We should note that Bill O’Reilly’s position here is not about taking a principled stand on bigotry and racism.

O’Reilly’s concern is that he be perceived as an expert in these matters, and that his ideas, which “just stick up for the folks” are intended to keep the GOP base from getting distracted by legal challenges that won’t win in court.

O’Reilly isn’t saying that he disagrees about wanting to overturn the 14th. He absolutely does agree that the children of undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be able to be citizens, and that some kind of legislative action should be taken to somehow stop this. O’Reilly just doesn’t think that this will be accomplished by either ignoring or somehow abolishing the 14th. So O’Reilly isn’t concerned about the naked bigotry here – just that he doesn’t want to waste his time on a legal challenge that won’t get him what he wants.

O’Reilly’s other concern, which is probably larger than the first, is that he really does not like it when another right winger calls him out on this stuff. So when Andrea Tantaros foolishly challenged him, he made certain to publicly chastise her on his show. He wasn’t angry with her for her position on this issue – he told her he agreed with her. He was angry that she’d publicly said he “was wrong”. And that’s a line you don’t cross with O’Reilly.

I’d be surprised if Fox News did much coverage of any kind of this story. The only thing they might try to play with is the hack of the website, and even there, I’m not sure how much mileage they could get for their cause.

As for Megyn Kelly, I expect her to resume her usual attacks as soon as she gets back from her break. I’d be very surprised to see her suddenly take off – she’s extremely well paid and promoted at Fox News. If anything, the nonsense with Trump just gives her street credibility that I honestly don’t think she deserves. She’ll use this situation to say that she’s tough with everyone – which is demonstrably false in most situations, as Ellen has tirelessly proven here on dozens of occasions.

It’s true that Kelly has occasionally stuck up for something that personally mattered to her – such as when she went after other right wing personalities for criticizing her Family Leave time. But she knows that her position at Fox is based on her keeping up the attacks on whatever Roger Ailes dislikes this week. Conversely, I can’t see her being able to go to another network – her professional reputation is now irrevocably tied to Fox News. I can’t imagine what other network would have any use for her – except maybe as a right wing panelist sometimes. Which would be a huge come-down from having her own prime time show. She won’t go backwards like that.

The term is one of open racism and hatred. It’s regularly used by right wing shock jocks to stir up listeners’ ideas about some kind of a foreign invasion by “other people”.

Watters might be able to clear himself of the “offensive” label if he were to actually stop doing and saying offensive things. The issue here isn’t that there’s some “conspiracy”. The issue is that Watters and other angry right wingers are being properly called out for their bigotry. If they don’t like that, maybe they shouldn’t engage in bigotry. Pretty simple solution.

Joseph, I agree that President Obama has never been a left wing president. He’s been more of a Bill Clinton centrist, with a few feints to the right and the left to appeal to everyone. But the GOP can never admit that. For their narrative, they need to play him as a far left ideologue regardless of the reality.

You’re absolutely right that they thumbed their noses at their own plan – because Obama proposed it. Had George W. Bush proposed the identical plan, they would have backed it a thousandfold.

Their actual agenda since January 2009 has been pretty simple – say no to everything that Obama and the Dems say or do. Nothing complicated about that. Just say no. Throw up roadblocks. Refuse to behave in a civilized fashion. Deny even a modicum of civility, while at the same time projecting the GOP’s issues of rage and impotence on the Dems. It’s frankly the display that many on the left were hoping they would see from the Dems when George W. Bush was in office. The difference being that the Dems always try to get along and the GOP has never had such an intention.

Venues like Fox News have sadly made even the tiniest steps toward bipartisanship almost completely impossible today. No GOP politician dares cross the aisle for fear of being primaried or pilloried on the TV and radio. It’s a truly sad state of affairs.

August’s new approach is novel. Since he is unable to deny the fact of the right wing’s hypocrisy in these cases, he has now chosen to embrace it. Not sure that this really helps his case. Because he’s just conceded the entire argument that Ellen was making here. It’s refreshing to see him admit this, but he may not realize what that means.

His statements about Occam’s Razor continue to avoid the simple truth we’ve already discussed. If anything, it’s ironic to see him over-complicating that discussion, when Occam’s Razor works to avoid that.

Regarding Polanski’s victim, August takes a regrettable approach. He calls her a hypocrite – an outrageous statement that assumes he has moral standing to judge this woman. He fails to understand that there is a significant difference between this woman giving an interview and/or writing a book to tell her story, and being subjected to a media frenzy of right wing pundits reading gory details of Grand Jury testimony about her case on the radio and television. The former is a matter of the victim having a voice and the courage to use it. The latter is a matter of craven media figures stepping over the victim and her family in search of salacious material to put on the air. There isn’t a constant stream of this because there isn’t a seriously pending matter of extradition happening today. But a couple years back, there was a sudden move to try to extradite Polanski that got a lot of publicity and churned up the media machine – during which time Fox News and right wing radio were very much “beating the drums”. This was a great opportunity to condemn Polanski and Hollywood while luxuriating in the nastiest of details of what happened to this woman when she was a young girl. Were another “Hail Mary” attempt to come up to try to suddenly grab Polanski, the right wing media would undoubtedly swing back into gear on the story, picking up right where they left off.

