better illustrate Bill O'Reilly's contempt for journalism and the folks he professes to look out for. Until that point, O'Reilly had succeeded in censoring from his show any mention of the myriad of criminal investigations and lawsuits plaguing the oil services corporation in which Cheney served as CEO from 1995 to 2000.

What scandal, O'Reilly? Take your pick. Let's start with France's criminal investigation of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root on bribery charges that may result in the indictment of Cheney. By any objective standards, isn't that newsworthy enough for O'Reilly's viewers? Of course it is. But professional objective standards do not govern The O'Reilly Factor. Subjective partisan standards do. Nothing could better expose Bill O'Reilly as a shill for the Republican Party, Cheney, and Bush than O'Reilly staring into the camera looking like the cat that swallowed the canary, asking, "Scandal? What scandal?"

The French investigation involves $180 million in bribes paid by oil companies to Nigerian government officials to build a natural gas plant and an offshore oil and gas facility in that country. The French newspaper Le Figaro wrote earlier this year that "the Paris court contemplates an eventual indictment of the present United States' vice president, Richard Cheney, in his capacity as former CEO of Halliburton."

What say you, O'Reilly? Nothing? The Factor host obviously doesn't think a pending bribery indictment against Cheney is important enough for his audience to consider. When confronted with mention of a scandal involving Cheney's former company, O'Reilly trivializes the matter by joking, "You mean their overcharging the government for cans of Coke?"

Actually the amount was significant higher: $27 million for overcharging meals to US forces in Kuwait and Iraq. That's separate from the $65 million Halliburton overcharged the Pentagon for fuel delivered to Baghdad during the Iraq war. Then there was the little matter of $6 million in kickbacks to two Kellogg, Brown &  Root employees for awarding a Kuwaiti company work in Iraq.

O'Reilly has also failed to tell his viewers that under Cheney's tenure Halliburton responded to earnings slumps by resorting to Enron-like accounting shenanigans, counting all cost overruns as revenue. He's never mentioned the myriad of lawsuits from shareholders, including the one filed by the right wing Judicial Watch alleging that Halliburton fraudulently boosted revenues through  accounting manipulations that delayed a decline in Halliburton's stock price until after Cheney left the company.

FOX News is not the only n ews outlet that has virtually blacked out all mention of Cheney's legal troubles, particularly the looming French indictment. Those godless, left-wing secularists over at The New York Times and the LA Times have also remained virtually silent.

Hey Prez, this is even more fun than blowing up frogs!

Sept. 23, 2004--On Sept. 13, Bill O'Reilly interviewed Seymour Hersh, the distinguished investigative journalist who broke the My Lai massacre story in 1968 and helped uncover the torture of Iraqis at  Abu Ghraib. Hersh's latest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," argues that  responsibility for Abu Ghraib goes all the way up the chain of command to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National  Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Vice President Richard Cheney and President George W. Bush.

But you'd never know that little tidbit from O'Reilly's spin-laced discussion with Hersh. O'Reilly's point of departure on this question is two-fold: direct blame away from the White House and toward General Janet Karpinski and  underlings like Private Lynnie England, while simultaneously defending the "harsh interrogation techniques" used at  Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, whitewashing  torture and sexual humiliation in the process.

Above all, O'Reilly's aim is to convince the American people that torture committed in our name is needed to protect us from another terrorist attack.

O'Reilly began by establishing that Hersh is a bleeding heart liberal who went into writing this book with the preconceived and quaint notion that prisoners of war should be treated humanely and afforded Geneva Convention protection.

O'Reilly: "...anybody who writes  a book brings a point of view to the book, you know that. You're a reporter, you bring a point of view....Do you believe that Guantanamo Bay prisoners should have Geneva Convention rights--name, rank and serial numbers, that's it?"

Hersh responded that "we" should get intelligence from Guantanamo prisoners, but it should be done with humane treatment that establishes a "rapport" with the them. "Every expert" tells him that, Hersh assured O'Reilly. This lame response derailed the interview because it opened the door for O'Reilly to change the focus of the discussion from responsibility for Abu Ghraib to tactical considerations on the best way to extract information from prisoners.

O'Reilly: "But you are aware that coercive interrogation has worked in some cases? ....And Khalid [Sheik Muhammed] is one where they used coercive, and they got the Brooklyn Bridge thing out of him. AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT THEY SAY. So you believe no coercive interrogations, no dogs, no sleep deprivation, none of that." [emphasis added]

The "Brooklyn Bridge thing?" Nice reporting job, O'Reilly. He's referring to May 2002, when Washington placed the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty on a high alert after interrogating [torturing?] a Guantanamo prisoner about an alleged Al Qaeda plot. It turns out the prisoner was referring to the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge by Godzilla in the 1998 Hollywood remake of the legendary monster flick!

So much for your successful coercive interrogation techniques, O'Reilly.

As O'Reilly himself admitted, "At least that's what they say." And anyone who still believes what this government says about terrorism, 9/11, Iraq, Social Security, or anything else is an idiot who's putting all of us in danger.

O'Reilly has hailed every alleged "success" of  the Bush administration in the war on terror as a victory that has made America safer. And every single one has been exposed as a fraud. Yaser Hamdi, the American citizen captured in Afghanistan  who has been locked up in solitary confinement for over two years as an "enemy combatant" who posed a serious threat to the US, is now being freed and returned to  Saudi Arabia where he grew up. Hamdi was a foot soldier in the Afghan civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. He knew nothing about 9/11. O'Reilly enthusiastically endorsed his unconstitutional imprisonment.

What say you now, O'Reilly?

Remember the Detroit terrorist "sleeper cell" convictions of alleged Al Qaeda members? Last month a US federal judge reversed their convictions, citing fabricated evidence and prosecutorial  misconduct. The government had nothing on the defendants, except they were Muslim men. The videotaping of Disneyland and other tourist sites turned out to be amateur footage shot by a Tunisian student on vacation.

What say you now, O'Reilly?

Remember the other smashing victory for Ashcroft that O'Reilly hailed as a blow against Al Qaeda--the prosecution of two Muslim immigrants in Albany, New York? Last month, federal prosecutors conceded in court that the evidence against them--a "terrorist training camp" in Iraq--was fabricated.

What say you now, O'Reilly?

Returning to the Hersh interview:

O'Reilly: "Now, in your book, you basically say that because Guantanamo Bay was set up in a punitive way, this carried over to Abu Graib. Do I have that correct?"

Hersh: "What I said was there were people very early on in the summer of 2002, long before we went to Iraq, who were telling people in the White House, Condoleeza Rice and others--somebody from the CIA...a really good, smart guy was troubled in the summer of 2002 that we weren't getting anything really useful. The really good stuff wasn't coming....so he goes down there...and spends some time, talks to people, comes back and writes a blistering report. One of the things ...was some 80-year-old men living in their own excrement, chained..."

O'Reilly: "This is in Guantanamo."

That's right, O'Reilly. The same place that FOX colleague Rita Cosby visited and found so humane and wonderful.

Sept. 10-16, 2004--We all heard what Vice President Cheney said in Des Moines, Iowa the other day:

"Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us."

But according to Bill O'Reilly, you didn't hear what Cheney said. Pay no attention to the man by the curtain. Just like the uprising in Iraq that isn't happening, according to The O'Reilly Factor. It's just a mirage in the No-Spin Zone.

During last night's interview with Newsday's Ellis Henican, O'Reilly echoed the spin emanating from the White House and its pig-headed apologists--Cheney didn't say if Kerry's elected we'll be attacked, he said if Kerry's elected and we're attacked, Kerry will adopt a "more Clintonesque" stance and treat the attack as a criminal act and not as an act of war.

Once again, O'Reilly is looking the American people right in the eyes and lying through his teeth. Once more from Cheney: "...because if we make the wrong choice [Kerry] then the danger is that we'll get hit again, and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." There is no ambiguity here. IF you elect, Kerry, THEN we'll get hit again.

As the World Socialist Web Site's Patrick Martin wrote today, "But what Cheney said cannot be unsaid."

Unless, of course, you're in the twilight of the No-Spin Zone. O'Reilly's only problem with Cheney is that the latter is backing away from his original formulation. O'Reilly weakly explained to Henican that Cheney didn't want the controversy that has ensued. In the vice president's own words, he wanted to "clean up" the embarrassing mess his arrogance has generated for the Bush/Cheney ticket. Listen to Cheney's "clarification":

"I did not say if Kerry is elected, we will be hit by a terrorist attack," he told the Cincinnati Enquirer. "Whoever is elected president has to anticipate more attacks.

"My point was the question before us is: Will we have the most effective policy in place to deal with that threat? George Bush will pursue a more effective policy than John Kerry."

Except Cheney DID say if Kerry was elected the US would be hit by a devastating attack. Now consider what Cheney's spokeswoman, Anne Womack, said only afters after the mess Cheney had to "clean up":

"Whoever is elected is going to face the prospect of another terrorist attack. The question is whether we will have the right policies in place to protect our country."

This is precisely what O'Reilly told Henican last night. O'Reilly is echoing Cheney and his spokeswoman. That's called spinning for the White House. O'Reilly's a dog chasing his own tail here. On the one hand, he says Cheney should have stood his ground and not backed away from his original formulation. On the other hand, Cheney's clarification completely dovetails with O'Reilly's defense of his Des Moines statement!

O'Reilly isn't happy with Cheney's retreat because it takes away from that macho, tough guy posture that is central to Bush's reelection strategy. But there's something else at work here. Cheney, despite all his arrogance and swagger, is still a candidate subject to to public relations "sensitivities." O'Reilly is Cheney's leading media point man who feels no such restraints.

O'Reilly is symbiotically tied to the Bush/Cheney campaign because he has played a leading role in helping the White House to "profit politically from new terrorist attacks on American targets," as Martin stated today, as well as "to use the threat of terrorism to panic the American public to the point that they lose sight of the disastrous consequences of the invasion of Iraq and the steadily deteriorating economic and social conditions facing the vast majority of working people at home."

SEPT. 14, 2004:

Before interviewing Henican, a pathetic liberal who once told me he should be so lucky as O'Reilly to make millions brainwashing people, O'Reilly's Talking Points attacked NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd's scathing criticism of Cheney's remarks.

O'Reilly: "...Dowd in an article entitled 'Cheney Spits Toads' wrote, 'As the deaths of American men and women fighting in Iraq topped 1,000 and with insurgents controlling parts of central Iraq, the White House trotted out the same old discredited line, assuming it can wear--and scare--everyone down by November.'"

In typically dishonest fashion, O'Reilly chooses to only quote Dowd's final paragraph, which is correct as far as it goes in accurately interpreting Cheney's blatant threat, something which O'Reilly's ideological bias prevents him from doing. O'Reilly leaves out the more germane passages of Dowd's column, in part because her words indict The Factor host as well.

Dowd: "These guys figure, hey, these scare tactics worked in building support for the Iraq war [with O'Reilly's help], maybe then can work in tearing down support for John Kerry. They linked Saddam with terrorism and cowed the Democrats [with O'Reilly's help] ...and fooled the country into going along with their trumped-up war [with O'Reilly's help]. So why not link Mr. Kerry with terrorism and cow the voters into sticking with the White House they've got?"

O'Reilly: "Well, here's a bulletin for Mrs. Dowd--who by the way is hawking a book, but won't appear on 'The Factor,' she's invited--you should be scared, madam very scared. Or did the events in Russia last week escape your attention? We're in the middle of World War III here, madam and Americans should vote for the candidates who they think will best protect the country. Therefore, it is perfectly legitimate for any candidate to tell you how dangerous the world is and promote their programs in the face of that danger."

And here's a bulletin for Bill O'Reilly--who's never been known to hawk a book--we don't need you to remind us how dangerous the world is or that we're in danger of another horrific terrorist attack, given the fact the same people in power who allowed Sept. 11 to occur are still at the helm--and are GUARANTEEING another attack.

SEPT. 16, 2004:

The events in Beslan, Russia did not escape Ms. Dowd's--or anyone else's--attention. Neither have the horrors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, Indonesia, Turkey, Madrid, and the rest of the world that's been engulfed in blood and hell since Bush unleashed "world war III" on humanity. Bush's unilateral, preemptive aggression has made the world even more dangerous than it was before. Bush--and the entire capitalist political establishment, including O'Reilly--have turned the U.S. into a bloody deathtrap for its inhabitants.

