Libs, Media Are Torturing Our President

by Steve Young

If you're writing a weekly column on the Lords of Loud...the Bloviators of Broadcast...you are often given a plethora of possibilities to choose your stories from. Sometimes they're so embarrassingly rich, so thick with unconscious hypocrisy and shameless pomposity, it's difficult to choose which story to exploit. This was such a week.

Hannity gave us a rare moment of gotcha. One where even his fans didn't buy his attempt to explain away what they knew to be mean-spirited and in bad taste. A caller chastized Sean, who consistently bashes liberals for their hate-speech and personal attack, for making light of Senator Ted Kennedy's "drinking problem," by Sean's hiccuping in between saying "Ted" and "Kennedy." The charming hunk of right wing integrity responded by actually saying that, number one, he wasn't even aware that Kennedy might have a drinking problem, and number two, and this is just precious, that the reason he hiccups when he say's Kennedy's name -- get ready, here it comes -- is to make fun of the way Kennedy stumbles over his words. Yessiree, nothing says stumbling like a hiccup. How could this caller misinterpret Sean's clever satire for bad taste or a personal attack. How many of his listeners do you think bought that? Funny, but not like a clown, that he didn't put it up as a poll on his site. He said he wouldn't stop doing it because he wouldn't be able to get through the show without the humor. I agree. I could listen to him do that hiccup and his Robert "KKK" Byrd twenty, thirty times a show...which is just short of the amount of times he does it. It just gets funnier each time. That, Mr. and Mrs. America, is entertainment.

Saturday, Tammy Bruce offered a brilliant piece of "liberal turned far right for profit" bias as she claimed the head of Amnesty International could not be truthful in determining American culpability in Guantanamo prisoner abuse because she is a Muslim.

Even liberal host, Randi Rhodes threw me this week as she urged the installation of Dick Cheney as official president, with calls to impeach G.W. To keep this administration's cancer in remission, we'd have to coordinate impeachments all the way down through the chain of command until we reached the Senate's Sergeant At Arms. Fun, yes. Efficient, not very. But since Rhodes may be the left's most familiar with government fol-der-ol and process, I'm sure she'll soon have an entertaining salve to rid us of the entire neo-con infection.

There were special kudos to Alan Colmes, who on Friday night's Hannity and Colmes, grew a long-awaited spine as he called Matt Drudge on his claim that the Left and leaders of the Democratic Party "cheered" the allegations of Koran abuse, just as they applaud any bad news for the military. Pressed for names, the stuttering Drudge could only come up with e-mails he received and Susan Sarandon. There's a hard-nosed, right-wing journalist for ya.

But the best of the week goes not to a Lords of Loud broadcast, but to his print. This week's Independent Bill O'Reilly's weekly column wins the "How Could We Ever Question His Independence" honor hands down for its...independent, unbiased reflection.

In his column, HURTING YOUR COUNTRY, which I'm thrilled to say appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News, right next to my column, he takes on the Bush-haters on the left and their fear that the President might succeed in something, anything.

"Then came the successful election in Iraq, and the fear on the left multiplied," Bill writes. "If Iraq turned out to be a success, Mr. Bush would become a hero. So the need to undermine the Bush administration became more intense than ever. But how to do it? Social Security wasn't emotional enough, particularly for young voters. What could be done to hurt Bush?

Then came the revelation -- let's torture the President."

Bill goes on to write about the The New York Times stories on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the reports from the International Red Cross on the prisoner abuse and the most dangerous organization on the planet, The American Civil Liberties Union, challenging detentions on Guantanamo. The "strategy was sealed," he wrote. "The Bush administration was full of torturers and human rights violators. It was ruining America's reputation throughout the world. Bush was a villain."

Then Bill wrote, "A liberal federal judge in New York City has ruled the Defense Department must release more photos and videos of Abu Ghraib to the ACLU. Of course, that will incite even more hatred against the USA and put our soldiers in more danger but, hey, politics comes before protecting the troops."

Alright. By now you're saying, "enough with the O'Reilly column. What have you got to say?" Sorry. Not yet. This thing is just so incredulous, you have to see more of it in print -- or cyberspace -- to believe it.

"The anti-Bush people want those pictures almost as badly as Al Jazeera wants them. Another nail in the President's coffin is more important than bodies in real coffins"

Okay, now me.

What the f***? Apologies, but is there another way to react what Bill it saying. Or even more incredulous, what he is not saying. Nowhere in this column, where he lays the blame for our dead young men and women at the feet of the Bush-haters, columnists, the ACLU, the liberal judges, and liberal anything he can get his mouth around, does he mention the very real possibility that all this...all this killing and dying -- and lying -- and nails in the coffins, comes at the hands of a president and an administration and those he pins medals of honor on for getting things WRONG! Nowhere does he mention "bad intelligence." Or "fixed intelligence." Or that prior to invading Iraq, George Tenet and Dick Cheney held private briefings for senior members of congress where they provided them with "smoking gun" intelligence that showed Iraq was interested in targeting UAVs (with nuclear and biological weapons delivery systems) on the United States. When the information was deemed highly doubtful, the congressmen were not informed. ( MORE)

Or that the no-spin-meister's oft-heard argument that everyone, including Democrats, saw the same intelligence as the President, is now NULL AND VOID! Oh, yeah, they all saw the same intelligence. But only the Bush administration knew it to be faulty.

For O'Reilly to place the accountability for the coffins of our young men and women on the messengers of admitted prisoner abuse has as much validity as him saying he doesn't spin. Or that he is an objective independent.

In this time when I hear people ask for a Deep Throat to reveal the sins of this administration, I can only believe that there is no need for an insider to disclose the crime, as all the criminal malfeasance is already out there. But today it is not so much the facts as it is the cherry-pickers, the twisters of truth, the pundits who distrust their fans with the whole truth, who need to be revealed. For they are the ones who attempt to distract the public from the facts by choosing scapegoats to be sacrificed so that they might survive to spin another day.

O'Reilly closes his column by "telling it like it is."

"So there you have it. For the anti-Bush folks, it is simple: no pain, no gain. Torture is selling and the media is buying. For those of you who are appalled by this analysis, I can only say one thing: sometimes the truth, like torture, hurts."

Which compels a final question: How would he know?

Other than that, it was a great column.