And to be clear, this isn’t a discussion of the DOJ’s efforts to extradite. It’s a discussion about how right wing pundits reacted to such efforts in the past – with sensationalistic coverage that walked all over the victim and her family. And it’s a discussion about how the same pundits now wish to morally condemn that same behavior when it comes to the Duggars and the victims of Duggar’s crimes. For August to accuse the victim here of hypocrisy is unacceptable. To quote the great Joseph Welch, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Vittert appears to be following the Stephen Crowder playbook of attempting to incite trouble and then acting surprised when people aren’t happy to accommodate him. Vittert was not there to ask real questions – he was there to ambush and attack the Mayor, with Sharpton as a boon to the fun. Nobody was physically attacking him – they were trying to clear him from the Mayor’s space, since he was clearly trying to obstruct her path. He’s frankly lucky he wasn’t arrested for this.

The GOP and Fox News are clearly terrified of Clinton’s candidacy. I’ve never seen such a concentrated series of smears and attack pieces being mounted in rapid-fire style.

Interesting that O’Reilly, Kelly and Hannity are just so concerned about how Clinton is running her campaign. Clearly, they’re very interested in helping her run a successful campaign, right? That wouldn’t be open hatred dripping from Hannity, Kelly and Mark Thiessen, would it? That wouldn’t be open condescension from Bill O’Reilly, would it?

And I say this not as a fan of Hillary Clinton. But it’s telling how openly desperate the GOP is becoming – maybe it would be a better idea for them to see if they can pull the angry factions of their own party together before running out and telling another party how to operate a presidential campaign? Just a thought.

This was a pretty obvious attempt to just attack Barrett, using a known right wing local voice to do it. We should note that Kelly followed this up last night with another cheap shot, this time attacking the Police Chief and using Dana Loesch to do it – without providing any alternative viewpoint to Loesch’s hysterical rant.

Interesting that comments by the Mayor and the Chief of Police are to be attacked and reviled as partisan pettiness, but cheap shots from right wingers (particularly uninformed ones like Loesch) are to be celebrated as bastions of truth and reliability.

I agree this is likely an attempt by Fox News to campaign against Barrett’s re-election. It will be more interesting to see what happens if Walker steps away from the state for the considerable time he’ll need when he attempts to be a presidential candidate.

There’s a good op-ed at CNN calling on O’Reilly to humbly apologize so he could move on with some grace. O’Reilly is unlikely of course to ever do so. The only times I’ve seen him apologize for mistakes were when it was on his terms. In this situation, I think he’d sooner eat quiche than admit that “guttersnipe” David Corn was right.

The overall impact of this on his reputation doesn’t really change anything. It just continues to frustrate his dream of becoming a respected elder statesman rather than a pundit who made himself rich by exploiting people’s baser instincts. And this is yet another piece of evidence of how hypocritical Fox News truly is.

I agree with Muto’s idea – basically that cooler heads at Fox News have been able to get O’Reilly to stop fanning the fire for a minute in the thought that it will die out on its own.

I’ve sent a question to Muto to see if my perception of O’Reilly’s thinking here feels correct to him.

And of course, Fox News did go ahead and mount another attack after these articles went up, but it was clearly less enthusiastic about it. The funniest part of their thinking was to say that this was some kind of “orchestrated campaign”. I suggested on one site that the simpler explanation is more plausible – that Corn’s article prompted more people to come out of the woodwork with their own stories about O’Reilly’s inventions.

We should keep in mind what’s actually at stake here – O’Reilly’s reputation and legacy. That’s what he’s most concerned about. He knows that Fox News will never take him off the air like NBC did with Williams. He knows that his fortune is not in any danger. But things like this tarnish the image he’s been trying to invent for himself, and that’s why he’s so angry about it.

The truth is, he has spent years embellishing his experiences as a younger newsman, among other things. He’d like the record to show him as an intrepid Good Journalist working for Bad People who didn’t recognize his worth. He’d like to act as if he has combat experience, even if it’s just at the level of reporting from the middle of the battle. Except that he doesn’t have that experience. So he puffs it up a bit. He says he was in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands. Except that he wasn’t actually in any active war zones. He says that he saw soldiers shooting people to death in front of him. Except that the evidence shows that he only saw them firing tear gas and plastic bullets. He says that he rescued his cameraman who he says had been bloodied up. Except that the evidence shows it was other reporters who had tense moments with the demonstrators, and that O’Reilly’s own disobedience of safety precautions caused problems. He says he was the only reporter to get a team out covering the protests. Except that the evidence shows there were five teams out there. And the problems for his credibility here just go on and on.