It may be "perfectly legitimate for any candidate to tell you how dangerous the world is and promote their programs in the face of that danger," but that's not what Cheney did in Des Moines.  He said IF you elect Kerry, THEN we'll be hit with a devastating terrorist attack.

The truth is working people are in grave danger no matter who is elected in November. No matter which capitalist party is in the White House, our living standards, jobs, health care, education and lives will continue to be under attack. Wars, terrorism, cutbacks, police state repression, catastrophe are what capitalism has in store for humanity. Our only choice is breaking from the capitalist two party monopoly and organizing a labor party that fights for a socialist program to unite the international working class.

O'Reilly deemed it a "miracle" that an LA Times editorial agreed with his defense of Cheney. As usual, O'Reilly's overinflated ego clouds his analytical ability. O'Reilly, the LA Times, even the "left-wing" NY Times, are all in the bourgeois camp. They shape bourgeois public opinion. While the tactical differences among them can be sharp, their overall strategic objective is the same--shoring up capitalist rule. So it's no "miracle" that O'Reilly, the LA Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the "elite media" are often in agreement, particularly when the very survival of the capitalist state is at stake. And it is now.

O'Reilly's religious dogma has clouded his analytical skills before. Remember, this is the genius who once compared Bush's invasion of Iraq with Jesus driving the moneylenders from the Temple.

It's no wonder that O'Reilly omitted this excerpt from Dowd:

"Mr. Cheney implies that John Kerry couldn't protect us from an attack like 9/11, blithely ignoring the fact that he and President Bush didn't protect us from the real 9/11."

Not only that, but Bush and Cheney did all they could to block any investigation of what really happened that day. And O'Reilly has been just as energetic covering up the obstacles the White House has erected to keep the truth from the people.

And it's no shock that O'Reilly didn't want his viewers to consider these words:

"Think of what brass-knuckled Republicans could have made of a 9/11 tape of an uncertain Democratic president giving a shaky staement that looked like a hostage tape and flying randomly from air base to air base, as the veep ordered that planes be show down."

As he closed his segment with Henican, O'Reilly ridiculed the title of Dowd's column, "Cheney Spits Toads": "I didn't see any toads, did you?"

That's because Ms. Dowd was using a literary method known as a metaphor, you idiot.

Dowd: "It's LIKE THAT fairy tale where vipers and toads jump out of the mouth of the accursed mean little girl when she tries to speak. Every time Mr. Cheney opens his mouth, vermin leap out." [emphasis added]

O'Reilly and his defenders will reply he was only kidding, but this is his standard operating procedure--trivialize and ridicule opponents when O'Reilly cannot compete with them intellectually and engage in a serious debate of the issues.

Sept. 8, 2004--To hear Bill O'Reilly tell it, FOX News has only been fair to John Kerry regarding the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth controversy. Any accusation that FOX has facilitated Swift Boat's campaign against Kerry is another example of left-wing, elite defamation, according to The Factor host. All the cable networks had given the story prominent coverage, O'Reilly lamely offered. But FOX's coverage was, as always, Fair and Balanced. Untouchable. O'Reilly even claimed that he and colleague Chris Wallace had been skeptical of Swift Boat's charges from the beginning.

Oh Really O'Reilly? As skeptical as FOX was toward the Iraq war, as you told Tim Russert on Oct. 4, 2003? ("Well, I think Fox News Channel was lucky because we were less skeptical of the war, and the war went very well. So we won.") FOX was the biggest cheerleader for the war. The war has been a disaster. 40,000 Iraqis are dead. Over 1,000 Americans are dead.  The country is in ruins while FOX's ratings are through the roof. The only people who "won" are Halliburton, Bechtel, FOX, and other capitalist swine. But back to the Swift Boat affair.

It's true that FOX is not alone in enthusiastically providing a sounding board for the pack of liars and false patriots who comprise Swift Boat Veterans for Peace. CNN and MSNBC also played no small role in bombarding the US public with Swift Boat's lies. But to deny FOX's leading role in this matter is another Orwellian lie from the foul mouth of Bill O'Reilly.

Consider just a few of the headlines from Media Matters for America concerning FOX's coverage of the Swift Boat matter:

"[FOX News contributor] Krauthammer repeated Swift Boat Vets' discredited attack on Kerry"; "FOX adopted another GOP talking point: reporters claimed Kerry 'deserved' false attacks on his war record"; "As evidence mounts of GOP connection to anti- Kerry Swift Boat Vets, [FOX News managing editor Brit] Hume and Dole deny the obvious"; "Conservatives echoed false accusation that Kerry lied about Cambodia" [Brit Hume, FNC host Fred Barnes]; "[FNC contributor]Kondracke echoed discredited Swift Boat Vets charge"; "Hume claimed media ignored Swift Boat Veteran's book"; "FOX's Garrett distorted support for Kerry among veterans who served with him"; "Hannity claimed Bush has denounced Swift Boats Vets' anti-Kerry ad; he hasn't"; "O'Reilly on anti-Kerry Swift Boat Vets: 'I've never seen them on...cable news' "; "FOX's Garrett boosted discredited Swift Boat Vets allegation"; "On FOX, Sabato called Swift Boat Vets' lies 'true' "; "O'Reilly: Swift Boat Veterans never said Kerry 'lied' " [they did!]; "O'Reilly Factor sub host challenged Swift Boat Vet on failing to question his own Bronze Star citation"; "Ignoring evidence of covberage, [FNC's] Brent Bozell and John Gibson claimed media ignored Swift Boat Vets."

You get the idea. O'Reilly's been caught lying--again.

But there's more. Consider today's World Socialist Web Site article by Patrick Martin, "The anatomy of a right-wing provocation in US election campaign," an analysis of Judicial Watch's complaint with the Pentagon inspector general asking for an investigation into Kerry's medals. Martin writes:

"The Pentagon has not yet made any decision on the complaint, or even agreed to begin an official investigation. Nor has the issue yet been raised in the mass media OUTSIDE OF RUPERT MURDOCH'S FOX NEWS..." [emphasis added]

And this: "The latest campaign is politically instructive, since it demonstrates both the cynical distortions that are the modus operandi of the ultra right, and the CLOSE COORDINATION BETWEEN RIGHT-WING OPERATIVES AND THE MURDOCH/FOX EMPIRE." [emphasis added]

After noting that the inspector general's office notified Judicial Watch it had received the complaint, and that the complaint had been forwarded to the Secretary of the Navy [per protocol], Martin informs us:

"Fox News reported the letter from the inspector general's office to Judicial Watch in BREATHLESS TONES, AS THOUGHT IT WAS CONFIRMING THE CREDIBILITY OF THE ALLEGATIONS." [emphasis added]

"Fox also interviewed John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 commission, who as secretary of the Navy in 1986 had issued Kerry a duplicate of the citation awarding him the Silver Star....Lehman said he did not know why Kerry had received the duplicate, but clerical workers in Lehman's office would have routinely signed such a citation, one of thousands like it, with an autopen. Lehman added that Navy records should be 'thoroughly researched and the facts established,' a truism that Fox presented as a virtual allegation that Kerry was lying."

John O'Neill has been thoroughly discredited as a liar with an axe to grind against Kerry for his 1971 antiwar testimony before Congress. At this point in time, anyone who gives O'Neill additional opportunities to peddle his lies and distortions is an enabler of those lies and a partner in O'Neill's crime. And that's exactly what O'Reilly did on last night's program.

"The left-wing press is having a hard time this week fueling anti-Bush feeling."--Bill O'Reilly, August 30, 2004

The backlash against television's most repugnant windbag is esclating in the mass media. Readers will definitely want to check out a new book by Peter Hart of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), entitled, "The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003).

Any resemblance between Hart's title and the title of this page is coincidental, not conspiratorial.

Also be sure to read John Colapinto's excellent Rolling Stone article, "Mad Dog: 'Shut up!' and other deep thoughts from the angry mind of Bill O'Reilly. The truth about Fox News' number-one bigmouth."

July 27, 2004--After self righteously declaring that his "coverage" of the Democratic National Convention would be devoid of propaganda and partisanship, Bill O'Reilly quickly censored the proceedings by refusing to broadcast former vice president Al Gore's address to the convention.

"In just a few moments, Al Gore is going to address the crowd here. We might listen in for a minute or so, but we're trying to stay away from partisan speeches in both conventions this year. The no-spin zone has turned into a no propaganda zone."

Or, more accurately a NO COVERAGE ZONE.

"We might listen in for a minute or two..."

Thank you, Oh Gracious One, for allowing us to listen in for a minute or two. We are not worthy of your generosity. It will be hard to tear ourselves away from your scholarly and balanced analysis.

"...but we're trying to stay away from partisan speeches in both conventions this year."

Excuse me? Isn't that what you're supposed to hear at political conventions? Aren't conventions by definition "partisan"? The very act of snubbing a speech by a former vice president who was the Democrats' standard bearer in 2004 and is now a leading  Democratic spokesman is itself an act of crass partisanship by the country's leading Republican propaganda organ, FOX News.

"Instead, The Factor is going to give you coverage of the convention by telling you about any controversies and inside stuff. We think you're going to get a lot more out of these political circuses if we play down the partisan blather."

Translation: Instead of letting you hear what the Democratic speakers have to say, we'll titillate you with gossip and "inside stuff."

Conventions ARE political circuses, O'Reilly. And your job as a news organization is to cover those political circuses, not condescendingly preach to viewers what they will be allowed to see. Gore's speech was objectively a newsworthy event within the context of the convention. Instead we watched O'Reilly prattle on about the equally clueless and offensive Teresa Heinz Kerry and plaster the screen with the latest gruesome murder the media love to divert us with.

And what is this constant blather from O'Reilly about "inside stuff"? He is incessantly reminding viewers of his wink-wink, "inside sources."Not exactly indicative of an "independent" journalist, is it? Someone with such an abundance of "inside sources" sounds like a representative of the "elite media" to me.

"We got a copy of Gore's speech. He's not throwing bombs tonight."

O'Reilly sounds like he's a proud member of the rest of the effete corps of impudent snobs who dominate the elite media. "WE got a copy of Gore's speech." While it's fine for the elite media whore O'Reilly to get an advance copy of the speech, O'Reilly and his bosses at FOX show their contempt for their audience by denying us the right to hear Gore's own words!

O'Reilly seemed visibly uncomfortable trying to maintain a facade of objectivity in the enemy camp. He lacked his usual arrogant bravado. He appeared incapable of doing anything but laugh nervously like a mischievous schoolboy and make stupid jokes about Kerry throwing out the first pitch at  Fenway Park ("At least we know he's not a lefty").

O'Reilly then took cutting edge journalism to new heights when he pressed rocker Joan Jett for her earlier support of Howard Dean:

"Howard Dean is a pretty off the wall guy as far as some of the things that he wanted -- pull out of Iraq immediately, give the terrorists a win there. Are you that liberal?"

Except Dean has NEVER called for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. What he did tell MSNBC on Sept. 1, 2003 is that "I think it was a mistake to go into Iraq in the long run.  Now that we're there, we're stuck there...and we cannot leave because losing the peace is not an option. We cannot leave Iraq."

No lie is too big for this windbag to tell. We've seen this method of operation before--from Joseph Goebbels.

July 28, 2004--A few words about Teresa Heinz Kerry. The problem with her "shove it" comment to a right wing newspaper editor is not that she's "opinionated," "speaks her mind," "speaks from her heart," or "speaks from her soul." The problem is that Ms. Kerry is a dishonest airhead who said something she couldn't back up, and when confronted with this reality, she denied she made the comment and told the editor to "shove it."

Heinz Kerry is a repugnant and hypocritical loose cannon whose big mouth will no doubt torpedo her husband's chances to be president. In her remarks to Pennsylvania Democrats over the weekend, Ms. Kerry told the delegates, "We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics."

