Olbermann is seething.....Don't miss the Countdown repeat or
go to Crooks and Liars for the video....KO rips Bill O'Reilly, for AGAIN twisting the story of the WW II massacre at Malmedy,..casting the US soldiers as the villains when in fact US soldiers were the ones slaughtered. O'Reilly was debating Wes Clark and trying, in his weird way, to diffuse impact of the Haditha slaughter of innocents. Here's what Billy said
as you know US forces at Malmedy captured SS forces and shot them down....
Not only does O'Reilly get it backwards, this is not the first time old Bill has made the same mistake..
The first time was last October, when Billy (again vs. Gen. Clark) was trying to diffuse the impact of the release of the Abu Ghraib images:
O'Reilly: General! You need to look at the Malmedy massacre in World War Two, and the 82nd Airborne who did it!..
So KO went ballistic over this. Here's the transcript of Countdown.
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Why, you may ask, would it even matter if O'Reilly was correct? so what if some Americans killed some Germans in WWII? would that justify Haditha? or Abu Ghraib? you have to be really weird to buy into this, but I guess O'Reilly is trying to say that WW II was a great war even though we made some mistakes, so Iraq can also be a really great war even though we screwed up once or twice. Or maybe O'Reilly is trying to slip in a little pseudomacho "kill em all, let God sort em out..." The guy is just twisted.
But O'Reilly's twisted logic runs counter to fact. The Germans massacred the Americans (82nd Airborne) not vice versa. Let's look at the Wikipedia account of Malmedy:
On December 17, 1944, near the hamlet of Baugnez on the height half-way between the town of Malmédy and Ligneuville in Belgium, elements of Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper encountered the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. After a brief battle, the Americans surrendered. About 150 of the prisoners of war were disarmed and sent to stand in a field near the crossroads. Peiper and his leading armoured units then continued their advance.
A tank pulled up, and a truck shortly thereafter. A single SS officer pulled out a pistol and shot a medical officer standing in the front row, and then shot the man standing next to the medical officer. Other soldiers joined in with machine guns. It is not known why this happened; there is no record of an order by an SS officer. While the shooting of POWs was common on the Eastern front, such incidents were rare on the Western front.
Now Fox has changed the O'Reilly transcripts on its web sites, printing things that O'Reilly didn't say. Changing "Malmedy" to "Normandy". Now they're just making things up. This is like changing "Niger" to "Africa" in the 2003 SOTUS. There was no historical massacre committed by the US in Normandy. How Karl Zinsmeister-like.
KO was really mad; menacing. I was afraid he was gonna bite me. Send him some good vibes at kolbermann at MSNBCdotcom. And some kudos to Wes Clark. He is doing some good work, pushing the Fauxes into blatant blathering.