Bill O’Reilly is mad as hell over the situation in Egypt and he’s rallying his TV-nation troops to boycott Egypt just like they boycotted France. O’Reilly doesn’t even want the American airlines to fly there. Never mind that French exports to the U.S. increased during O’Reilly’s boycott of that country. And never mind that we export about three times as much to Egypt as we import from them.
O’Reilly was angry that the Egyptian government failed to adequately protect the United States embassy from the violent riots there this week. “We should punish that country with our tourist dollars and it’s not even safe to travel there anyway,” he declared during his regular Friday chat with Geraldo Rivera last night. “We don’t go for a while and I don’t think the airlines, the U.S. airlines should even fly there… send a message.”
Rivera argued that it wasn’t so simple. “You have to understand that you’re punishing Egypt from the bottom up not the top down.”
But Papa Bear O’Reilly was not going to sit back and do nothing! He said, “We were lucky (no American lives were lost in Egypt.) …So I say for three months, alright? ‘Til the end of the year, no nothing… That sends a message to the Muslim Brotherhood – you do it again, that’s it! OK? …That’s the way you have to deal in this world, Geraldo!”
Unlike Rivera, O’Reilly was unwilling to let the U.S. government handle the situation. “They have agendas all over the place!” O’Reilly said. “The folks are the folks. I’m bettin’ you that everybody watching – not everybody but 90% are going, ‘You know what? I’m not going there. Even if I was gonna go there, I’m cancelling my cruise. I’m not goin’ for a while.’”
And I’ll bet that if that happens, it has nothing to do with O’Reilly’s command and everything to do with not feeling safe.
But in O’Reilly’s mind, anyway, he’s got legions ready to do his bidding. He told Rivera, “The French thing that I called for when they were proppin’ up Saddam Hussein? That hurt them.”
Well, not really, though O’Reilly continues to claim otherwise.
Rivera said the boycott “hurt (French) feelings more than their economy.”
“It hurt their economy, too,” O’Reilly insisted. Although he agreed with Rivera that it would not be a good idea to push Egypt into anarchy, O’Reilly was resolute. “I want to send a message to them. If you do it again, it’s over, you don’t get any more money.”
Video available at Mediaite.
The reason a country establishes embassies in other countries is to have eyes and ears on the ground. Those people on the ground provide the information needed to inform policy and formal negotiations and relations. That being the case, the reason why the consulate at Benghazi was poorly protected can only be because the Ambassador (Stevens) and his staff had not heard any chatter. He actually felt secure enough to go to Benghasi with only a small escort on 9/11.
He was clearly wrong (I suspect he knew nothing about that video) but there’s no way that Washington could have second-guessed him.
And my weekend trips to Egypt are no more.What an arrogant bullshit artist he proves to be on a daily basis.
http://media.photobucket.com/image/fox%20news%20map%20egypt%20iraq/ecostarr/3765147402_4012bf812c.jpg
http://www.usegyptcouncil.org/
http://www.usegyptcouncil.org/member-companies/
And, of course, BOR will demand that Murdoch’s News Corp (who owns FOX “news”) tell FOX Sports Middle East to stop airing sports programming in Egypt, hmm?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation (see FOX Sports Middle East info on this page)
BOR: “âThe folks are the folks. Iâm bettinâ you that everybody watching â not everybody but 90% are going, âYou know what? Iâm not going there. Even if I was gonna go there, Iâm cancelling my cruise. Iâm not goinâ for a while.”
Oh, give me a freakin’ break – BOR’s viewers were never going to vacation in Egypt anyway. Geez, BOR, you’re so lame.
Any bets most Fox viewers could not find Egypt on a map if you spotted them the “nation” of Africa?
http://www.parisbusinessreview.net/
Make like Moses and get lost for 40 years.
Also on F&F yesterday, the WSJ reporter now in Cairo (Nat Bradley, I think) tried at least twice to say that the protesters were mainly disgruntled youths who felt that their “revolution” had been snatched from them. He called them “hooligans” who wanted to “butt heads” with the police. The uproar over that disgracefully blasphemous video (on somebody else’s religion) came later and the two dimensions overlapped. Anybody who claims to understand what happened from a cushy office in Manhattan is a raving delusional maniac.
I’ve yet to hear anybody on FOX mention that the current government of Egypt, the first one to be elected after Mubarak was forced to step down, was sworn in only a few days ago. Even the USA has a sort of hiatus after elections while the new elections find their feet. And the USA is a country with perhaps the longest democratic tradition in the world.
The foxies make my head hurt.
