We were so focused on porn from this past weekend’s Value Voters Summit that we nearly forgot Bill O’Reilly was honored there! Yes, he received a Media Courage Award, for his outstanding use of a highly rated cable news show to promote school bullying and scaring parents. But O’Reilly must have been quite humble over all the platitudes, because he demanded his award reception be closed to the press. Why ever would this attention whore want that?
One theory: He didn’t want to provide Keith Olbermann with a clip of the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins handing him an award.
VVS wanted to honor O’Reilly “for being a voice of virtue in a culture of death.” Charming, especially since the award was particularly focused on O’Reilly’s coverage of abortion doc George Tiller — or, as Bill’s viewers might know him, “Tiller The Baby Killer.” And that’s when things got interesting:
Tiller, O’Reilly told his audience, “was hiding behind privacy law.”
At that point in the speech, blogger Mike Stark, semi-famous for his dogging of O’Reilly, began shouting. My friend couldn’t quite make out all of Stark’s words, but she did catch the phrase “while his first wife was pregnant.” Whether or not Stark was referring directly to O’Reilly remains unclear.
I was standing on the other side of the ballroom doors with a dozen or so glum journalists, when suddenly the doors burst open and two burly men in uniforms dragged Stark, still shouting, through the exit doors and into a stairwell. That was the last I saw of him.
“Obviously,” O’Reilly told the audience, “that must be an MSNBC host.”
O’Reilly continued to defend his coverage of Dr. Tiller, calling the late doctor’s clinic “a racket.”
However, after Tiller was murdered “by this zealot,” O’Reilly said, “I was the first one to say this shouldn’t happen to any American.”
But that didn’t stop the media, who “went after me,” O’Reilly complained. “They just want to attack you personally.”
In fact, O’Reilly said, for a journalist to defend him would endanger that journalist’s career. “If they went into a newsroom and said, ‘O’Reilly got it right,’ they would freeze you out,” the told the audience.
He turned his focus to the injustice faced by aborted fetuses, comparing their fate to that faced by the captives held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, saying that Guantanamo was a “nice island; you can walk around.” Making the leap that all held at Guantanamo are terrorists — never mind his conceit that the lives of fetuses (which he called “babies”) parallel the lives of grown men — O’Reilly said, “Do babies have to blow something up before they get human rights?”
“Some guy can drill a hole in their heads for no reason whatsoever,” he said. “They have no rights.”
Well congratulations on your award, Mr. O’Reilly. You can place it on your mantle, right next to George Tiller’s head.
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(Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/U.S. News & World Report)
AlanInSLC
O’Reilly is a complete ass. Nothing more needs to be said about him. What a waste of human flesh.
YellowRanger
I find it a wee bit hilarious how after Columbine Bill O’Reilly and his ilk were ranting and raving that Marilyn Manson and the vidya games basically shot up that school. It was all the media’s fault.
But when goes out and shoots an abortion doctor that O’Reilly and his cohorts routinely referred to as a baby killer, suddenly the media has no involvement whatsoever and it was all just the work of some lone nutjob…