COSMOS LEFT is no friend of Colin McNickle, the editorial page editor of the  Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a right-wing rag owned by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. And Heinz Kerry, who has been villified by that newspaper, may have her own axe to grind with its editorial page editor. But McNickle asked Heinz a simple question: what did she mean by "un-American activity"?

Heinz Kerry: "No, I didn't say that."

McNickle: "What did you mean?"

Heinz Kerry: " I didn't say that. I didn't say that."

McNickle: "I was just asking what you said."

Heinz Kerry: "Why do you put words in my mouth?"

McNickle: "You said something about 'un-American activity.' "

Heinz Kerry: "No, I didn't say that, I did not say 'activity' or 'un-American.' Those were your words."

No, those were your words, Ms. Kerry. Actually, "un-American traits" were your words. McNickle substituted "activity" for "traits." But McNickle didn't put "un-American" in your mouth. YOU did. And that's what he asked you to explain.

Ms. Kerry could have left it there, but she's so unhinged she walked away, thought about it, and came back to expose a little more of her beautiful mind to the waiting world.

"Are you from the Tribune-Review?"

McNickle: "Yes I am."

Heinz Kerry: "Understandable. You said something I didn't say -- now shove it."

COSMOS LEFT doesn't exist to bail out capitalist politicians or their wives when they stick their feet in their big mouths, but all Ms. Kerry had to say was the following: "You want examples of un-American traits? How about when Republicans impugn my husband's patriotism because he spoke out against the Vietnam war? Or this growing trend among Bush supporters to claim that bin Laden wants Kerry to win? That a vote for Kerry is a vote for bin Laden?"

Obviously flustered and unhinged, Heinz Kerry could only deny what she had just said and tell McNickle to shove it right after calling for more civility in public discourse.

If Heinz Kerry is going to repeat some of the cliches she's been hearing and throw around loaded terms like "un-American," she'd better be prepared to back it up. Once you start down that road, you can't weasel out of it by denying a statement the entire planet just heard you clearly say. If Heinz Kerry wants to be the First Lady, she should play it smart, put a muzzle on herself and act like Laura Bush, who at least knows her limitations and knows her husband's political fortunes are best served by her playing the doting woman behind the man card.

That's not going to happen, which is why the Bush camp is ecstatic--and the Kerry staff holds their breath--every time Teresa Heinz Kerry speaks.

Of course, as far as working people are concerned, we're going to the wall no matter who occupies the White House. The last thing we need is another billionaire who feels sorry for us. We'll be better off politically organizing ourselves as a class and relying on our own strength than the current course of  looking for a savior in the Democratic Party.

We have no more time for "lesser-evilism." We need to build a mass socialist party--NOW.

July 10-13, 2004--There are some Talking Points memos that are so full of lies and falsification they must be shot down immediately. "Hating America," O'Reilly's July 8 offering, is the latest illustration of this windbag's audacity and mendacity.

"Hating America....According to a new poll, 40 percent of Canadian teenagers think America is an evil country. Among French-Canadian teens, the number jumps to 64 percent. Those numbers can be laid right on the doorstep of the Canadian media and government."

False. Those numbers can be laid right on the doorstep of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, whose occupant has shown his contempt for the world by waging two illegal wars of aggression that have killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and whose military has tortured detainees in gulags across the planet. Many Canadians are upset that their imperialist government is HELPING Washington carry out these war crimes, something that doesn't fit O'Reilly's national chauvinist spin. You'd never know it listening to O'Reilly, but Canada has been a junior partner of US imperialism for decades and a military ally in Korea,Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Many Canadians were none too happy when four of their soldiers were killed in 2002 by US "friendly-fire" in Afghanistan, something else that O'Reilly usually omits from his anti-Canadian tirades.

The spike in anti-US feelings among French-Canadian teens no doubt reflects the national oppression Quebec has historically suffered at the hands of the central bourgeois government in Ottowa. Oppressed national minorities are acutely sensitive to the murderous machinations of world imperialism.

"As you may know, the FOX News Channel is not allowed in Canada, but CNN is. Fair and balanced? You decide."

FOX and CNN are BOTH mouthpieces and propaganda arms for US imperialism. COSMOS LEFT takes no position on the dog-eat-dog competition between these networks for inside access to the White House.  The fact that FOX is universally recognized as the preferred propaganda instrument of Wall Street and the Pentagon is because FOX just can't hide their blatant bias. Look at it this way, O'Reilly. Your employer is viewed as a toxic virus that some nations want to prevent from polluting their airwaves. Perhaps Canada has noticed that 70% of Americans thought Iraq was behind 9/11 primarily because of the information and brainwashing they received from Fox.

"The USA takes a relentless pounding from many Canadian news organizations and from the liberal government. So, what can we expect from the kids? They're not getting a full picture. And neither is most of the world."

It's not the "USA" but the militaristic policies of the US government that is being pounded by international news organizations, governments, and citizens. That's because unlike those Americans who rely on Washington's propaganda outlets like FOX for their news, Canadians and most of the planet ARE getting the full picture of the death and destruction the US has brought to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Tens of thousands are dead in those countries due to the conscious, cold-blooded decisions made in Washington and London, not from the journalists reporting the atrocities those decisions have wrought. O'Reilly's upset because despite his attempts to spin Abu Ghraib off the international radar, the world IS getting the full picture of the White House-sanctioned torture so graphically captured on those rolls of digital film.

Polls from one corner of the earth to another are showing similar results, like the latest from Budapest showing Bush is disliked by more Hungarian school kids than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. This survey of 34,000 students revealed that Adolph Hitler was the most disliked foreign personality, followed by Bush, and that the US president was even more unpopular than Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin.

O'Reilly would no doubt blame the Hungarian media for these findings, but he can't get away with blaming the messenger any longer.

"Increasingly, the bully America is being portrayed as the devil. And the far left in this country is gleefully piling on. Guys like Michael Moore [are] running around the world telling everybody what a bad place America is. Moore and his enablers should be very proud of themselves."

When the most powerful nation in history invades two helpless and defenseless sovereign nations and slaughters tens of thousands of their people, it's no shock the label "bully" starts acquiring relevance. "Far left" to the rightist O'Reilly includes the NY Times, so the term means little when it comes from his foul mouth. But as a genuine representative of the far left, COSMOS LEFT can say authoritatively that no one is "gleeful" about the chaos and devastation Washington is inflicting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Michael Moore is not telling anyone America is a bad place. He's saying the policies of the US government are bad. And most of the world agrees with him.

It's mouthpieces and stooges like Bill O'Reilly who have enabled Bush and the warmakers to lie, murder and torture. They are the ones who should be filled with pride--because they have no shame--over the accomplishments of the Abu Ghraib interrogators.

"For the benefit of the Canadian kids, let's take a look at the record:"

First of all, whenever people like O'Reilly claim they're looking out for the kids, you better hide them. Remember Janet Reno on the Waco holocaust: "My only concern is for the children--SEND IN THE TANKS!"

As O'Reilly attempts to defend the long and bloody trail left by US imperialism over the last century, remember this is the individual who once said Washington's foreign policy doesn't aim to kill anyone, but merely tries to keep people from killing each other.

"The foreign and defense policies of Ronald Reagan resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the freeing of approximately 122 million people in Eastern Europe."

False. The Soviet Union's dissolution resulted from the internal contradictions and weaknesses of the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy which increasingly relied on market forces and prevented the democratic participation of working people. And Soviet generals have stated that Reagan's militarism PROLONGED the inevitable collapse of Stalinist rule. Those 122 million were "freed" from cradle-to-grave security, pensions, health care, and guaranteed jobs. They are now basking in the sunshine of mafia-style capitalism and corruption. But many Soviet and Eastern European workers are fighting attempts by imperialist capital and wanna-be capitalists to impose the glories of the free market.

"The state of Israel would cease to exist if not for American protection, and about 5.5 million Jews would be in grave danger."

Flash: O'Reilly actually got something right, though not for the reasons he intended. Israel WOULD cease to exist if not for "American protection"--. This rogue nation, armed to the teeth with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that continually defies UN resolutions regarding its illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip, WOULD CEASE TO EXIST without US tax dollars. Earth to O'Reilly: 5.5 million Jews ARE in grave danger. Leon Trotsky was right 66 years ago: Zionist Israel would become a bloody death trap for Jews if it succeeded in establishing an exclusively Jewish state on land stolen from the indigenous Palestinian population.

"Nearly 23 million Taiwanese would be denied freedom if not for American protection."

Taiwan's corrupt rule by capitalists and landlords would certainly not exist without Washington's "protection" (see Webster's fourth definition: "immunity from prosecution purchased by criminals through bribery"). When the 1949 Chinese Revolution overthrew capitalism on the mainland, the bourgeois KMT forces fled to the neighboring island of Taiwan, where they established a brutal military dictatorship with the help of the United States. Martial law, secret police, and state-run unions have been the defining characteristics of Taiwan's "democratic" rule.

"More than 48 million South Koreans would be living under a dictatorship if not for American protection."

Those 48 million south Koreans have lived under a US-backed dictatorship for 50 years. Under the cover of the UN, Washington invaded Korea in 1951 to prevent the unification of the country under socialist rule, killings millions of Koreans in the process. To this day, Korean workers protest the repressive and draconian capitalist rule that was imposed on them by Washington. Most Koreans support a peaceful reunification with the North and an end to the militarization of their peninsula.

"USA action led to the removal of the Serbian dictator Milosevic, who was responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of people in the Balkans."

False. USA action led to the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by ultrarightist Serb forces. The militant protests and mobilizations had more to do with the overthrow of Milosevic than Washington's military aggression in the Balkans.

"The USA and Britain removed the Iraqi dictator Hussein, who was responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East. And we have also removed the terrorist Taliban government in Afghanistan."

The US installed the Iraqi dictator Hussein, equipped him with chemical and biological weapons, and helped him kill most of those hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, since this figure includes those killed in the Iran/Iraq war, which was waged at Washington's behest. As for Afghanistan, Washington's backing of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen helped pave the way for the Taliban's rule. And to this day, no evidence has been provided linking the Taliban to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. When the Taliban asked Washington for the "white paper" that supposedly proved bin Laden organized the attacks from Afghanistan, Bush refused, parading the poodle Tony Blair to recycle the allegations that bin Laden was behind the African embassy bombings.

"America is sending $15 billion to Africa to help victims of AIDS. We were unable to find out how much France contributes, if anything. To be fair, Canada sends $270 million, which is substantial."

False. Through budget cuts and trick accounting, the US is sending much less than the $15 billion Bush announced. The truth is Bush is starving the most direct and effective AIDS organization, the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and is instead directing much of that money to US government agencies like the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Centers for Disease Control, whose role is to bolster the economic and political interests of Washington.

JULY 13, 2004:

Two thirds of that $15 billion is "new" money, but out of that only $1 billion is slated for the Global Fund. The remaining 90% goes to USAID in nations that exclude India, China and Russia, where new HIV cases are skyrocketing. Anil Soni of the Fund stated: "We have a problem. We need to get new dollars in, so we can continue to fund programs." The Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights wrote a letter to Bush last year urging him to adequately finance the Global Fund and provide debt relief to Third World nations.  Its director, Hollly Burkhalter, said, "The funding of the new plan under the President's budget would come too slowly. He has allocated only $ 2 billion in fiscal year 2004, still well short of the $3.5 billion that Physicians for Human Rights is calling for on an annual basis. The money for his plan should be front-loaded to pay for the most expensive initial investment; building health infrastructure. With infrastructure in place, the treatment costs will go down."

Health GAP (Global Access Project), an AIDS and human rights organization, strongly criticized Bush's weakening of the Global Fund and reliance on US government agencies: "USAID and CDC do not have the capacity nor the desire to implement the programs called for by the president."

No, Bush is too busy pushing his faith-based conservative social engineering to truly make a difference and save lives. As Anne-Chrstine d'Adesky put it in her new book, "Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS":

"The Bush money favors prevention programs that support sexual abstinence over the use of condoms, and opposes funding groups that support family planning services that even indirectly allow abortion."

