Salon.com reports on Bill O'Reilly's relentless denunciation of Dr. George Tiller, who as far as we know was a compassionate, humane doctor who performed abortion services completely within what was legal. Through decades he has received death threats, his clinic has been bombed, and he was actually wounded by gunshots intended to kill him several years before his assassination yesterday.
According to reporting by Gabriel Winant on Salon, O'Reilly mentioned Tiller on 29 on-air episodes in the past 4 years, most recently in April 2009. He writes:
"There's no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists."According to Salon, among the things O'Reilly has said of Tiller: (1) He destroys fetuses for just about an reason right up until the birth date for $5,000; (2) He's guilty of "Nazi stuff;" (3) A moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida; (4) This is the kind of stuff that happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union; (5) operating a death mill; (6) executing babies about to be born.
And what is his evidence? None. Tiller has been investigated and acquitted by a grand jury who found no evidence of illegal actions.
I admit it's a stretch to connect O'Reilly's rants with the actual assassination, but he is one of those who create the climate of hatred and lies that fanatics and mentally unstable people take as a license to kill -- in the name of saving lives of the unborn.
Ralph
Blogger TBogg put it succinctly:
ReplyDelete"What happened to George Tiller isn't what happens when you yell "fire" in a crowded theater. It's what happens when you yell "fire" at a firing range."
Brilliant TBogg!
ReplyDeleteWatching O'Reilly respond was chilling. He's perfected the same delivery style as Dick Cheney, subdued venom.
As much as I hate the methodology of Roeder, I expect this might shut down "late term abortions." Thinking strategically, that may well be the only possible compromise that will bring this insanity to a close, if it can be closed at all.
Guys like Roeder are monotonous. They are in the Freemen, or the Milita, or the NRA, or the KKK, or the Aryan Nation, and Pro-Life Hate Groups. They oppose government, taxes, regulation of their lives and guns - while attempting to regulate the lives of others - pregnant women, homosexuals, medical researchers, physicians. It makes little sense. This guy could talk of nothing but unborn babies, yet his wife divorced him because he was crazy and his own son wants absolutely nothing to do with him. It's worth thinking about trying to find the personality type that can contain these obvious paradoxes [since they tend to murder and blow up things].