O'Lielly Can't Handle Being Called Out

It's fun watching right-wing liar Bill O'Reilly implode. Every time he gets caught publicly in a lie, in an environment he can't control, he goes all red-faced (and sometimes splotchy) and begins yelling and screaming and threatening. It's like watching Gollum in the Rankin and Bass adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit flying into a rage at having lost his "precious."

In 2003, satirist Al Franken caught O'Reilly in a whopper of a lie at a book expo. O'Reilly had previously claimed on several occasions that he'd won a Peabody award for work he'd done while on the tabloid TV show Inside Edition. Franken pointed out how the show had actually won one Polk Award for a segment that had aired a full year after O'Reilly had left the program. The host of the O'Reilly Spin Zone predictably blew his top, and later lobbied Faux News lawyers to sue Franken. Not for libel or slander, mind you, which you might think he'd do if Franken had actually said something false about O'Reilly in print. No no no, Faux News--without a shred of evidence to support such a suit--sued Al over the title of his book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair And Balanced Look At the Right. For copyright infringment.

The suit was literally laughed out of court, and rightly so.

This is the kind of vindictive piece of shit Bill O'Lielly is; when he's caught in a lie he can't spin his way out of, he tries to bully the messenger into craven submission.

Lately he's been going after MSNBC's Keith Olbermann for regularly catching the King of Spin in flat out lies and reprehensible acts ranging from racist remarks to trash-talking liberals. And since Olbermann is safe behind the protective veil of MSNBC, there's nothing O'Reilly can do, like edit out content he doesn't like (as he does for his own show). Billy-boy has even taken to trying to petition MSNBC to replace Olbermann with the less-than-stellar-ratings-bringer Phil Donahue. The boy just can't take the heat.

Up until now, this little feud between Olbermann and O'Lielly had remained generally confined to just the two of them. But now, according to media watchdog Media Matters For America, O'Reilly has now threatened a caller who phoned in to his radio show and committed the unspeakable "crime" of mentioning Olbermann's name on the air.

On the March 2 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor, host Bill O'Reilly threatened to turn over the personal information of a caller to "Fox security" because the caller mentioned MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. As Media Matters for America has noted, in recent weeks, Olbermann has repeatedly awarded O'Reilly the "Worst Person in the World" designation during his show, MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. O'Reilly has responded, on several occasions, by asserting that MSNBC "is a true ratings disaster." The caller began by telling O'Reilly, "I like to listen to you during the day." Continuing, the caller stated, "I think Keith Olbermann's show," at which point O'Reilly disconnected the call, proclaiming: "Mike is -- he's a gone guy. You know, we have his -- we have your phone numbers, by the way. So, if you're listening, Mike, we have your phone number, and we're going to turn it over to Fox security, and you'll be getting a little visit."

And this poor schmuck didn't even appear to have the chance to say anything critical yet alone in support of Olbermann.

Weird, huh? Not really.

See, O'Lielly has made a habit of being very careful to avoid naming people he has a feud with, outside the strict confines of his control. During his feud with Franken, he kept referring to the satirist as "Stuart Smalley," a character the comedian had portrayed on the TV sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. And he absolutely refuses to let anyone mention the actual names of his most hated enemies on either his TV or radio liefests.

Of course Olbermann has in fact been consistently higher in the ratings than O'Lielly would have his viewers believe. And Olbermann has enjoyed tremendous fun ripping Billy-boy's lies to ribbons on the air. Probably because the liar makes it so easy.

What is sad about the pathetic host of the All-Spin Zone is that he really has no reason to complain. Word to the unwise: if you don't like being called a liar, Billy-boy, it helps if you don't lie on a daily basis. It's simply a joke for you to whine about being called a liar if you are in fact a pathological liar. My advice to you is to grow up, quit your damned lying and spinning, and cease trying to bully people. Because it isn't working, and all it does is make you look like more of a horse's ass than you already are.

Another Scandal, Another Smoking Gun

So once again George W. Bush is exposed as being deliberately--and criminally--negligent.

Yesterday a video was released showing that Bush was indeed warned before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year that the levees would fail.

"federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage."

The mayor of New Orleans claimed to be shocked after perusing the video.

"New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on Wednesday he was shocked by video showing U.S. President George W. Bush being told the day before Hurricane Katrina hit that the city's protective levees could fail.

The tape contradicts the president's statement four days after the hurricane struck: 'I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.'"

But none of this should be at all surprising; when Bush received the fateful August 6, 2001 PDB regarding the determination of Osama bin Laden to attack within the United States, his response was to sit on his ass and let the al-Qaeda attack happen. He didn't do a damned thing.

And when this was revealed during the 9/11 Commission hearings, that was the first official sign that protecting American lives is the farthest thing from what passes for Bush's mind.

So why be surprised that he didn't bat an eye or take action when he was told that the levees were inadequate to deal with the flooding that would inevitably follow a category 5 hurricane?

With the ineffectual Democrats and their rubber-stamping counterparts in the GOP asking tepid questions about the tape, and Bush setting record low approval ratings just about every day, the obvious questions are thus: What will it take before the American people rise up and hold this traitor and his cronies accountable? When, or will, Bush, Cheney and the rest of the regime be punished for their crimes? How many good people will have to die before enough is enough and the nightmare finally ends?

The sad, plain fact is that the Bush regime does not now, has not ever, nor will it ever, care what happens to America and its citizens; protecting us is the farthest thing from their minds. All they care about is seizing and maintaining power at any cost--as long as someone else pays the price for their ambitions.

That's a tough truth to accept, even for the most die-hard Bush-haters. But you know what? Tough. The truth is rarely, if ever, pleasant. Deal with it.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. lied to get us mired in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to us. Iraq had no WMDs. It had no operational ties to al-Qaeda. But the Bushites wanted their invasion, and they were prepared to tell any lie to get it. And they did. Now that country is collapsing into all-out civil war, as was predicted by every sane person both inside and outside the federal government who had any insight into the matter.

They put corporate cronies into high positions in government, in agencies that were designed to look out for our interests and protect us from harm. And as a result, those cronies systematically dismantled those agencies--from the EPA to FEMA.

And people are dead because of it, who didn't have to die. And they will continue to die, as long as the American people in general continue to throw up their hands and give up, telling themselves that there's nothing to be done about it.

It is this acceptance of, and surrender to governmental abuse that is killing this nation. Until we all become unified in our anger at the Bush regime and its enablers in government, until we rise off our couches and do something, then all we're stuck with is "another day, another scandal, and another smoking gun."