Of all the Fox News politicization of Obamacare, Bill O’Reilly may take the cake. He’s not just trashing the Affordable Care Act. He’s actually agitating to impeach President Obama over it.
O’Reillys Talking Points commentary last night was called, “The Deceit Factor.” Was he talking about all those phony Obamacare victims Fox has been trotting out lately? No, he was arguing that President Obama may have lied about Obamacare and, if so, should be impeached.
OK, it wasn’t just Obamacare, it was also “the Benghazi deception,” although “we don’t know,” O’Reilly intoned, if President Obama “directly ordered that deceit.” It’s O’Reilly’s way of faking independence. Because if he were REALLY independent, he’d note that there are good, solid reasons to conclude there was no deceit. Furthermore, when you compare this to O’Reilly’s decision not to “Monday morning quarterback” Dick Cheney’s misbegotten invasion of Iraq under false pretenses because “as Americans, we’re all in it together,” – well, you cant help but conclude that O’Reilly is only “all in it together” with some Americans.
But having “proved” (to his own satisfaction, anyway) that he’s not jumping to conclusions, O’Reilly went for the Obamacare/impeachment jugular. Why? Over that “you can keep your insurance” statement that Fox has obsessed over. As if that is the only thing that matters with regard to Obamacare.
“Was the president misinformed or bearing false witness intentionally?” O’Reilly asked gravely. Which made me wonder the same thing about those fake Obamacare “victims” Fox trotted out in such a passionate effort to make the very same case.
O'Reilly's arrival at the "I" word was by way of a hilarious sideswipe at Bill Maher that Mr. No Spin clearly thought proved his own independent bona fides:
The Wall Street Journal today accused President Obama of falsehoods. The Washington Post wrote that his healthcare assertions were not completely true. Both papers did not use the word ‘lie.’ It is important for responsible news agencies, and “The Factor” is in that category, to be very precise when lodging accusations. Did the President mislead the country? Absolutely—no question about it. Did he know he was misleading it? Maybe—most likely. Did he lie? Very possible but the evidence is not conclusive.
Here is a good example of a provable lie just so you know.
Last night Bill Maher, progressive zealot, accused me of promoting the Republican Party, implying that I use talking points from the GOP. That’s a lie. I have never received Republican talking points in my life. Anyone who watches this program knows we are often very tough on the GOP but Maher doesn’t care. He has nothing to lose by spouting dishonest gibberish. In fact he makes money doing it.
President Obama has a lot to lose if he did indeed tell outright lies to the American people. In fact, he could be impeached if that were proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
It’s bad enough that Bill O’Reilly should be suggesting impeachment over this in the first place. As if one wrong prediction - even if it were a deception - over a democratically enacted piece of legislation, subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court were far more egregious than the Bush administration’s cock-and-bull story about weapons of mass destruction and the rosy outcome of an invasion that ensnared us in a 10-year war.
But what’s truly disgusting is how O’Reilly slyly pretends he’s serving the interests of truth in a dispassionate way rather than owning up to his very deliberate agenda. And as the top show on Fox News, this may well signal a coming meme for the others.
The scary thing is, with a Republican party happy to shutdown the entire U.S. government over a sham effort to defund Obamacare, why wouldn’t they shut it down over a phony impeachment effort?
O’Reilly should be ashamed of himself.