The Impenetrable Fog Of Bill O’Reilly

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The Impenetrable Fog Of Bill O’Reilly
By Don Wycliff
June 22, 2006

If intellectual dishonesty could be said to have a face, I saw it Tuesday evening as I watched Bill O’Reilly’s program on Fox News.

I watched without the benefit of sound—if any was coming from the television it couldn’t be heard over the din in the bar where I was in Mishawaka, Ind. But Fox conveniently runs a stripped-down text next to O’Reilly’s image as he delivers his opening commentary. And there was, in addition, captioning beneath the picture for hearing-impaired viewers—or people who happen to be in noisy bars.

O’Reilly was burned up about the mutilation and murders of those two American soldiers—Pfc. Thomas Tucker and Pfc. Kristian Menchaca—who were captured in Iraq by insurgents last week and whose bodies were retrieved Tuesday.

What civilized person would not have been? The military didn’t give a detailed public description of the conditions of the soldier’s bodies, but decapitation seems to have been the least of the savageries inflicted on them—and may have been a grisly coup de grace.

O’Reilly wasn’t just mad about what had happened to these two young Americans; he wanted something done about it. We’ve got to get tougher and more aggressive, he opined. Outfits like the American Civil Liberties Union and Air America need to be "exposed," and all those who inadvertently help the enemy—like ministers who sign petitions against torture—should mind their p’s and q’s. And the Iraqi government ought to declare martial law in some parts of Iraq that O’Reilly considers in particular need of iron-fist treatment.

After O’Reilly finished his rant, he brought on two retired generals who apparently serve as regular expert commentators on Fox. For several minutes Wild Bill and this posse took out after the murderous barbarians in Iraq, as well as the "liberals" and dupes here in the U.S. who insist on hobbling the war effort by exercising their rights to think and speak freely.

There was much fuming about "taking the handcuffs off" and "taking the gloves off" and people cowing the Bush administration and forcing it to fight the war "defensively," which after all was exactly how the war in Vietnam had been wrongly fought. And they all arrived at the same conclusion: The U.S. must fight this war to "win" or bring our troops home.

Bill. Bill. Bill. Bill. Bill. You ignorant sl ... How do you face yourself in the mirror each morning?

Less than two years ago, George W. Bush won a second term in office with the biggest popular vote in American history. His party controls both houses of Congress. The ACLU is preoccupied with controlling the speech of its board of directors. The New York Times, which also came in for some of Bill’s dishonorable mention, has not endorsed the winner in the last two presidential elections.

And yet you, Bill, are peddling the notion that Bush is hamstrung in fighting the Iraq war because of domestic doubt and opposition from the left.

And then there’s your call for the Iraqi government to declare "martial law."

Bill, that is so-o-o-o Saddam of you. Don’t you understand that to declare martial law, you have to have a functioning military? And that the reason Menchaca and Tucker and 130,000 or so of our neighbors and family members are in Iraq is precisely because it doesn’t have a functioning military? And that the reason it doesn’t have a functioning military is because we smashed it because Saddam Hussein ... Well, let’s not go there.

Bill, does the name Eric Shinseki mean anything to you? On the assumption that it doesn’t, let me explain that he was the Army chief of staff who was shown the door by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after Shinseki had the audacity to tell members of Congress that we would need "several hundred thousand soldiers" to control Iraq after an invasion.

Bill, it wasn’t the press or the Democrats or the ACLU or Air America that sent our soldiers to Iraq in numbers that evidently are too small to control the place. It was Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz who did that, because they had some notions about smaller, lighter, quicker forces that ... Well, let’s not go there.

Bill, I understand your dilemma. You want to blame somebody for outrages like the murders of Menchaca and Tucker, but if you put the blame where it really belongs, you have to say bad things about some people for whom you have been a cheerleader.

It’s OK , Bill. Nobody who cares about the truth takes you seriously anyway.

Don Wycliff is associate vice president for news and information at the University of Notre Dame and teaches media criticism there.