Chris Talbot, in an October 2003 World Socialist Web Site article, wrote that, "The effect of the US policy has meant that some communities have been left with no healthcare at all....The closure of the Mathare Valley clinic in a slum area of Nairobi has left 300,000 people without healthcare. In Ethiopa and Zambia, health services have had their supplies of USAID contraceptives stopped."

As Talbot accurately put it, Bush's decision to terminate funding for family planning groups that distribute condoms is a "death warrant for millions of poor people."

Nice going, Bush. And an even better job reporting, O'Reilly. Just the way Jesus Christ would have wanted it.

Ms. d'Adesky has accurately called the Bush administration "the greatest barrier to access to cheap AIDS medicines for the world." This was confirmed only yesterday in a NY Times article by Elizabeth Becker and Robert Pear, "Trade Pact May Undercut Inexpensive Drug Imports": "The agreement [an international trade agreement negotiated with Australia] would allow pharmaceutical companies to prevent imports of drugs to the United States..."

"American action in Central America, Grenada, and Haiti has kept millions of people out of totalitarian regimes. Of course, all of this has cost every American taxpayer big. And thousands of American servicepeople have lost their lives protecting people overseas."

In truth, American action in Central America, Grenada, and Haiti has kept millions of people under the jackboot of totalitarian regimes. Washington has been overthrowing democratically elected governments and backing brutal military dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile,  Brazil, and Argentina, to name a few, for 100 years. These hundreds of military interventions have been paid for by US taxpayers, but those thousands of American soldiers didn't die "protecting people overseas." They died for the profits of US capitalists.

Bill O'Reilly, meet Marine Major General Smedley Butler, who explained quite succinctly what US foreign policy is all about in 1931:

"I spent 33 years (in the Marines) . . . most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. . .

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . .

"In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested . . . I had . . . a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions.... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents."

Back to O'Reilly's "Hating America" masterpiece:

"It is insulting and dishonest for Americans and Canadians and Europeans to condemn this country because they don't like certain policies. Dissent is good. Slander is unacceptable."

Americans and Canadians and Europeans and Africans and Asians. The entire world is condemning not "this country" but the militarist madness of the US capitalist government, which does NOT represent the working people of the US--the overwhelming majority. There are two Americas--capitalist and working class. What is being condemned are the murderous policies of capitalist America. O'Reilly's America. It is insulting and dishonest for Bill O'Reilly to spew his lies and hatemongering every night on behalf of US capitalists and falsely present himself as a spokesman for the working class. And after what O'Reilly did to young Jeremy Glick, threatening to smash him into fucking pieces for articulating a viewpoint O'Reilly didn't agree with, this FOX windbag has no moral standing to define the acceptable boundaries of dissent.

"The truth is that the USA has freed more human beings in 230 years than the rest of the world combined. France has freed almost no one. Ditto Canada."

The truth is that the "USA" has freed no one since the Civil War, when the North crushed the Confederate slavocracy in the Second American Revolution. Ever since the US became an imperialist power in the Spanish-American War of 1898, US foreign policy has been designed to enslave the workers of the world under the dictatorship of the dollar sign, as Gen. Butler accurately explained in 1931.

France and Canada are also imperialist powers whose foreign policies are designed to bolster the capitalist classes of those two countries. French and Canadian imperialism have no friend here. France continues to exploit its former colonies in Africa and elsewhere. Canada, as discussed earlier, has been a long-time junior partner of US imperialism. We note, in passing, however, that France played a key role in freeing the American colonies from British rule.

"America has a provable history of freeing oppressed peoples all over the world in fighting evil dictators. [O'Reilly's proven nothing of the kind.] Canada should be ashamed that so many of its young people are flat out ignorant. And Americans should wise up and realize that we are living in a changing world."

The truth is Washington has imposed brutal dictators on oppressed peoples all over the world, from Somozoa to Batista to Mobutu to Suharto. The US has drowned millions of working people in their blood, from Vietnam to Korea to Indonesia to Iraq to the Philippines to Hiroshima.

Canada should be proud that so many of its young people recoil at the exploitation and horrors US imperialism is inflicting on the planet. The US should be ashamed that so many of its citizens still believe Bill O'Reilly and look to him for political guidance.

O'Reilly concluded this farce with a "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day" that was disgraceful even by the Factor's gutter standards. He took issue with the slap on the wrist FOX news analyst Geraldine Ferraro slap on the wrist she had levied toward Halliburton for alleged overcharging in Iraq. In the words of Warner Wolf, let's go to the videotape:

"I don't want to talk about Halliburton, because it's not been proven they did anything wrong."

Oh Really O'Reilly?

That's never stopped you from talking about Michael Jackson on the air. That's never stopped you from talking about Scott Peterson on the air. That's never stopped you from discussing Gary Condit on the air. That's never stopped you from discussing Professor Sami Al-Arian on the air. It was never proven that any of these individuals had done anything wrong, but that didn't stop you from convicting them in living rooms across the globe.

Don't you think it's newsworthy, O'Reilly, that Vice President Richard Cheney is about to be indicted in both the US and France [yes, France] for Halliburton-related corruption?

Shouldn't your viewers be aware that a confidential White House Counsel report warned that Cheney has violated the "spirit and intent" of Federal Conflict of Interest laws? And that the report says Cheney also faces indictment for illegally intervening to ensure that Halliburton won a $7 billion, no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq's oil facilities?

Shouldn't they know that Cheney faces a pending French indictment on charges of bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets related to the construction of a $6 billion petrochemical plant in Nigeria? Or that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating a $180 million "slush fund" that French prosecutors say were used to pay bribes?

Isn't this why former New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato publicly called for Cheney's removal from the Republican presidential ticket?

Finally, doesn't the Factor think it's newsworthy that the Treasury Department is investigating whether Halliburton violated U.S. sanctions against Iran when its Dubai-based subsidiary received a dozen tender offers from a British subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company?

No, O'Reilly doesn't let any of these matters trouble his beautiful mind. Instead, he focused on the blockbuster accusation from the equally clueless Ferraro that  Halliburton had charged $45 for a case of  Coke. O'Reilly's vigilant staff uncovered the shocking truth--a Kuwaiti subsidiary of Halliburton did try to charge Washington 45 bucks for a 30-can case of Coke, "but they did other stuff, too. Instead of sending the cases, they sent individual cans."

While his viewers held their breath, O'Reilly assured them that Halliburton fixed the problem by withholding payments to the guilty subcontractor.

While O'Reilly trivialized Halliburton's profiteering by focusing on the price of a case of Coke, he failed to inform his audience about a Pentagon report that found "blood all over the floor," "dirty pans," "dirty grills," "dirty salad bars," and rotting meats...and vegetables" in four of the military mess halls in Iraq run by Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Root.

So much for O'Reilly's professed concern for US soldiers.

July 16, 2004--In his July 15 essay dissecting Fox News Channel's response to a recent NY Times piece on Robert Greenwald's new film, "Outfoxed," liberal journalist Eric Alterman illuminated the central thesis of "Oh Really O'Reilly": beneath his Irish Catholic charm lurks the ugly face of US fascism.

Alterman recounts how Fox accused the Times of "taking orders from" a "Web site" allegedly funded by George Soros, whom Fox described as "a left-wing billionaire CURRENCY SPECULATOR who funds many liberal efforts." [emphasis added] After pointing out that the "Web site" is actually the Center for American Progress, a think tank that receives some financial support from Soros but "is far from its most significant funder," Alterman writes:

"So why is Fox picking on Soros. I don't know for sure, but we do know that Sean Hannity, Tony Blankley and Bill O'Reilly have proven part of a nasty disinformation campaign to slander Soros with anti-Semitic codewords and images and attack his religious beliefs on Fox and elsewhere. Hence the loaded term, 'left-wing billionaire currency speculator,' which would have fit perfectly into any Nazi propaganda pamphlet about Jews. (Blankley has actually criticized Soros for being both Jewish and surviving the holocaust, and has passed along poisonous, unsubstantiated accusations that Soros' family cooperated with Hungary's Nazi occupiers.)"

This page analyzed O'Reilly's slanderous campaign against Soros in two essays last year: "Clueless O'Reilly Indicts Himself (Dec. 2-3, 2003)" and "O'Reilly Feels Heat from MoveOn, Fears Cold Cash from Soros, so He Slanders Them (Nov. 2003)." "Clueless" also discussed the internal memos Fox distributes to its employees directing them to give a pro-Bush, pro-war spin, which has surfaced again in "Outfoxed."

O'Reilly's fascist methods are visible on a nightly basis: scapegoating the most vulnerable victims of capitalist exploitation--gays, immigrants, single mothers, especially African-American single mothers, and the poorest layers of this class-divided society, all the while employing just enough anticapitalist rhetoric to suck in the most backward layers of the working class while railing against the bankrupt, weak liberal elites who just don't have the gumption to militarize the borders and establish the rest of O'Reilly's authoritarian vision for society.

The fact that a liberal journalist like Alterman is moved to illuminate O'Reilly's fascist tendencies is still another reflection of the desperation the Factor host can no longer mask.

July 24-25, 2004--On both sides of the Atlantic, the song remains the same: the warmongering US and UK ruling classes, reacting to the political fallout from the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, are frantically cranking out "independent" commissions designed to neutralize opposition to their aggression in Iraq by declaring it was all caused by bad intelligence and honest mistakes. There were no lies, no deceit, no manipulation by Bush and Blair. The two leaders were just victimized by flawed data from the CIA and MI6. That was the essential conclusion from the recent reports by the US Senate Intelligence Committee and the Butler commission investigating the intelligence scandals emanating from the nonexistent Iraqi WMDs.

Government mouthpieces like Bill O'Reilly quickly used these fraudulent whitewashes to exonerate Bush and Blair. O'Reilly tried to take the offensive by declaring that those critics who accused Bush and Blair of lying about WMDs "have been dishonorable. They were wrong and had no proof to begin with. They are guilty of a slander, a dishonorable act."

To paraphrase Woody Allen, the key word here is "dishonorable." It is O'Reilly who once again is being dishonorable to his audience by spinning and distorting the governmental whitewashes, which themselves cannot mask Washington and London's deception.

Listening to O'Reilly, one would never know that Blair's troubles INCREASED after Butler's WMD whitewash. Here's just a sample of the reporting that reflected this fact:

1) London's Sunday Telegraph reported that Butler's report was watered down at the last minute to make it less critical of Blair. Pakistan's Daily Times wrote that the alterations "reduced the contrast between the seemingly compelling case for war made to lawmakers by Blair and the thinness of the intelligence he actually asked had at his disposal."

The Times wrote that "despite being cleared of deliberate deception, Blair--who argued the case for backing the U.S.-led war almost exclusively on the basis of the threat posed by Iraq's WMDs--was criticized in the report." The Telegraph reported a member of the inquiry panel saying Blair was by no means in the clear.

"The whole thing points straight to the man in charge...absolutely to where responsibility belongs, which is the prime minister, which is what we could not say."

2) O'Reilly also has nothing to say about another revelation illuminated by the Butler Whitewash--that two weeks before the September 2002 security dossier on Iraq was released, Blair was warned by the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, that the claim Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was unproven. Yet that didn't stop Blair from stating in the dossier's foreword that the intelligence was "beyond doubt." As in a "slam-dunk."

It's no wonder O'Reilly avoided the Butler inquiry's assessment of messy details like the discredited 45-minute claim, because even Butler's whitewash was forced to conclude that it was an "uncharacteristically poor piece of assessment." In other words, the British intelligence dossier had been "sexed up," and the BBC's coverage of whistleblower Dr. David Kelly's testimony had been essentially correct. The BBC was right; O'Reilly was wrong. Again.

Notice the double standard regarding collective responsibility at work here, because O'Reilly certainly won't. Butler's inquiry--and every other commission report coming out of London and DC--say that collective responsibility means no one is responsible. But when Blair went after the BBC for telling the truth, collective responsiblity meant that BBC execs Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies were responsible--and they lost their jobs.

