Here’s my answer to my question in the previous post…..hat tip to Huffington Post
LETTERMAN’S O’REILLY SMACKDOWN UPDATED
What an a-hole O’Reilly is ….condescending , arrogant ….”spin free”. Yeah. He actually said after asking Letterman who ….is (somebody I didn’t recognize either), and Dave didn’t answer immediately, O’Reilly goes “Ya don’t….OK….so ” and then he said ” I don’t mean to be condescending”….after emitting that repulsive O’Reilly smart-mouthed, self-assured “Ya Don’t” …..(by the way, the name O’Reilly dropped must be an ingredient of the “non-spin packet” he circulates through his listeners (him along with Rush, Hannity, Coulter, and co.) It’s something they drudge up to link Iraq to things that work into this “manufacture of consent”
Actually, another Huffington blog post calls O’Reilly (again):
According to O’Reilly, Ansar al-Islam was a terrorist group tied to al-Qaeda who was in Iraq before the war working with Saddam Hussein. Of course, it’s a lie.
The Senate Report of Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq has concluded that Ansar al-Islam was considered a threat to the Saddam regime. They were enemies — not allies.
Source: The Blog | Cenk Uygur: O’Reilly’s Big Lie on Letterman | The Huffington Post
Did ya Know that Bill? Ya Didn’t. (Or maybe you did, but that doesn’t fit, in character with your heroes the Bush administration, ie. ignoring evidence that flatly disputes your spins)
I don’t see it exactly the way Dave does, but he makes much more sense than O’Reilly. And to O’Reilly’s question “Do you think we’re a bad country for being there, and that Bush is evil, is THAT what you’re putting forth here”. To that I say, YES. We were (and are) an EXTREMELY bad country for doing this, and Bush IS indeed an EVIL man. That sounds like blasphemy to the “civilized public discourse” but EVIL is the word for this. O’Reilly sees that as blasphemous because it’s all about him and his “persona” and his ideology with it. The United States is an empire very much like all other empires. It perpetrates massive suffering for its own interests (actually the interest of a select few, and then manufactures consent from the masses, in the name of something far more noble sounding. But for me, the “noble goals” are an empty shrine as William Cavanaugh calls them. The Kingdom of God is what we’re about. That is NOT synonymous with what ever the “powers that be” want (those who lay claim to be those powers, that is)
O’Reilly narrows the question, finally to this: “Do you want the United States to WIN in Iraq?” Gee Bill, isn’t it a matter of gaining something for ALL of us? And Bill, the “us” is ALL of the world. Let me expand upon my definition of evil. People are EVIL when they join that system; allow themselves to be DECEIVED by it. Nobody is saying that evil is unredeemable; that is what SALVATION is about. It’s nothing new to identify EVIL. Empires just don’t like it being used on them, nor do the people who identify who they are with what they have been sold by that evil system.
Source: LETTERMAN’S O’REILLY SMACKDOWN UPDATED… | The Huffington Post
A brief sample:
Full interview:
