Friday, June 02, 2006

Paging Mr. Orwell

Bill O'Reilly made a damned fool out of himself yesterday by saying this, in a pathetic attempt to excuse the atrocities at Haditha (video of Keith Olbermann ripping O'Reilly a new one) :

Bill O'Reilly: But I, in, in Mal-, in, in Malmedy, as you know, US forces captured SS forces who had their hands in the air, and they were unarmed, and they shot them down. You know that. That's on the record, been documented. In Iwo Jima, the same thing occurred. Japanese attempted to surrender, and they were burned in their caves.


No, O'Reilly, you buffoon, it was the other way around. SS forces massacred US forces. The Nazis committed the crimes at Malmedy, not the Americans, and it's BIZARRE that someone would make that mistake.

But what's equally bizarre is that Fox News scrubbed the transcript, and changed "Malmedy" to "Normandy":

O'REILLY: And in Normandy, as you know, U.S. forces captured S.S. forces, who had their hands in the air. And they were unarmed. And they shot them down. You know that. That's on the record. Been documented.


Down the Memory Hole.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks again Iggy. Another in a long long list of great posts. If you haven't watched the video of Olberman skewering Orielly you should. Its great stuff.

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

. . . and what if O'Reilly had been correct? What is he saying? That three atrocities are better than one?

Sheesh!

Iggy said...

Ooof.. Good point. And I loved Olbermann.

Anonymous said...

It's similar to this:

One time I got into a discussion about Bush lying to start the Iraq war with someone who shrugged his shoulders and said, "There've always been wars."

What is that? I can understand a certain fatalism about it, like Kurt Vonnegut's friend telling him that writing a anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book. But to to say, "there have always been wars," and to suggest that that mitigates the circumstances of deceit that surrounded the beginning of the current one is. . . is. . . I don't even know how one can engage that sort of argument. It's like saying, "Oh, I know he killed her, but there have always been murders." It's beyond the realm of any sort intelligent, rational, discussion.