Where the hell are you? Alabama?
I’d expect this for any party defending the status quo vs. changing it.
I’m pretty that a “friend of the working man” wouldn’t tell the son of someone who died in the WTC to shut up.
[quote=“Skinner”]
Where the hell are you? Alabama?[/quote]
Birmingham. A lot of my relatives are from COlumbus though. Hilliard and Grove City. I am a rare bird down here considering I was born and raised in the land of Bull Connor, barking dogs, fire hoses, crooked black politicians, crooked white politicians, and Civil Rights marches. That’s a subject I could go on about for days and possibly double my post count in a week.
He steamrolls people on his TV program and I do not enjoy it. I do not believe I have made it through one entire broadcast. Now when I watch the TV version of Bill, it seems a bit like a SNL skit. His radio show, OTOH, he is not as rushed (2 hrs. where he covers 2 topics, one per hour) and is quite dry and witty. Very much the environmentalist and protector of children. Today he was railing on SUV’s and how they were mainly the means of transportation for people with more money than sense and how horrible they are for other drivers an the environment. He all but called Lincoln Navigator drivers selfish bastards. 6 miles to the gallon and more space then any normal human could need, much less a 100 lb. woman on her cell phone with nowhere special to go.
His indignation on the radio seems much more genuine. His TV persona seems like a ramped up version for the camera. Believe me, I tried to hate him from the onset of his show on TV. I avoided it like the plague and still do for the most part (his pleasant conversation with Mrs. Ozzy was decent), but once I stopped and really listened to him on the radio, all of his “act” seemed to be based in real concern for the country’s well being.
Also, he may just have me duped. That is the conclusion most people have when I tell them I enjoy the AM radio show. For now, he bitches about the shitty illegal immigration problem and the governments complete inaction, crooked politicians on both sides, Jeb Bush ignoring the fucked up Child Services Dept. in Florida, how useless Ashcroft and that homeland security guy are, and many other issues where i completely agree with him, put on or no.
He steamrolls people on his TV program and I do not enjoy it. I do not believe I have made it through one entire broadcast. Now when I watch the TV version of Bill, it seems a bit like a SNL skit. [/quote]
The SNL O’Reilly is a lot of fun.
“Let me stop you right there. How can you say California is most the populous state? I was walking along a Malibu beach the other day and saw no one. But I come back to New York City, and I see people everywhere. For my money, New York is the most populous state. Maybe New Jersey.”
Troy
O’Reilly’s latest takes on the internet are quite amusing.
Wahh! Wahh! People say bad things about other people on the Internet and you can’t get them to say the truth!
That link with O’Reilly and Glick? I can completely understand O’Reilly’s behavior. How do you respond to someone who thinks George Bush trained the 9/11 bombers?
Where the hell are you? Alabama?[/quote]
Birmingham. A lot of my relatives are from COlumbus though. Hilliard and Grove City. I am a rare bird down here considering I was born and raised in the land of Bull Connor, barking dogs, fire hoses, crooked black politicians, crooked white politicians, and Civil Rights marches. That’s a subject I could go on about for days and possibly double my post count in a week.[/quote]
Get the hell outta here. I grew up in Hilliard and my mom still lives there. I gradauted in '89 before all the farms were sold and all the cheap housing went up. Small world. I wonder if I know any of your relatives. Hilliard was small back in the day and everybody knew everybody.
edit - sorry went off topic… :)
He didn’t say Bush trained the 9/11 bombers; he said George Bush’s father trained the afghan Mujahadeen. One of the mujahadeen was bin Laden; bin Laden was behind the bombing. It’s true that the bombers themselves weren’t trained by the CIA, but he didn’t say that. The guy behind them, bin Laden, sure was.
(edited for brevity)
GLICK: Why would I want to brutalize and further punish the people in Afghanistan…
GLICK: The people in Afghanistan…
GLICK: … didn’t kill my father.
O’REILLY: Sure they did. The al Qaeda people were trained there.
GLICK: The al Qaeda people? What about the Afghan people?
O’REILLY: See, I’m more angry about it than you are!
GLICK: So what about George Bush?
O’REILLY: What about George Bush? He had nothing to do with it.
GLICK: The director – senior as director of the CIA.
O’REILLY: He had nothing to do with it.
GLICK: So the people that trained a hundred thousand Mujahadeen who were…
O’REILLY: As respect – as respect – in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians…
GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government…
Some people really should shut up, and I think O’Reilly had every right to rethink giving that man time on national television. I’m sure there are all sorts of horrible people related to victims of 9/11.
But I just love the way O’Reilly does cut him off…
GLICK: On September 14, do you want to know what I’m doing?
O’REILLY: Shut up! Shut up!
GLICK: Oh, please don’t tell me to shut up.