And just who is Lord Butler? Again, don't look to O'Reilly for an answer, because he's too busy helping Butler spin for Blair. Butler is your classic ruling class stooge with a long history of covering up imperialist crimes. Educated at Oxford, civil service in the 1960s, Edward Heath's private secretary, and a loyal aide to Margaret Thatcher and John Major, Butler exonerated Conservative minister Jonathan Aitken of charges he took bribes from the Saudi royal family. During an investigation into British covert arms sales to Iraq in the 1990s, Butler had this to say on the subject of government deception:

"it was accurate but incomplete...the purpose of it was to give an answer which itself was true. It did not give the full picture. It was half an answer....It is not justified to mislead, but very often one is finding oneself in a position where you have to give an answer that is not the whole truth."

Heard enough? Wait, there's more from O'Reilly's impartial investigator of Blair.

"You have to be selective about the facts....It does not follow that you mislead people. You just do not give the full information."

Think about Butler's revealing comments as you consider what's just happened on bo th sides of the Atlantic regarding Iraq's nonexistent WMDs and the so-called "flawed intelligence."

O'Reilly and other Bush/Blair supporters point to Butler's finding that the British dossier claiming Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger was "well founded." On what Butler did not say, except that there was other evidence, WHICH HE DID NOT PRODUCE. And which O'Reilly could not cite. Sorry, someone saying that Niger's foreign minister thought that the Iraqi official meant uranium when he expressed a desire for expanded commercial relations proves nothing. Besides, Washington and London had both stated the transaction had occurred, a falsehood that was based on forged documents, no doubt emanating from the CIA, MI6, or Mossad.

Butler's approach to the whitewash was simple: If Blair says he didn't intentionally deceive on WMD, then we believe him. There was no evidence of intent "on the part of the government to mislead." "No single individual is to blame." [Not coincidentally, this is the line of the recently released 9/11 commission report.]

The US and Britain knew that Hussein had been disarmed in the 1990s. Rice and Powell both stated in 2001 that Hussein was no longer a threat. Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, defected to Jordan in 1995 and revealed that Iraq's WMD were destroyed in 1991 on his orders. Kamal's testimony had been confirmed by UN inspectors during 1996-1998. This is what former UN inspector Scott Ritter kept saying with such passion before Bush invaded in March 2003.

The truth is Bush and Blair manipulated and fabricated the WMD intelligence to justify a war they had long planned to seize control of Iraq's oil as part of their larger plan to strengthen Israel and dominate the Middle East.

Media whores like Bill O'Reilly have facilitated their lies from the beginning. O'Reilly should feel close to Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. They might be sharing prison cells one day after their convictions for war crimes.

O'Reilly's coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war WMD intelligence was equally dishonest. O'Reilly claimed in his July 12 Talking Points, "Dissent or Dishonor," that the committee "did not find any evidence that the Bush administration attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgment on WMDs in Iraq."

June 18-22, 2004--Bill O'Reilly wasted no time exploiting the horrific murder of Paul Johnson to escalate the rulers war of terror against working people from America to Iraq. His solution? Declare war on Al Qaeda, which means the entire world, and accuse any American who opposes Washington's wars of treason. If you oppose Bush's absolute authority to wage war, you're helping Al Qaeda and endangering Americans. O'Reilly tried to bully Americans out of our constitutional right to dissent at the outbreak of the Iraq war, but was forced to quickly retreat when the relationship of forces became evident, even to the clueless O'Reilly.

O'Reilly and other bourgeois mouthpieces quickly surmised they could extract much more political capital out of Johnson's execution than than they could from Nick Berg's last month. As the facts surrounding Berg's murder became known--Berg was in US custody before his abduction; Washington was caught lying about this when Berg's parents produced the US consul's e-mail proving it; Berg was at Abu Ghraib; Berg was linked to Zacharias Moussaoui; Berg's father saying his son "died for Bush and Rumsfeld's sins"--the resulting stench put a crimp on the level of bloodthirsty jingoism and desire for revenge that could be whipped up.

Johnson's murder has more potential propaganda value for the rulers because it occurred in Saudi Arabia and lacks the above-described baggage that accompanied the Berg murder. Except for one thing--Johnson was wearing the same orange jumpsuit that Berg wore at his death--the same ones worn by prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghrabi and other US gulags.

We don't know who murdered Berg or Johnson. Washington said the former was beheaded by Abu Musaab al-Zarqaqi, the Jordanian terrorist allegedly aligned with al-Qaeda. COSMOS LEFT thinks it was a black psy/ops operation by a CIA or Mossad death squad. The US and Saudi Arabia tell us Johnson was murdered by Abdulaziz al-Moqrin, the alleged leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia.

A group claiming to be al-Qaeda beheaded Johnson, a civilian contractor who worked on Apache helicopters, the ones that have slaughtered thousands of Palestinians and Iraqis. Where there's al-Qaeda, the CIA or Mossad is not far behind.

Already the stench is rising. Yesterday it was reported that Johnson's body had been f und in Riyadh. Today the Saudis said they were still looking for Johnson's corpse. Now we learn Saudi forces killed Moqrin in a shootout on Friday night. As in Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald? As in killing the patsie so the official story can roll along?

O'Reilly wasn't the only one moving fast to capitalize on Johnson's execution. Under cover of the jingoism being whipped up over the latest Web site reality horrorshow, US forces struck again in Falluja by firing missiles from a fighter plane at a residential neighborhood, killing at least 20. The US military claim they targeted a "safe-house" for Zarqawi, the shadowy figure who's replaced bin Laden as the number one bogeyman in the war on terror.

There was no evidence Zarqawi was in Falluja, but those 20 civilians were, including women and children. This should please Bill O'Reilly, who has been urging the Pentagon to bomb Falluja again before we leave the ungrateful bastards because they're not worth liberating.

On his June 17 broadcast of The Radio Factor, O'Reilly had this to say: "...when 2 percent of the population feels that you're doing them a favor, just forget it, you're not going to win. [You got that right!] And I don't have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think they're a prehistoric group that is --yea, there's excuses.

"Sure, they're terrorized, they've never know freedom, all of that....But I do n't have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dy ing trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, ... it's time to wise up.

"And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. [Oh Really, O'Reilly? Actually, the US bombed the daylights out of the Serbs in Belgrade and elsewhere. But the US DID recruit al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan to help kill Serbs and Croatians.]

"Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain't going to work. They're just people who are primitive."

Go ahead, reveal yourself, O'Reilly. Reveal your c haracter. Reveal the benefits of your God-fearing upbringing and Christian family values.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to compare O'Reilly's vicious chauvinism against Iraqis with his opinions of working people in the US. Consider this recent gem from his radio show as he pontificated about Ronald Reagan:

"Reagan was n ot a con frontational g uy...much rather be your pal...doesn't want to get involved with the really nasty stuff...and that's what racial politics is...It's hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell 'em they're irresponsible and lazy. And who's gonna wanna do that? [You, you racist prick.] BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT POVERTY IS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. IN THIS COUNTRY, YOU CAN SUCCEED IF YOU GET EDUCATED AND WORK HARD. PERIOD. ...You come here, you get educated, you work hard, you'll make a buck. YOU GET ADDICTED, YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING, YOU'LL BE POOR."

Then O'Reilly gave us the benefit of his mastery of economic laws: "....during the Clinton years, with all the R&D that companies made a lot of money. BUT NOT THE POOR PEOPLE WHO ARE ILL-EDUCATED OR ADDICTED. THEY DIDN'T MAKE ANY MONEY BECAUSE THEY NEVER WILL MAKE ANY MONEY because you can't compete in that circumstance. You cannot compete if you are addicted and ill-educated. All right."

June 20, 2004:

Thank you, again, O'Reilly, for showing us the benefits of your Christian upbringing. And tell us again how some methods of torture are justified. What was that again about Christ driving the moneylenders from the Temple? What was that again about "Blessed are the meek and the poor, for they shall inherit the earth?"

But no matter who killed Johnson, Berg, and the other Americans who were recently killed in Saudi Arabia, the blood of all those dying--Iraqi and American--is on Bill O' Reilly's as well as those war criminals he's covering up for and aligning himself with. None of the victims would be dead if O'Reilly hadn't helped Bush lie to the American people about the criminal and predatory war of colonial conquest against Iraq.

The deeper the crisis of US imperialism and the more blood on the hands of Bush, Cheney, and O'Reilly, the more these bastards become obstinate in their lies and deceit.

In his role as chief media spinmeister for the warmakers, O'Reilly continues to take his Orwellian doublespeak and Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of reality to unparalleled heights. Only it's not amusing, because people are dying as a result of his lies, and the more the responsibility for their blood points to O'Reilly's conscious complicity in Bush's war crimes, the more O' Reilly tries to blame it on those opposed to these crimes.

Quit playing word games to cover your ass, O'Reilly. People are dying. Isn't there enough blood on your hands? Have you no shame? Have you no decency? To ask these questions is to answer them.

O'Reilly's rant against the media's coverage of the Sept. 11 commission's conclusions regarding Iraq, Al Qaeda and Sept. 11 echoed Bush and Cheney's statements. They are closing ranks, circling the wagons, and coming out swinging with even bigger lies.

O'Reilly opened his June 17 Talking Points memo, "Misleading Reporting," by in forming us we should thank the No Spin Zone for pointing out the deception that was on displayin the following headlines of major newspapers across the country:

"Panel finds No Qaeda-Iraq tie" (NY Times)

"Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" (Washington Post)

"No Signs of Iraq-Al Qaeda Ties Found" (LA Times)

And just to show how fair and balanced he is, O'Reilly included the "conservative Wall Street Journal" on his list of deceivers for this contribution: "No Iraq-Al-Qaeda Link."

JUNE 21, 2004:

The above publications that O'Reilly is criticizing are capitalist newspapers, and every one of them helped Bush deceive the American public about Sept. 11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But even the headline of a prominent socialist news organ--the World Socialist Web Site--echoed what most of the world was saying about the 9/11 commission's findings: "No Evidence of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties: 9/11 commission undermines another Bush lie."

What's going on here?

Let's turn to O'Reilly for enlightenment: "But if you read below the headlines you see the Commission said something a bit different: That there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda regarding Sept. 11. That's true, but there were certainly links and ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda and that's provable."

So now it comes down to what you mean by "links and ties." O'Reilly's been obsessed with Bill Clinton for too long.

O'Reilly's trying to argue is that since there were links and ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Bush's invasion of Iraq was completely justified. America's security trumps the other two patently false rationales for the war-- WMD and liberating the Iraqi people--that even O'Reilly concedes were wrong, though he still holds out hope the WMD will be found SOMEWHERE.

But let's stop O'Reilly when he tells us what the Commission really said--that there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda regarding Sept. 11.

"That's true," O'Reilly informed us.

Oh Really O'Reilly?

Then why did Bush assert in his March 19, 2003, letter to Congress officially telling them that the invasion had begun that the war was legal under legislation authorizing force against those who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001."

Thus in his formal notification to Congress that the US was going to war, Bush directly connected the war to the Sept. 11 attacks. O'Reilly does not attempt to explain this contradiction. He can do nothing but continue lying.

The next night, during a segment called "Striking Back," O'Reilly proudly showed a clip of his buddy Cheney echoing O'Reilly's complaints about the press: " What the 'New York Times' did today was outrageous. They do a lot of outrageous things, but the headline, 'Panel Finds No Al Qaeda-Iraq Tie,' the press wants to run out and say there's a fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said....There's no conflict.'"

We'll get back to the conflict shortly, but for now recall what Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in September 2003: "If we're successful in Iraq... then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

And just what were the "ties and contacts" that O'Reilly claims vindicates Bush's war? In 1994, while in the Sudan, Bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq." However, "Iraq apparently never responded," and no "collaborative relationship" was ever established.

Every single paper that O'Reilly blasted--and the socialist Web site that's superior to them all--used the words "ties" or "links" in the context of the subheadings or text that followed--the lack of collaborative or operational links between Iraq and Al Qaeda that led to 9/11. The message that the administration and media whores like O'Reilly rammed home every chance they could before the war was that Iraq and Hussein were connected to Sept. 11. US soldiers on their way to Iraq last year were told that the attack was revenge for 9/11. When they were in Kuwait awaiting the order to invade, US troops were based in camps called Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in memory of those who died on Sept. 11

The three individuals most responsible for the fact that two thirds of the American public erroneously believe IS a connection between Iraq and Sept. 11 are George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and Bill O'Reilly!

