control, shift, cheeseburger

Hi all, hope you all took the time to vote yesteday.

Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of D-Day, the allied attack in World War II on Normandy Beach, France and the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Please let us honor those from the Greatest Generation who fought and died for our freedom there.

In that vein, your humble author, like many others, condmens Fox News bighead gasbag, Bill O’Reilly, for statements he made on May 30 in an interview with General Wesley Clark about the events that took place in WWII at Malmedy, Belgium, December 17, 1944 (please read this article from World War II magazine by Michael Reynolds for the facts) right after The Battle of the Bulge. Bill said that US forces captured an unarmed squad of German SS soldiers there and shot them all dead with no provocation.

In point of fact, it was the other way around. This was documented by Hal Boyle in his January 1945 Stars and Stripes article. If he hadn’t been there, we might not have any documentation of this atrocity. Apparently, Mr. O. was using his “knowledge” of history in some twisted way in order to justify the US massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha. When caught in this bare faced lie, Fox News had the transcript of O’Reilly’s show doctored on their website to exclude the statement. When other news outlets and blog sites complained about this, they put the offending statements back.

A few days later, Bill didn’t apologize; he made a statement that he had “confused” the event in Malmedy with something that had taken place later. Oh, yeah Bill?

Before I ask my question, I will say that, yes, US forces on the ground during WWII indeed killed unarmed or captured enemy soldiers. It might have been stress, anger, whatever, it really doesn’t matter, the bottom line is it was wrong. Confusing the issue at Malmedy and representing what he said as cold, hard facts, O’Reilly does a disservice to the men that fought in WWII. According to Keith Olberman on his Countdown, red baiter Joseph McCarthy tried the same thing in 1949 and tried to tie it to Jewish revenge for the Holocaust. ?!?

My question is this; what the hell is O’Reilly still doing on TV? If that had happened on MSNBC and Olberman was the culprit, O’Reilly would want his skin for an overcoat. Oh, wait a minit, Olberman checks his facts before he speaks whereas Bill just conveniently gets things wrong and then “apologizes” after he closes his falafel trap. It’s bad enough that he got the facts reversed, but to falsely implicate American soldiers in a massacre and then to use that non-event to blow off what went down in Haditha is not only not on the same planet, it is not even remotely in the same galaxy.

Bottome line, what O’Reilly is saying (just imagine this next in his condescending tone) is this:

“OK US service people, we know that from time to time you’re going to snap, that’s a given. War is stressful by an order of magnitude of, say, my job (except for the lawsuit). Just please know, that if you snap, and a few civilians get caught in the crossfire, you have nothing to worry about; The Factor and this plucky Irish-American news hound will be with you one hundred and ten percent!”

In other news, the Senate, a partially owned subsidiary of the Executive Branch, is still trying to get their pet projects in civil rights curbing passed; a Constitutional amendment banning flag burning and one banning gay marriage.

It has been said time and again, by two Supreme Courts over the years, that flag burning is an exercise of one’s First Amendment right to free speech. In fact, in 1989 the Supreme Court wrote in Johnson v. Texas:

The First Amendment literally forbids the abridgment only of “speech,” but we have long recognized that its protection does not end at the spoken or written word. While we have rejected “the view that an apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled `speech’ whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea,” United States v. O’Brien, supra, at 376, we have acknowledged that conduct may be “sufficiently imbued with elements of communication to fall within the scope of the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” Spence, supra, at 409.

As far as the Gay Marriage ban is concerned, the only thing their supporters can trot out is that Gay Marrige is a “gateaway lifestyle;” that if you find same sex marriage acceptable, that will lead you to polygamy, bestiality etc. sort of like the marijuana is a gateway drug argument. This sounds like a slippery slope argument, but I really like Whoppi Goldberg’s advice; “If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t marry one.”

Filed under: General