Wisdom from Bill O'Reilly

One thing about Bill O'Reilly and Faux News: They never cease to entertain. Here's this from Daily Kos:

Bill O'Reilly on teen pregnancies
by kos

Tue Sep 02, 2008 at 01:50:28 PM PDT

He was for blaming the parents before he was against it.

On the pinhead front, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. The sister of Britney says she is shocked. I bet.

Now most teens are pinheads in some ways. But here the blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously have little control over her or even over Britney Spears. Look at the way she behaves.

Last night, O'Reilly was beside himself that anyone would publicly discuss Bristol Palin's pregnancy.

Then again, hypocrite extraordinaire O'Reilly never met a glass house he didn't shatter.

Indeed. One of the great joys of the McCain camp's bizarre selection of Sarah Palin as their VP candidate is watching right-wingnuts trip over themselves to explain away all of the hypocrisy that the selection brings with it. O'Reilly's backpedaling above, for instance. Or various local and national GOP politicians trying to explain that now "experience" doesn't really matter at all...never mind what they've been saying about Barack Obama all these months.

Amazingly, they seem capable of doing all of this with a straight face, which makes me think they've been at it so long that they really don't know what lies, dissembling, hypocrisy, and smears are anymore!

"Fair and Balanced," Tee-Hee

In case there's anyone who actually believes that Faux News is really "news" and not just the propaganda arm of the GOP, here's this:

"LATEST NEWS" item on FoxNews.com front page linked not to news story, but to Republican blog post

Summary: The front page of FoxNews.com contained a headline under the "LATEST NEWS" tab that read "Report: Over 400 Scientists Dispute Man-Made Warming," the link to which led to a post on the blog of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) -- not a news report.

On December 21, the front page of FoxNews.com contained a headline under the "LATEST NEWS" tab that read "Report: Over 400 Scientists Dispute Man-Made Warming." However, the purported "LATEST NEWS" item did not link to a news report but, rather, to a post on "The Inhofe EPW Press Blog," the blog of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking minority member on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. (emphasis added)

Read the whole report at Media Matters for America here.

Your job now is this: 'Splain to me about "Fair and Balanced," and 'splain to me about the "liberal bias" in the media.

Al Gore

Of course, Faux News wasted no time in smearing Al Gore's Nobel Prize award (in typical right-wingnut fashion, they slung mud not only at the former vice-president but also at the Nobel Prize Committee in general, for, among other things, having previously awarded the Peace Prize to "that crazy Jimmy Carter"), but that's to be expected: As the Propaganda Ministry for the GOP, Faux News's mission is to disseminate lies and vitriol against anyone The Government deems an Undesirable--former presidents, former vice-presidents, twelve-year-old kids, anyone who voices a contrary point of view, etc.

Meanwhile, here's this little bit of sanity from Talking Points Memo:

---

On Gore

10.12.07 -- 10:05AM

By Josh Marshall

First, before any other yapping and commentary, a big congratulations to Al Gore.

There are several layers of irony and poetic justice wrapped into this honor. The first is that the greatest step for world peace would simply have been for Gore not to have had the presidency stolen from him in November 2000. By every just measure, Gore won the presidency in 2000 only to have George W. Bush steal it from him with the critical assistance of the US Supreme Court. It's worth taking a few moments today to consider where the country and world would be without that original sin of this corrupt presidency.

And yet this is a fitting bookend, with Gore receiving this accolade while the sitting president grows daily an object of greater disapproval, disapprobation and collective shame. And let's not discount another benefit: watching the rump of the American right detail the liberal bias of the Nobel Committee and at this point I guess the entire world. Fox News vs. the world.

And not to forget what this award is about even more than Gore. If half of what we think we know about global warming is true, people will look back fifty years from now on the claims that "War on Terror" was the defining challenge of this century and see it as a very sick, sad joke -- which rather sums up the Bush presidency.

But more than thinking only of what might have been, where can we go from here?

---

Nicely done, John Marshall. Expect to be smeared on Faux News in the next day or two.