Bush in October 2002: "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda m embers in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." False.

Bush in his Jan. 2003 State of the Union speech: "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda." False.

Bush in Feb. 20 03: "Iraq has provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training." False.

Bush from the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 3, announcing the end of major combat operations," "We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda." False.

Cheney on Sept. 14, 2003, repeated Bush's lie that Iraq was training Al Qaeda in chemical and biological warfare, said that the Iraqis were "providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization." False.

Cheney in an Oct. 2003 speech: "Saddam had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in the area of poisons, making conventional weapons." Another lie.

As late as June 14, Cheney repeated that Saddam "had long established ties with Al Qaeda." LONG ESTABLISHED TIES? One attempt by bin Laden in 1994 to use facilities in Iraq for which he was rebuffed? That does not sound like long established ties OR a relationship.

But there's O'Reilly spinning furiously for Bush and Cheney, shouting, "Ties! Contacts! Bush and I are right about the war! You're all wrong! Gotcha!"

O'Reilly quoted Bush approvingly: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraa and Saddm and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda."

Ties! Contacts! Relationships! Oh my!

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service had this to say about the above Bush gem: "This is what logicians call a tautology, or a ' useless repetition,' as the dictionary defines it, but it is also an indication of how the Bush administration is defending itself against a growing number of scandals and deceptions in which it finds itself enmeshed."

Ivan Eland of The Independent Institute is also on the right track: "But by analogy, if a charity was able to arrange an appointment with a large corporation or foundation in an attempt to get a contribution but then ultimately got rejected in its solicitation, the Bush administration's logic would co nclude that the charity and the corporation had established a philanthropic relationship."

O'Reilly is silent about the fact that Al Qaeda enjoyed far closer relationships with two key US allies--Pakistan and Saudi Arabia--than it ever did with Iraq. For nearly three years O'Reilly has not said a word about the far more tangible relationship Osama bin Laden had with the United States. He has never mentioned the fact that bin Laden was once on the CIA's payroll who received training in guerrilla warfare and bomb-making. O'Reilly has never uttered a word about the extensive business relationship between the Bush and bin Laden families, aside from scoffing at Michael Moore's attempt to publicize this fact.

But let's get back to "Misleading Reporting" and the rest of O'Reilly's Orwellian offensive to spin the latest blows to Bush's credibility into a vindication for the war criminal in the White House.

"The smoking gun is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda leader who found his way to Baghdad after being severely wounded fighting against American forces in Afghanistan."

JUNE 29-JULY 22, 2004:

O'Reilly's smoking gun is likely a corpse, which sums up his worth as a journalist. Zarqawi was reportedly killed in a US bombing raid last year in Northern Iraq, according to several Iraqi groups. Zarqawi has become Washington's latest bogeyman, leaving bin Laden and Hussein in the dust. He's the Number One Terrorist, the Number One Cause of all the violence in Iraq and the entire world. He's here; he's there; he's everywhere. He's the Islamic Flying Dutchman and Scarlet Pimpernel all rolled into one.
If Zarqawi's taken out, the Iraqi resistance will crumble, because there is no Iraqi resistance, only foreign terrorists like Zarqawi, former Baathists, and Shiite thugs like al-Sadr. Right, just like the insurgency would end with the capture of Hussein and the murder of his two sons.

O'Reilly is today recycling lies about Zarqawi's alleged links to Iraq and al Qaeda told by Sec. of State Powell last February to the UN Security Council. Zarqawi's biography is sketchy. He's apparently a 36 year old Jordanian born Palestinian who fought in Afghanistan with the CIA against the pro-Moscow Kabul regime in the 1980s. Powell claimed he was linked to Al Qaeda and had fought in Afghanistan but left after the Taliban's defeat to establish a terrorist base in Iraq.

"Zarqawi arrived in Iraq in May of 2002 and had surgery in an Iraqi hospital, run by --are you ready-- Uday Hussein. [So what? One of Uday's jobs was running the hospitals.] I believe that may be a tie, but there's more." [There'd better be, because O'Reilly has established NOTHING here.]

"Next, the Al Qaeda big shot--who was wanted by the USA--traveled to Lebanon to meet with leaders of Hezbollah." [Al Qaeda big shot? That's an unproven assertion contradicted by foreign intelligence services. More on that soon.]

"A short time after that meeting, in October of 2002, Lawrence Foley, an American official was assassinated in Jordan. The arrested killers said Zarqawi was involved in the plot."

Here O'Reilly obediently passes along as fact Powell's unproven and discredited claims about Zarqawi: After receiving medical care for his wounded leg, Zarqawi recuperated while establishing with Hussein's approval a vast terrorist cell in Iraq--a cell that assassinated Foley and oversees the larger terrorist enterprise involving over 100 agents in the Middle East and Europe, and continues its terrorist activities in Iraq today.

Powell and O'Reilly don't have a whit of evidence that Zarqawi was involved in the Foley assassination. What does O'Reilly produce as his backup? "The arrested killers said Zarqawi was involved in the plot"--a testimony that was very likely coerced by torture or "harsh interrogation measures." I believe there's a breaking Newsweek story about a leading Al Qaeda operative who has recanted his previous testimony about Al Qaeda involvement with poison gas production--further weakening Powell and Bush's already discredited case.

"Zarqawi wound up back in Iraq after the assassination of Foley and met up with the Ansar al-Islam group, which operated in Northern Iraq and is AFFILIATED with Al Qaeda." [emphasis added]

O'Reilly left out a few pertinent facts here: 1) Al-Ansam's base in northern Iraq was located in US-controlled Kurdish territory, well beyond Hussein's jurisdiction. Al-Islam is an Islamic fundamentalist group in Iraqi Kurdistan that has been fighting the secular Patriotic Union of Kurdistan--a pro-US Kurdish group. [Secular group? Then O'Reilly should be aligned with al-Ansam!] In February 2003 the Brussels-based International Crisis Group issued a report that stated: "No independent so urces have ever been presented to corroborate the link between Ansar and al Qaeda." It's true that some Ansar defectors have said the group's leaders visited Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, but that didn't "automatically translate into supervision over or direction of Ansar al-Islam's activities by bin Laden's network. An Ansar leader said that his organization saw itself as "a part of the Kurdish national movement," not part of Al Qaeda.

JULY 14, 2004:

This original CIA/O'Reilly story that Zarqawi's leg had been amputated in Baghdad has now been reversed in order to square with the latest fiction that Zarqawi himself beheaded Nick Berg on that videotape. Once the CIA became aware that alternative Web sites were reporting that Berg's beheader showed no signs of an amputated leg, they changed their tune. Now Zarqawi didn't have his leg amputated in Baghdad. How could he have? The beheader wasn't an amputee!

These spooks from Langley are regular Maxwell Smarts.

O'Reilly, as usual, ignored all of these complexities.

"Zarqawi wound up back in Iraq after the assassination of Foley and met up with the Ansar al-Islam group, which operated in Northern Iraq and is AFFILIATED with Al Qaeda." [emphasis added]

O'Reilly left out a few pertinent facts here: 1) Al-Ansam's base in northern Iraq was located in US-controlled Kurdish territory, well beyond Hussein's jurisdiction. Al-Ansam is an Islamic fundamentalist group in Iraqi Kurdistan that has been fighting the secular Patriotic Union of Kurdistan--a pro-US Kurdish group. [Secular group? Then O'Reilly should be aligned with al-Islam!] In February 2003 the Brussels-based International Crisis Group issued a report that stated: "No independent sources have ever been presented to corroborate the link between Ansar and al Qaeda." It's true that some Ansar defectors have said the group's leaders visited Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, but that didn't "automatically translate into supervision over or direction of Ansar al-Islam's activities by bin Laden's network. An Ansar leader said that his organization saw itself as "a part of the Kurdish national movement," not part of Al Qaeda.

"In January 2003, several Ansar terrorists were arrested in Britain and charged with planning to put ricin in the military food supply. Some of those terrorists fingered Zarqawi in the plot."

That O'Reilly is still repeating a bogus story, a complete hoax that has been long exposed in even the capitalist press, confirms his status as a tabloid journalist. There was a ricin terror alert in London in January 2003, allegedly ordered by Zarqawi. The ricin had allegedly been found in a London apartment. It was actually to be used in an attack on the London subways. The British claimed the ricin was made in the Ansar camp in Northern Iraq, where Powell had claimed in his UN speech that Zarqawi established a "poison and complosive training camp center."

Powell's lie started unraveling right away. First the location of the camp was wrong, despite all the satellite aerial photographs he paraded before the Security Council. Then Ansar opened the "poison camp" for inspections by Western reporters. The NY Times wrote: "They found a wholly unimpressive place--a small and largely undeveloped cluster of buildings that appeared to lack substantial industrial capacity. For example, the structures do not have plumbing and had only the limited electricity supplied by a generator. Roughly half the buildings in the compound appeared to have recently been civilian homes, and one contained the sandals of a small child. The remaining buildings were in military or political use, serving as fighters' barracks or as a television and radio station for the Islamic party."

This is where Zarqawi made the ricin that allegedly ended up in a London kitchen, according to Powell in February 2003 and Bill O'Reilly to this day. No chemicals, no equipment, not even running water. And when US Special Forces raided the camp in March 2003, they, too, found no evidence of ricin or anything resembling biological or chemical weapons.

There was a ricin scare in the US in February 2003, when a suspicious white powder was found in a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist which allegedly was ricin. Zarqawi was immediately tagged as the culprit, although it's far more likely Frist's ricin was related to the ricin that was reported missing from a facility in Alabama!

"Right now [June 17, 2004], Zarqawi is believed to be in Fallujah working with some of Saddam's former generals in planning terror attacks. Just last week he took credit for killing 13 people in a bombing."

JULY 18, 2004:

Someone CLAIMING to be Zarqawi took credit for the bombing. Here O'Reilly is doing what he's paid to do--act as a mouthpiece for the capitalist rulers. Zarqawi is "believed to be in Fallujah." Believed by whom? US intelligence? The same intelligence that said Iraq had WMD and allowed Sept. 11?

Since last month, the US has used Zarqawi's alleged presence in Falluja to conduct 6 airstrikes against that town, killing dozens of Iraqi civilians, including at least 14 in the latest raid on July 17. This has not satisfied O'Reilly's lust for blood. The Christian O'Reilly has been enthusiastically urging Washington to take off the gloves and inflict a bloodbath on Falluja, claiming that Zarqawi's presence there validates Bush's position that Iraq is a central front in the "war on terrorism."

However, Washington has not produced a shred of evidence confirming Zarqawi's in Falluja, beyond claiming US intelligence says he's there--and that proves nothing, because the credibility of US intelligence is worth dishwater. And from the first airstrike last month, Fallujans have protested the murderous raids and denied Zarqawi is among them.

In the first two strikes, F-16s fired missiles into civilian homes, not Zarqawi "safe-houses" as the Pentagon claimed. The first raid killed 22m embers of an extended family, including three women and five children. The British newspaper Observer reported that a Falluja dictor, Fadhil al-Baddrani, testified that the home of Mohammed Hamadi, an elderly farmer, was completely destroyed. "The whole family is gone. The blast was so powerful it blew them to pieces. We could only recognize the women by their long hair."

Witnessed told Al-Jazeera that US pilots waited for people to start r ummaging through the rubble before launching a second missile. One resident said: 'The number of casualties is so high because after the first missile we jumped to rescue the victims. The second missile killed those trying to carry out the rescue."

Doesn't everyone feel safer already?

Thousands of outraged Fallujans condemned the airstrike in militant protests. They chanted anti-US slogans and accused Washington of erroneously saying Zarqawi was in their town as an excuse to attack it. One banner read: "The lie about Zarqawi is like the one about weapons of mass destruction." A Fallujan mosque leader told the AP: "America is accusing us of (harboring) al-Zarqawi...among us. We assure America, and the world, that there are valiant, embattled men in Falluja who need neither al-Zarqawi or others to defend Falluja."

After the third air strike at the end of June, Falluja resistance fighters released a video statement stating: "We know that this talk about Zarqawi and the fighters is a game the American invader forces are playing to strike Islam and Muslims in the city of mosques, steadfast Falluja."