O’REILLY: As respect – as respect – in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians…
GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government…
O’REILLY: Out of respect for him…
GLICK: … not the people of America.
O’REILLY: … I’m not going to…
GLICK: … The people of the ruling class, the small minority.
O’REILLY: Cut his mic. I’m not going to dress you down anymore, out of respect for your father.
But then, O’Reilly, Hannity, Druge, Limbaugh, et al are good at cutting mics.
edit: And a funny joke that I just thought up:
Q: Why don’t you hear about liberal talk show hosts muting callers?
A: Because there ARE no liberal talk show hosts!
Hah! Hah!
Hilarious. He’s a “horrible person” for pointing out something that’s perfectly true.
I didn’t say he was horrible, I just pointed out tha being a relative of a victim isn’t some magical, all encompassing pass for bad behavior for the rest of your life. You may wish to commit to the ideal that no one related to a WTC victim should ever be told to shut up, but I think that’s just a naive bit of rhetoric on your part.
Let’s all start a fund to get Jason on The O’Reilly Factor. Now that would be entertainment.
Uh, so let’s back up here:
Relative of guy who died in WTC goes on the air.
Relative says perfectly accurate things about Afghanistan & the CIA, in addiiton to editorializing that he doesn’t see a need to invade Afghanistan.
O’Reilly blows a fucking gasket, calling him a disgrace to his family, etc.
In response to this, you say:
Because, you know, O’Reilly made a mistake giving him national television airtime, what with him being absolutely correct on the facts and furthermore possessing the opinion that one-third to one-half of the country does. How dare he!
And what was “all sorts of horrible people” about, then, if you weren’t implying he was? Just a non-sequitor?
My statement made no value judgement. I said that O’Reilly can put on or take people off the air if he so chooses. It sounded to me that he was more concerned with his own reaction than stifling that Click’s voice. So he showed some restraint and put an end to it.
What I took issue with was the way you try to spin the fact that he told a relative of a victim to shut up. You’ve taken the absurd position that such a thing is unacceptable.
As to Glicks comments themselves, to each his own. I think had it continued Glick was well on his way to blaming that act of terrorism on the Bush administration, which is frankly absurd. The CIA “trained” and armed those “extremists”, well you could say that. Or you could say we support revolutionary fighters in their struggle against tyrrany. It turned around and blew up in our face, that’s for sure, and that’s gratitude for you. Glick seemed to think that made 9/11 the Bush families fault. O’Reilly thinks that’s an obscene distortion of reality, and I tend to in his direction. Afghanistan may have been mishandled, but people in the developing world have completely unrealistic expectations of America. For all we know we could have gotten into nationbuilding once the Soviets had been defeated, and still gotten a black eye from extremists who were demanding our complete withdrawal of presense in Afghanistan. It’s that Damned if you Do, Damned if you don’t think that’s been haunting the US for a while.
The issue is that O’Reilly does this all the time with anyone who dares hold a different opinion or points out his own errors or logical fallacies. If he’s going to have a “debate” show, he should actually debate, not cut off mics and tell people to shut up.
If you brought a guy on your show to give a certain point of view, let the guy say what he wants to say then tear it apart. Otherwise, what’s the point of having him on in the first place? The guy had, up to that point, restated facts. If his conclusion was, “The CIA is to blame for 9/11,” that’s when you go after that statement.
http://www.dailykos.com/archives/001498.html
On Thursday night, the Fox News talk host Bill O’Reilly, used the word “wetback” as he fumbled for the word “coyote” to describe smugglers who transport illegal immigrants over the border.
Mr. O’Reilly returned a call to say: “I was groping for a term to describe the industry that brings people in here. It was not meant to disparage people in any way.”
Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, whom Mr. O’Reilly was interviewing when the word slipped out, said in a statement: “Of course, he didn’t intend to say it. But the fact that ‘wetback’ is a part of his vocabulary and slipped out is a clear sign of where his views fall.”
Actually, I’d dispute that. Not to defend O’Reilly in this particular case (or, really, him in general since I can’t stand the way he and many other talk show hosts argue), but part of why this particular case is so unusual is that, well, it’s unusual. He does not “do this all the time”, making a habit out of cutting people off, telling them to shut up. His show is basically like Crossfire - a bunch of people shouting straw-man arguments at each other. Generally his guests give as good as they get from him, which accomplishes nothing but can sometimes provide pretty good entertainment. (I’ll admit that one of my favorite radio segments EVER was hearing Al Sharpton and Sean Hannity going at it on Sean’s radio show - it was kind of bewildering but undeniably funny.)
Again, this was an example of O’Reilly really flipping the fuck out! And I think that’s the issue here - that neither he nor anyone else I’ve seen normally resorts to this sort of stuff.