As everyone knows by now, Bill O'Reilly created a bit of a fuss when during his radio show on November 8th he, well,
endorsed an Al Qaeda attack on San Francisco:
Hey, you know, if you want to ban military recruiting, fine, but I'm not going to give you another nickel of federal money. You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."
And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.
Of course, that created a backlash. (Oh, and if you want to contribute to that backlash, this diary includes a list of the radio stations that carry O'Reilly's "show", as well as some of the sponsors of that show.) So O'Reilly responded Friday by clarifying that yes, he really meant exactly what he said:
I mean, look, everybody knows what's going on there. What I said isn't controversial. What I said needed to be said. I'm sitting here and I'm looking at a city that has absolutely no clue about what the world is. None. You know, if you had been hit on 9/11 instead of New York, believe me, you would not have voted against military recruting. Yet the left-wing, selfish, Land of Oz philosophy that the media and the city politicians have embraced out there is an absolute intellectual disgrace.
Okie-dokie, then.
In reality, this is pretty much part and parcel of O'Reilly's recent behavior -- he's been getting increasingly spectacular in his shrieking cries at being fact checked by media watchdogs and his now-ritualistic bashing of his perceived omnipresent enemies. So now he's reduced to invoking, and confirming, his endorsement of the notion that San Franciscans should be murdered by Al Qaeda, and that'd be just fine with him.
Why the behavior? It might have something to do with not finding WMDs; it might have something to do with the internals of Fox News right now. Or he might really just hate America and Americans (except for the ones who support him and his views, of course), exactly as much as most of us presume he does. For Bill O'Reilly, patriotism means whatever Bill O'Reilly says it does. And the rest of you can be fodder for terrorists.
I, for one, am interested in knowing which of his program's sponsors are happy being associated with an anti-American, McCarthyite ass like him.
Let's see what we can find out about O'Reilly's sponsors, and what they think of his comments. Radio and television. Ask the companies that advertise on his shows what they think of an Al Qaeda attack on San Francisco -- and whether or not they think the people of San Francisco deserve to buy products whose proceeds don't directly go towards supporting such speech. Do they think O'Reilly should apologize to San Franciscans? What are they doing towards making that happen?
I'd say we should ask Fox News for a statement about their most-vaunted pundit's speech, but we can pretty much guess what they'll say. Fox News supports anti-Americanism in all forms, so long as they can pin a waving flag logo behind it. I think it's safe to say that Fox stands behind their pundit's endorsement of an Al Qaeda attack on the political opposition.
But in the end, this is normal for modern-day conservatism. You know it, I know it, and they know it. That's why they'll defend not only O'Reilly himself, but his sentiments, to the hilt.
Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin. This new brand of distinctly anti-American hate speech, this "new" non-conservative conservatism has been working its way in a moist clump down America's pant leg for a while now.
Eventually, we'll be rid of it, but in the meantime it's still going to stink like hell.