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Archive for August 13th, 2006

The Danger of Blogs

Posted by s.z. on August 13th, 2006

You know, I got to thinking about Bill O’Reilly’s denunciations of the evil, all-powerful bloggers, and I decided to check out some of them for myself.

My first stop was Blogs For Bush.com. What did I learn there? What is the blog buzz?  And are these bloggers as depraved as what Bill claims?

 I’ll report and you decide.

The Sort of Man President Bush Is, By Mark Noonan

He really is beyond the reach or understanding of most of his critics – and that goes for both conservative and leftwing critics. They don’t get the man – and I don’t think they ever will.

Yea, for as the prophets have told us, while George Bush is “A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”

And while George Bush is far beyond our understanding as we are to the ants, Mr. Noonan does cite an example to help us understand his greatness from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Beth Karlson, who lost her son to the Iraq war, wanted something when she met Thursday with President Bush. Answers.

For well over a year, the 63-year-old woman – “just a little bumpkin from Wisconsin,” she says – has repeatedly sought information from the Army about the 2003 death of her son, Army Staff Sgt. Warren S. Hansen.

He and 16 soldiers from the 101st Airborne were killed when two Blackhawk helicopters collided above Mosul on Nov. 15, 2003. It was the single deadliest episode in the war for U.S. forces up until then.

Karlson learned Wednesday from the White House that she and her husband were invited to meet with Bush on Thursday during his Green Bay visit. Away from the public eye, he met with five families who have lost loves ones in the war, a White House aide said.

Karlson, a retired school “lunch lady” from Clintonville, has been frustrated by multiple attempts to obtain the official Army report on the crash. So she broached the subject with Bush.

“He seemed very interested,” the mother said. The president told her that an aide who was on hand and taking notes would look into the matter Friday.

And THAT is the kind of man that President Bush is – the kind who says that an aide will look into things.

But wait, there’s more!

Karlson and her husband, Jim, met with Bush for 20 to 30 minutes. It began with a “great big bear hug” from Bush. He gave her a presidential coin. He signed a scrapbook she’s amassed about her firstborn son. It was the only time he didn’t hold her hand during the meeting.

Bush is a hand-holding, bear-hugging, personal-space-invading kind of man! He’s the kind of man who gives presidential coins to grieving families in order to show them how much he sympathizes with their loss!

“He said, ‘I just love the military.

As long as he doesn’t have to serve in it, of course

‘There’s just something about military families.’

All the mourning for dead loved ones, maybe?

And he thanked us for raising the type of child we did – that’s part of what he wrote in the scrapbook,” Karlson said.

“Dear Mrs. Karlson, thanks for raising a child who would serve his country in a foreign war, so that my children don’t have to.”

But here’s Mark’s assessment of the story:

This is just typical President Bush – going out of his way to meet the families of the fallen, and doing it outside the public eye because, well, its not a public matter – it is the President of the United States and the man George W. Bush offering his respect to the family of the fallen. 

This isn’t for sound bites; this isn’t for a “money shot” picture on the nightly news…this is just the act of a decent, caring man who understands that his decisions have stern consequences which he bears full moral responsibility for.

So, per Mark, President Bush bears full moral responsible for the deaths of over 2600 American service men and women, and also for an untold number of Iraqi casualities. And yet, Mr. Bush seems strangely untroubled by all this. So, I guess the kind of man he is (per Mark), is a sociopath.

Yeah, I can see why Bill O’Reilly finds the blogs so troubling.

Buy That Man A Subscription to RenewAmerica!

Posted by s.z. on August 13th, 2006

Speaking of Bill O’Reilly, on Friday I caught part of his TV show (which is, as the announcer reminds us at frequent intervals, “The most powerful name in cable news for old farts who hate everything,” or something like that).

In a promo for the upcoming segment, Bill promised us the most maddeningly stupid radio bit ever, so naturally I thought it was going to be an encore of his “shoot him right between the heads” piece. But no, it was a clip from Lynn Samuels of Sirius Radio talking about the timing of the London terrorist arrests.

Anyway, Bill’s liberal guests, Ellis Hennican and Laura Scwartz, agreed with Bill that nobody listens to Samuels anyway. But despite that, Bill was quick to warn his listeners that while she has no audience, her ideas are picked up by Bill’s archenemies, the bloggers – and apparently people do listen to them, which is why bill had to devote eight minutes of his program to bringing Samuels down.

Guest Scwarz also agreed with Bill that people like Samuels are hurting the Democratic Party by being crazy. However, Hennican said that there are whackos on both sides of the political spectrum, and mentioned the wingnuts at NewsMax and Free Republic. Bill dismissed them as not being the same thing as far-left wackos (apparently because their liberal, as opposed to conservative).

Then Hennican brought up Michael Savage, and scored a palpable hit. Although bleeding profusely from the hole in his argument, Bill sputtered something about how the loony Savage wasn’t the same thing as a crazy like Samuels, since Savage hadn’t said anything  about the British terrorist plot.

We go to News Hounds for the next part of the story:

Hennican suggested that they both denounce the extemists on both sides but O’Reilly was compelled to continue his left wing media shtick This time it was the San Francisco Chronicle for commenting on Bush’ vacation during a crisis. O’Reilly seemed to think that was awful calling it a ” cheap shot”

Hennican caught him by surprise bringing up Cheney’s comment that the voters for Ned Lamont were helping Al Qaeda. O’Reilly tried to defend Cheney saying it was just politics.

Bill also said that it was just Cheney’s opinion, apparently feeling that it’s okay for the Vice President of the United States to publicly accuse the Democratic voters of Connecticut of treason for not voting for his choice of candidate, if that’s his honest belief.  However, Bill rejected Hennican’s suggestion that the SF Chronicle’s “cheap shot” was just their opinion of Bush’s overstated claims about his involvement in thwarting the British plot.

Bill kept muttering that anything brought up by his guests “wasn’t the same thing,” in that it didn’t support his claim, which seems to boil down to “Democrats who refuse to be Republicans are hurting the Democratic Party.”

It all ended with Bill reiterating his premise that left-wing extremists hurt the Democratic party, but that right-wing extremists don’t hurt the Republican Party “because there are too few of them.”

Yes, that’s really what he said.

I’d suggest that we give Bill a copy of the Internet for his birthday, but he seems well aware of its contents — and not just the “left-wing extremist blogger” portion consisting of MediaMatters and DailyKos, since he frequently uses stories that originated on the wingnutosphere.  

So, I guess all we can do is to encourage Bill to drop the “fair and balanced” pretense, and just come out and admit that he’s a wholly owned subsidy of the RNC. That way, instead of sputtering at his liberal guests when they refuse to follow his script, he could have them arrested and sent to Gitmo. It would do wonders for his blood pressure.