O'Reilly failed to tell his audience that Shiite and Sunni leaders of the resistance sharply criticized the beheadings and bombings carried out in Zarqawi's name. Most Iraqis disassociate themselves from Zarqawi's group, correctly seeing its tactics as playing into the hands of the occupation forces. One group of resistance fighters have vowed to drive Zarqawi's forces from Iraq.

Falluja police chief Colonel Sadar al-Janabi told Al-Jazeera that "This was an attack on a family in a house and it killed all of them. There are no signs that people like Zarqawi were in the house or in Falluja. This attack was conducted without any co-ordination with us."

Even the Falluja Brigade, the paramilitary force set up by Washington to pacify the rebellious town, was kept in the dark about Zarqawi's alleged presence and the air strikes. Brigadier Nouri Aboud of the Brigade told Reuters that there was no evidence of Zarqawi anywhere. "We inspected the damage, we looked through the bodies of the women and children and elderly. This was a family. There is no sign of foreigners having lived in the house. Zarqawi and his men have no presence in Falluja."

After the third air strike several weeks ago, Washington media whores like O' Reilly obediently parroted the War Party's line that the missiles had destroyed a Zarqawi safe house in al-Askeri, killing 15 to 25 members of his network. But Al-Jazeera reporters who were at the site said that the missile had hit a vacant house and wounded four people in the house next door. And when Al-Askeri's mayor took an Associated Press reporter to the destroyed home, the only casualty was a dead rabbit on the front lawn, prompting the mayor to say: "If this animal is a member of the al-Zarqawi group, then I congratulate the Americans on their victory."

The fifth and sixth attacks (July 5 and July 17, respectively) took place after the "handover" of "sovereignty" to the US-installed tyrant, Ayad Allawi Allawi is the former Baathist and Hussein general who organized car bombings in Baghdad during the 1990s when he was working for US and British intelligence. It's been reported recently that he shot five prisoners dead. Allawi is just the type of ruthless killer that Bush needs to crush the Iraqi resistance. Bill O'Reilly likes him, too.

Bush and O'Reilly would love nothing more than to see Allawi do their dirty work for them by drowning the Falluja resistance in blood, along with the martial law he has in store for other trouble spots.

They hate Falluja not because Zarqawi is hiding there, but because the town is the headquarters and symbol of Iraq's armed resistance against the occupation. Zarqawi may not be there, but each murderous air raid is recruiting a new generation of national liberation fighters determined to drive the imperialist invaders from their sacred soil.

Undeterred by the facts, O'Reilly pressed on with his disingenuous attempt to link Zarqawi and al-Qaeda to Iraq in his June 21 Talking Points, "The War Over How to Fight Al Qaeda Continues."

"Governor Thomas Kean says definitely there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. And he's the 9/11 investigative chief, but that's not enough for 'The Times,' which continues to deny the Iraq-Al Qaeda association.

JULY 22, 2004:

The essay below entitled, "O'Reilly Caught Lying about 9/11: with a snip/snip here..." revealed how O'Reilly was caught dead in his tracks editing Kean's comment to fit the Factor's spin that Bush was right to invade Iraq. What Kean and the commission said was that the tenuous and sketchy "contacts" between Hussein and al Qaeda during the '90s "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," and that there was "no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Here O'Reilly is blatantly attempting to throw dust in his viewers' eyes and reshape the axis of the argument. "Definitely a connection" between Baghdad and al Qaeda is counterposed to denying "an association" between them. The Times and the rest of the world were talking precisely about a collaborative relationship, because that was the misinformation that Bush in part sold the war on to the US public.

As the World Socialist Web Site put it:

"The political preparation for the war with Iraq involved the systematic poisoning of American public opinion with three major lies: "that Iraq had close ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist organization; that Iraq had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; and that Iraq might supply those weapons to Osam bin Laden, thus creating the conditions for a chemical, biological or even nuclear version of Sept. 11.

"In the crudest presentation of this case, the three lies were amalgamated into a single, all-encompassing fabrication, linking Saddam Hussein directly to September 11, 2001. When asked about opinion polls showing that two-thirds of Americans believed that Iraq was responsible for the terrorist attacks, Cheney said last year, "It's not surprising that people make that connection.' "

Bush--and O'Reilly--tied Sept. 11 to the invasion of Iraq from the beginning, and they are still doing so by falsely claiming Iraq is the central front in the "war on terrorism." THERE WAS NO TERRORISM IN IRAQ UNTIL WASHINGTON INVADED THAT NATION.

Speaking of Cheney, O'Reilly is characteristically silent on the two public clashes that occurred between the vice president and the 9/11 commission. After the commission report was released, Cheney blasted the media for its "outrageous" coverage that the findings proved Bush was wrong. But it was Cheney who was outrageously wrong. When CNBC correspondent Gloria Borger confronted Cheney about his repeated claim that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001--a claim debunked by the 9/11 report--Cheney snapped: "No, I never said that. I never said that. Absolutely not."

Wrong. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said this to NBC's Tim Russert: "It's been pretty well confirmed that Atta did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service."

Borger: "This report [9/11 panel] says it didn't happen."

Cheney: "No. This report says they haven't found any evidence."

Wrong. The 9/11 commission staff report found that after examing all the evidence, "we do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

Cheney also told Borger that the commission's staff report talked about Iraq and al-Qaeda only regarding the Sept. 11 attacks and "did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda in other areas, in other ways."

False. Staff Statement No. 15 reviewed the entire history of al-Qaeda, not just the Sept. 11 attacks. While it found evidence of al-Qaeda relations with Sudan and Afghanistan, it found none with Iraq.

Cheney then acknowledged to Borger that the report did rule out a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda; he just disagreed with that conclusion.

"Do you know something things that the commission does not know?" Borger asked.

"Probably," Cheney responded arrogantly.

The next day Kean and fellow panel chairman Senator Lee Hamilton asked Cheney to provide them with that information. Three weeks later, Kean and Hamilton publicly rebuked Cheney: "The 9/11 commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks."

Back to O' Reilly and Zarqawi.

O'Reilly: "This is from their [NY Times] editorial: 'Mr. Bush has also used a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda...but the Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told the Senate this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime, nor under the direction of Al Qaeda.'

"Well, 'Talking Points' found that editorial to be very strange, very strange indeed because in the testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 11, 2003, one month before the start of the Iraq war, Tenet said this: "Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of Usama bin Laden."

O'Reilly then crowed, "You can look it up. Maybe Tenet contradicted himself, but 'The New York Times' owes it to the readers to report the terrorism story accurately. And the paper is simply not doing that."

Tenet told the US Senate committee in February 2003 that Zarqawi was not "under the control" of Hussein and that his group was independent of Al Qaeda. The NY Times reported that a senior German intelligence official was skeptical of a link between Zarqawi and Baghdad. "We have been investigating Mr Zarqawi for some time. We need to examine the evidence that Powell has drawn from, and it is possible that he knows things that we don't. But as of yet we have seen no indication of a direct link between Zarqawi and Baghdad."

The Guardian assessed the sentiments of British intelligence officials this way: "[W]ell-placed officials in Whitehall insisted there was no solid evidence of any link between Zarqawi and the recent spate of arrestsof suspect terrorists in western Europe, let alone a link with al Qaeda. Though they said that Zarqawi was certainly an important figure, and had some knowledge or chemical warfare, sourceswith access to intelligence say they were not aware he had even visited northeastern Iraq. He had been travelling around the Middle East but was 'not in Iraq,' a well placed source insisted."

Just for O'Reilly's sake, French intelligence weighed in to weaken Bush's case. Powell's diagram allegedly depicting Zarqawi's European network included two pictures of Islamic m ilitants who had been arrested in Paris last year. But French intelligence Agence France Presse that the two men were Chechen terrorists with no relations with Zarqawi.

Agence France Presse also reported that a "high-ranking" U.S.military official" anonymously told them that "Saddam did not have any love for non-Iraqi Arabs. We have found no evidence he cooperated with Zarqawi himself."

British journalist Jason Burke directly contradicts Bush's accusations about Zarqawi, arguing that Zarqawi is not an al-Qaeda leader or member, and was certainly no compatriot of Hussein. "Zarqawi is not an al-Qaeda operative. If there is a link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein he is not it."

O'Reilly blamed the Times' inaccurate reporting for the confusion and lack of resolve among Americans in fighting the terrorists. Translation: O'Reilly's mad because he knows that the fact public support for the war and Bush has plummeted means fewer people are listening to O'Reilly.

July 12, 2004--Rule Number One in the Bill O'Reilly School of Falsification is that the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. This is the alleged historical foundation upon which O'Reilly wages his nightly war against secularists like the ACLU bent on driving "spiritualism" from the public arena. The fact that the one unambiguous statement in the US Constitution on religion--the First Amendment--specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion, is not enough for O'Reilly, who continues to erroneously assert that America is a Christian nation.

In researching my response to Christopher Hitchens' reactionary article, "To the Shores of Tripoli" (Time, July 5, 2004), I discovered further evidence that O'Reilly is disingenuously hijacking US history when he claims the American constitutional republic was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. In 1797, President John Adams signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary. Known today as the Treaty With Tripoli, this document had been negotiated in an  unsuccessful attempt to halt the plundering of US ships by pirates from the Barbary States of Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli (Libya today).

Article 11 of the Treaty With Tripoli reads as follows:

"AS THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS NOT IN ANY SENSE FOUNDED ON THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims], and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan [Mohammedan) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religions opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." [emphasis added]

This is not just some informal correspondence among the Founding Fathers discussing their personal religious beliefs, as O'Reilly is fond of citing as historical backup for his absurd claim that America is a Christian nation. This is the law of the land. This is an official governmental proclamation signed by the President of the United States. Article VI, Section II of the Constitution clearly states:

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; AND ALL TREATIES MADE, OR WHICH SHALL BE MADE, UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE UNITED STATES, SHALL BE THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." [emphasis added]

What say you, O'Reilly?

July 1, 2004--Real nice, O'Reilly. Classy guy. What an apt thing to say when two Americans and a Korean were just beheaded and others face the same horrific end. The fact that the words "Off with his head" came so freely from O'Reilly's lips shows both his moral depravity and political desperation over Bush's freefall and Michael Moore's phenomenal success with "Fahrenheit 9/11."

This latest scandalous O'Reilly comment came at the conclusion of a segment he'd done with fellow Fox right-winger John Gibson. Gibson had whined over his censure by the BBC for saying their reporter, Andrew Gilligan, had lied in his report about whistleblower Dr. David Kelly and that the BBC then defended the lie. We'll leave aside for a moment Gibson's erroneous and ideologically based spin of Gilligan's reporting, the thrust of which was accurate. The focus should be on O'Reilly choosing to tease Gibson for the slap on the wrist he received from the BBC by saying "Off with his head" at a time when beheadings are occurring or looming on a regular basis.

Go ahead, O'Reilly. Keep revealing your character. Show us the benefits of your Christian upbringing.

This offensive outburst comes from the individual who self-righteously claimed he had a monopoly on grieving for Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, and Kim Sun-il, while the rest of the elite media ignored them to harp on Abu Ghraib. COSMOS LEFT won't speak for the capitalist press, but this Web site, the World Socialist Web Site, and many others condemned the beheadings and grieved for the victims and families, proving that human beings can oppose gruesome killings and torture at the same time, unlike Bill O'Reilly and his Kool-Aid followers.

O'Reilly will no doubt defend his callous and insensitive comment by saying that he was only fooling around, just as he claimed he was only fooling around when he accused liberal journalist Eric Alterman of being a "confidante of Fidel Castro." I'm sure Alterman's attorneys are laughing hysterically as they prepare their defamation lawsuit against Bill O'Reilly.

For the record, COSMOS LEFT would consider it a badge of honor to be a confidante of Fidel, but we'll settle for being an admirer, supporter, and COMRADE of the Cuban revolutionary leader and the millions of working people he represents (see "In Defense of Cuba" on this site).

