Bravo to Fox News Kirsten Powers for magnificently smacking down The O’Reilly Factor attempts to blame the murder of two NYPD officers on Mayor Bill de Blasio. When Fox’s Monica Crowley likened the shootings to Watergate and de Blasio to Nixon – well, you should see how Powers reacted.
The segment was designed to amplify and pile on to Bill O’Reilly’s call for de Blasio’s resignation of the night before.
Crowley, a former aide to Richard Nixon, complained, “Nobody resigns in disgrace any more, unfortunately.”
Powers called it “ridiculous” that after a year in office de Blasio should resign because the police department doesn’t like him, as an O'Reilly clip alleged. “The mayor doesn’t do what the NYPD tells him to do. …His primary relationship is with the people of New York. And the NYPD reports to him,” Powers said.
Powers agreed that the mayor should “work on his relationship” with the NYPD but, she said, “I don’t think that they get to decide.”
Powers shot down host Eric Bolling's attack on protesters for “making race a big issue in New York” (“Race is a big issue,” Powers said) and on de Blasio for having “the talk” with his son: “As does every parent of a child who looks African American, OK?” Powers shot back.
Powers continued, “Race is a huge issue in New York city and Mayor de Blasio did not cause those protests. Those protests were caused by the NYPD and their treatment of Eric Garner. So why are you blaming de Blasio for it?”
Why more Democratic guests can’t be this direct and on target on Fox is a mystery to me. But wait, there’s more.
Monica Crowley had an explanation – of sorts. “De Blasio created an environment here when he brought on Al Sharpton as one of his top advisors on race and other issues.” Crowley said, “A lot of people in the city” are saying that Sharpton is “actually the de facto mayor. So that is responsibility right there.”
Then Crowley got to the Watergate comparison.
CROWLEY: Secondly, when Watergate happened, Nixon did not order the break-in. But what was argued was that Nixon created a context, an environment, an atmosphere where the break-in was considered acceptable.
In this case you have the Mayor of New York City, who has created this anti-police environment since the day he took office, created an atmosphere here. I’m not saying he pulled the trigger but what I’m saying… is as the leader of the City of New York, he has a responsibility to protect his police force and not attack them and that’s what he’s been doing from the start.
Of course, the reason Nixon was held responsible was because it was people who worked under him who did the law breaking. Not even Crowley asserted that de Blasio had any relationship with the man who shot and killed the NYPD officers.
The look on Powers’ face was priceless. She said, “That’s ridiculous. I really think what you’re saying is out of control.”
Watch it below, from last night's The O'Reilly Factor.
These two reich-winger, brown shirts are reaching for any way possible to pin this on the mayor, the US AG, the President, Sharpton, and any other progressive, liberal, Democrat that they can.
Hopeless propagandists.
I’ll give Kirsten Powers credit for trying to get her points across here – but she was repeatedly interrupted, talked over and shouted down both by Bolling and Crowley throughout the segment. The pattern was that Bolling and Crowley would make an outrageous statement, Powers would begin to respond to it, and then be interrupted before she could finish nearly every time. To add injury to insult, Bolling made sure that Crowley’s last nonsensical comment stood unrebutted, and cut off Powers to end the segment. The last moments had Bolling condescendingly telling Powers he’d have to pick it up another time, while she was given no opportunity to answer.
This followed an obvious pattern all through yesterday of repeatedly demanding that de Blasio resign immediately – something that had to have been the Fox News Line of the Day.
But the best two gems that came in were even more outrageous than what we heard here. One was Bill O’Reilly in his phone comments, not only angrily demanding de Blasio resign TODAY but also asserting that out of 8.5 million New Yorkers, 800,000 of them could hurt you, I mean really hurt you. In other words, O’Reilly is saying that nearly 10 percent of the population of NYC are violent criminals. That’s an amazing statement.
And then we have Andrea Tantaros in the Kurtz/Tantaro Attack de Blasio segment smugly attesting that de Blasio is really a communist. That was the part where my own jaw dropped completely. I suppose we could go back to the old oil company commercial: Do Fox News people really hate Mayor de Blasio (and President Obama) that much? Fox News people do.