And I’m not even going to go into his novel Those Who Trespass, since it seems to show a fictional version of O’Reilly murdering the CBS folk who’d done him wrong, and then being tracked by another fictional version of O’Reilly as investigator…

If we were to believe O’Reilly’s version of these events, we’d think of him as a sage voice of authority – a person who’s been in combat situations and knows the military issues and certainly knows more about this stuff than critics who want to peck at him. We’d think of him as an elder statesman who’s always been straight with everyone and just wants to look out for “the folks”, and that his experiences have taken him to some awful places in order to do that. Unfortunately, the reality of O’Reilly’s career would tend to indicate something else. Just watching the various tapes of his performances (“We’ll DO IT LIVE!!!”) and listening to the various recollections of his co-workers and supervisors, we can see him for who he’s always been. His behavior at CBS is consistent with his behavior on Inside Edition, which is consistent with his attitude even today. And that, sadly for him, will be his real legacy.

This interview is even more devastating than the comments Engberg and the others made on Facebook. It also clarifies what we discussed before. Engberg has no intention of dignifying O’Reilly’s show with his presence, and he’s not going to get into a back and forth with O’Reilly. All of this simply points up the fact that O’Reilly has in fact done the same things that sank Brian Williams. The difference here will be that O’Reilly won’t pay an immediate price for his behavior. Instead, he’ll continue along to the end of his allotted time with Fox News. And when the history of his career is written, this is the kind of thing that will be included in the discussion. O’Reilly is fighting to preserve his legacy now – and the sheer weight of history indicates he’s fighting a losing battle.

The accounts from Engberg and the others strongly indicate that Dan Rather would have no reason to try to help Bill O’Reilly paper over his record. Rather does not seem to have wavered from his dismissal of O’Reilly back in the day, when he made certain that Bill’s antics would never taint his broadcasts. I think it’s more likely that Rather will join the chorus on the other side.

Again, we should keep in mind that this will not likely change O’Reilly’s status at Fox News. They’ll probably just wait for this to blow over and then act like it never happened. But it does strike another, and potentially fatal, blow to O’Reilly’s desperate wish for mainstream respectability. And in the end, when we discuss this in ten years, that will be all that matters.

I don’t think Enberg is going to give O’Reilly the satisfaction of a back-and-forth. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he consented to an interview with a real journalist at CNN or another network. Enberg’s account, as well as those of Rabel and Roberts, is specific and devastating. All O’Reilly has been able to come up with in response are, once again, personal insults.

Hannity’s obvious intent throughout this segment and others was to call President Obama a coward, something he would have violently attacked had anyone said that kind of thing about George W. Bush. He made a point of repeatedly inserting the claim that the President is “too scared” to use the terminology that Hannity wants to hear. The fact that Bill Richardson didn’t want to entertain that kind of nonsense just seemed to set Hannity farther off. This was frankly a strange segment to watch.

I hate to say this, but I actually expected better conduct from O’Reilly on this, considering that he makes hay out of having been a teacher himself. No person who truly had the heart of a teacher would have tolerated the kind of snide behavior Watters pulled last night in relation to the students.

The proper thing for O’Reilly to have done would have been to have the students on the show, with their teacher, and with Watters, and go through the complaints. That would have been a teachable moment for everyone. Instead, O’Reilly decided it was a joke and let Watters throw in a few more cheap shots just for fun.

It’s pretty clear that Huckabee didn’t just “all but say it”. He did say it. He was making the point that he as a good Southerner was offended by women using profanity in a professional setting. I agree he was also making a point that men who use the profanity around women are also trashy. All of which went to his larger point with “The Culture of Crude” – that the folks living in New York City behave in a less civilized manner than the good Christian folks living in the flyover states.

There was a phenomenally strange bit on Megyn Kelly’s show about this situation just this evening.
In it, Kelly was clearly trying to rehab Huckabee for this scenario. She repeatedly supported him while he said that he really wasn’t talking about Fox News when he discussed producers he’d worked with in New York over the past 6 years. She never asked him who he WAS talking about, but she presumably accepted that he wasn’t talking about Fox News.

And then at the end, she dropped the bomb: She made a comment to Huckabee that I don’t think was what the Ailes crew had in mind. She finished the segment with a bit where she pointedly told him, and I’m paraphrasing: “You know, we do swear, and we drink, and we have premarital sex too. And we even do it before we come to work.” Huckabee had no answer other than a nervous laugh. I think that may have been her answer, but I’ll leave it to others here to see whether my take on this was close to the mark.