O'Reilly opened tonight's program with an unusually sophisticated insight from the Factor host regarding today's arraignment of Saddam Hussein. Aside from panting for Hussein to be hung as quickly as possible, O'Reilly spent most of the segment obsessing over Hussein's appearance, wondering if the "Queer Guy" had been his groomer.

O'Reilly was just getting warmed up. Later he spun Hezbollah's supposed endorsement of "Fahrenheit 9/11" to equate Michael Moore and his supporters with terrorism. The previous night O'Reilly FALSELY claimed that Moore had equated those doing the beheadings in Iraq with America's Revolutionary Minutemen.

Let's review: "Off with his head," homophobia, fabrication, and McCarthyite slander, all in less than one hour.

Keep it up, O'Reilly, and you'll win another Peabody Award. Or was that a Polk?

June 28-July 17, 2004--Bill O'Reilly wasted no time using last week's reunion between Yankee pitcher Jose Contreras and his family to smear Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. In a June 23 segment entitled, "A Family's Dramatic Escape from Cuba," O'Reilly gave a one-sided, simplistic analysis of the issue of Cuban immigration that erroneously placed all blame on Havana for separating families while ignoring a breaking story that Bush is limiting Cuban-Americans' right to visit Cuba and send money and gifts to relatives there.

JULY 2, 2004:

O'Reilly must have thought this story would be all wrapped up in a box for him. It looked like easy pickings for him--the bad, bad dictator keeping a family separate versus the good, good New York Yankees pushing family values along with Mom, apple pie and America's pasttime.

"...in this age of vicious terrorism, sometimes we forget there are still countries in the world that deny even basic human rights to citizens. Such a place is Cuba, where the villainous dictator, Fidel Castro, keeps his people in a tightly guarded police state."

If he were an honest journalist, O'Reilly would report that Cuba has been victimized by US backed terrorism for over 40 years, including the bombing of a Cubana airliner in 1976 that killed 73 people, a heinous crime executed by two CIA-sponsored antiCastro exiles named Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles. Bosch is a free man today because he was pardoned by George H.W. Bush in 1989.

If he were an honest journalist, O'Reilly would report that five Cubans are currently doing 15 years to life because they infiltrated similar antiCastro groups and told Washington about the terrorist acts these criminals were planning.

Let's review: Bush Senior freed a convicted terrorist who blew up an airliner and killed 73, while Junior imprisoned Cuban patriots who were trying to prevent terrorism.

Way to stay on top of a story, O'Reilly. It's all part of that fair and balanced approach.

If he were an honest journalist, O'Reilly would report that unlike the US, Cuba is one of those countries that provide their citizens the basic human rights of free education, free health care, pensions and full employment.

Some "closely guarded police state"--the entire country is armed, and Fidel can walk freely among the people. Bush should be so lucky.

Yes, the stage was set for another Factor masterpiece. Let's listen to the glorified stagehand set things up.

"New York Yankee pitcher Jose Contreras defected from Cuba two years ago, but his wife and two young daughters were not allowed to join him in the USA. Castro personally blocking any reunion. He's quite a guy."

But as usual, we discover matters are more complex than O'Reilly's cartoonish analysis. Dismissing the rumor that the Yankees played a role in the "dramatic escape" that reunited the Contreras family, general manager Brian Cashman told Jack Curry of the NY Times: "We were not involved at all."

Curry writes: "Contreras said he felt guilty during the first year he was in the United States because it was his choice to defect, SO HE SAID IT WAS HIS FAULT THAT HE WAS SEPARATED FROM HIS FAMILY. [emphasis added] He said he asked himself all the time if he had made the right decision." [NY Times, June 26, 2004]

Contreras had good reasons to question his decision to defect. Aside from leaving his family behind, Contreras was well aware he had deserted his nation. He had deserted his people and the Revolution. That had to weigh on his mind, particularly in view of what he had told ESPN two years when the network interviewed him from his hometown in Pinar del Rio on the day he pitched in the Cuban World Series:

"I think I have an infinite number of reasons to keep playing here in Cuba. I come from a humble family. I think I owe this to the Revolution. It's helped me. I've been world champion, Olympic champion and Central American champion, thanks to the Revolution. That's why I'm here. I owe this."

You got that right, Jose. Before the Revolution, professional baseball didn't reach towns like Pinar del Rio, and Black players had little hope for reaching the big leagues. Contreras' father cut sugar cane in the morning and played on the plantation's amateur team in the afternoon. Contreras Senior, a strong supporter of the Revolution, watched his son become an Olympic champion and national hero. The elder Contreras agreed with Fidel from the beginning that sports should be of the people, by the people, and for the people. As Castro put it in 1966:

"Professional athletics are the antithesis of sport, a cultural instrument to ruin sports, and only our revolutionary concept of sport will be an instrument to educate our culture, an instrument of well-being."

Given what the profit motive has done to sports in the United States, that sounds rather refreshing. There's little doubt there are many in the US who would not disagree with Fidel, particularly those involved in high school and collegiate athletics.

Cuba's Revolution has produced thousands of champions over the years and firmly established the country as a world power in sports. ESPN's Tom Farrey writes: "Unlike in the major leagues, players in the Cuban league usually represent the communities in which they grew up. The vast majority will never be traded -- a feature Contreras seemed to appreciate as a matter of personal dignity. 'Besides the roots I've put down in this country, I won't let anyone treat me like a piece of merchandise, like something they can buy today and sell to someone else tomorrow.' "

JULY 8, 2004--You are now, Jose. You are now. No wonder he was up nights wondering if he made the right decision to desert his family and country.

But let's get back to that dramatic escape and learn, as O'Reilly did, about the less than humane nature of US immigration policy.

"But now the family has escaped dramatically. And joining us now from Miami to tell us how that happened is Joe Garcia, the executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation "[a rabidly right wing, antiCastro outfit dedicated to a capitalist counterrevolution in Cuba, something O'Reilly neglected to tell his audience].

Garcia explained the family was smuggled out of Cuba in a daring scheme that almost cost Contreras his entire family. "21 people came in that boat....And as they were heading out, apparently somewhere al ong the line, they ran into Coast Guard cutters. the boat turned off its lights and went for the gold....they drove over three hours and they beached themselves at Big Pine Key, which is one of the Keys on your way to Key West in South Florida. And they're free."

So smugglers put Contreras' wife and two kids along with 18 others on a speedboat and whisked them out of Cuba, evading Coast Guard cutters and running aground near Big Pine Key, 108 miles southwest of Miami.

O'Reilly: "But let's take it step by step, Mr. Garcia....Number one, to get in a power boat like that, and I used to work in Miami, and I know the area. [I, I, I. Right, we know you've been everywhere and know everything, O'Reilly.] You got to have a lot of money. You got to--this isn't a cheap thing to do, correct?"

Garcia confirmed it cost from ten to fifteen thousand a person to get aboard a smuggler's boat. O'Reilly reveals that one of his sources said it could have cost Contreras, "who's a wealthy individual now playing for the Yankees, $150,000 to get his family out of there. Is that possible?"

Garcia: "Oh, very possible. I mean, if this was the main objective of whoever helped these these folks out [like those NY Yankees?], and clearly they were the golden nugget of this group."

O'Reilly: "...Now who are these smugglers? Are they Cuban nationals? Are they people who live in Cuba? [O'Reilly, perhaps sensing this one might not pan out the way he planned it, instantly tries to pin the negative-sounding smugglers on Cuba.] Garcia quickly brought him down to earth.

Garcia: "No, no, these guys are both U.S. residents. They were in jail. They--from what we understand, they've been released but no prosecution or no indictment has been handed down yet." [June 26, 2004]

Yes, the two smuggling suspects had been detained for questioning, but the delays in their identification and indictment were highly unusual for this type of case.

Carlos Castillo from the US attorney's office in Miami, told the NY Times that he had no updates on the case and referred calls to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. A spokesperson for that office said: "The matter is still under review by the Department of Homeland Security." [Uh-oh.]

When asked why the suspected smugglers had not been identified, she said: "We look at everything on a case-by-case basis. We want to be certain we look at everything." [COSMOS LEFT will follow up on the status of the smugglers--July 8, 2004]

JULY 17, 2004:

When asked who had organized and funded the dangerous escape, Contreras was less than convincing: "I don't know exactly how the trip was planned out, but I prefer not to talk about that."

Translation: I know but I'm not telling.

O'Reilly: "...Now who are these smugglers? Are they Cuban nationals? Are they people who live in Cuba? [O'Reilly, perhaps sensing this one might not pan out the way he planned it, instantly tries to pin the negative-sounding smugglers on Cuba.] Garcia quickly brought him down to earth.

Garcia: "No, no, these guys are both U.S. residents. They were in jail. They--from what we understand, they've been released but no prosecution or no indictment has been handed down yet." [June 26, 2004]

Yes, the two smuggling suspects had been detained for questioning, but the delays in their identification and indictment were highly unusual for this type of case.

Carlos Castillo from the US attorney's office in Miami, told the NY Times that he had no updates on the case and referred calls to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. A spokesperson for that office said: "The matter is still under review by the Department of Homeland Security." [Uh-oh.]

When asked why the suspected smugglers had not been identified, she said: "We look at everything on a case-by-case basis. We want to be certain we look at everything." [COSMOS LEFT will follow up on the status of the smugglers--July 8, 2004]

O'Reilly and Garcia then establish that the smugglers were Cuban-Americans residents of Florida.

O'Reilly: "They get the boat. They go to Cuba and pick these people up at an assigned point. It's all coordinated." [Try not to be overwhelmed by this cutting edge journalism.]

O'Reilly: "They have an underground there, right, that coordinates this stuff?"

Garcia: "I think it's more than an underground. I think clearly, someone reached out, had to have reached out to the family. You know, Cuba doesn't have as many patrol boats as it used to. Most of Cuba's patrol boats can't keep up with the fast type of boat that they use here." [Remember this when the US justifies its invasion of Cuba by claiming the island is a powerful military threat to its neighbors.]

Garcia speculated that in some smuggling cases people in the Cuban government might be involved, but he didn't t hink that was the case here with the Contreras'.

O'Reilly then offered the type of advice that's on his mind: "You could bribe them.....I mean, if you have $150,000..."

Garcia: "I don't think this is the case here."

O'Reilly: "...floating around, to get these people out. That's a lot of cash..."

Garcia: "Goes a long way..." [These guys are practically screaming that Contreras and the Yankees pulled this off!]

O'Reilly then got to the crux of the matter as the segment concluded: "...if Cuban refugees reach U.S. soil, they're here. But if the Coast Guard catches them before they put their hand on the sand, they go back. Right?"

Garcia: "They go back. That's exactly how the policy works, which is a very dangerous policy. Because in this case, these guys were caught three hours out. And they just turned out the lights and went for the gold."

And risked putting Contreras' wife and kids in the same "boat," as Elian Gonzalez's mother.

O'Reilly lightened the load with a sports analogy: "They beat them to the goal post."

Garcia offered in kind: "Beat them to the beach."

O'Reilly: "Right."

Garcia: "Yes, that's right." [These two would have given Lincoln and Douglas a run for their money in the eloquence department.]

O'Reilly: "It's an amazing story that our government is still playing that kind of a game."

Garcia: "It's a ridiculous story."

It may be a game in his juvenile mind, but it's a matter of life and death for Cuban immigrants who are lured by the irresponsible and deadly US policy of "wet foot"/dry foot" that had just been discussed by host and guest.

O'Reilly con cluded the segment with a characteristically classless swipe at Fidel that once again revealed his solid Irish Catholic upbringing: "And to Fidel Castro, you know, the sooner you depart this earth, the better."

Fidel does and says more in one three hour speech than O'Reilly has in his entire bombastic charade of a "career." Fidel is an outstanding working class leader revered by millions of toilers the world over. O'Reilly's an unprincipled windbag who gets paid millions for lying and hatemongering every night. We've been blessed with Fidel's longevity. May he live another 20 years. O'Reilly can be sure that when he dies, there will be hundreds of MoveOn and other parties all over the world celebrating his demise.

While the segment ended, the issues underlying the story didn't, though as usual Factor viewers were denied a full debate of these issues because this undermine O'Reilly's spin, and he makes up the No-Spin Zone rules, remember.