Monday night on the O'Reilly Factor means Bernard Goldberg's weekly analysis of the latest nefarious deeds of the left-wing media. Top on the bill last night was the mistaken allegation, by Brian Ross of ABC, that James Holmes, the accused in the Aurora movie theater massacre – or at least someone bearing the same name – was a member of the Tea Party. All part of an ongoing liberal effort to make the Tea Party look bad, Goldberg implied.
Only hours after the shooting, Ross told George Stephanopoulos that “There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site… talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.” Fox Nation was on it like a hawk on a field mouse, and gathered nearly 2,000 comments in a matter of hours. Most of them were sort of like this:
Or this:
As it turned out, it wasn’t the same Jim Holmes, and ABC quickly apologized for the mistake. But Goldberg wasn’t going to let either Ross or Stephanopoulos off the hook. “The mistake isn't what ABC News and a bunch of critics, both on the right and the left, say it is. They say the mistake is that he jumped the gun... That's not the mistake. The mistake was bringing the Tea Party into this at all….The reason too many reporters drag the Tea Party into stories like this is because they have a predisposed disposition about the Tea Party… They think a lot of their members are unhinged, so they tie them to the Aurora shooting. They tie them to the massacre in Arizona. They even bring them in to the Times Square bombing, which was the work of a Pakistani.”
Goldberg also implied that Stephanopoulos had been feeding Ross questions to make the Tea Party look bad. “You and I know how this works. When he asked Brian Ross that question, he knew what Brian Ross was going to say. Brian Ross didn't come up with this just on the spur of the moment on the set. What he should have what he should have done -- I'll tell you what I would have done. ‘Brian, I'm just curious. What's the significance of bringing the Tea Party into this at all?’” (Well, it’s a dirty left-wing plot, obviously.)
O’Reilly didn’t think it would have been newsworthy if Holmes had been a member of the Tea Party. HOWEVER! “Look, if that guy was a member of Move On and that was, you know, he was out demonstrating and this and that, that would become a huge story.” (you betcha, gentle reader! Fox would have been all over it faster than you could say ‘commie left wing chattering elitists’.) Two minutes later he turned around and said it was “irrelevant” for Goldberg to tie politics into violence.
Oh and by the way, gentle reader: evil left-wing celebrities are still dumping on the Tea Party, and Fox Nation is still dumping on them. As witness this post, about anti-Tea-Party comments made online by the Guy We Know as George Costanza.
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Intern who reads us for Bill the thin skinned, pass this on:
Bernie, I never accused the Tea Party personally, I only entertained the cases where it seemed likely. But if you want… a while back, I made a nice little interactive map that I’ll email to anyone interested in it. It’s every major crime committed by the Tea Party that we never heard about on the supposedly “liberal biased mainstream media.”
You might like it, it’s pretty interesting- you got cop killers, spree killers, stalkers, drug dealers, arms smugglers, and people who committed mass fraud, among other things. But I have to ask you, Bernie… if the Tea Party’s being so picked on, why wasn’t anyone all over this? I know that out of what they’ve done here in California (a state Bill loves to demonize), I was only cleared to do one mention of one. And $10 says you’ll get which one wrong if I make you guess. Then a month later, I was told to say there were no arrests in the organization and play dumb on that one we got to talk about.
So why don’t you quit playing the victim game? It’s pretty damn lame.
