The Severity Of Our Disengagement

Defending himself against Bill O'Reilly's wacky accusation that he's a communist, Robert Reich says Fox News and their ilk are burying the nation in "doo-doo" -- an unintentional allusion to the late Seamus Romney, one assumes, since Reich adds:

The 2012 election doesn't seem likely to clarify any issue. At this moment the candidates and their surrogates are debating the treatment of dogs.

Across the nation, conservatives right-wingers and liberal or progressive lefties have stopped debating their respective views, or even listening to anyone they disagree with. They just find broadcasters and bloggers who confirm their views.

We're even sorting by belief according to where we live. Today your neighbors are more likely to agree with your politics than disagree. We've settled into like-minded enclaves where we don't need to think because everyone we meet confirms what we assume we already know.

It's not that the nation is more polarized than it's been in the past. America has been through searing conflicts, some within the living memories of most of us. The communist witch-hunts of the 1950s were followed by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage.

What makes America's current polarization remarkable isn't the severity of our disagreements but our utter lack of engagement debating them.

The Clintons Got Tired Of Him, Too

Orwell Lives (Or Laughs)

Writing in the American Spectator, an overheated Jeffrey Lord says that the KKK and Nazis were leftists and agrees with Bill O'Reilly that U.S. leftists are are fascists for using their free speech rights to organize an advertisers' boycott against Rush Limbaugh -- which wouldn't have gotten any traction if Limbaugh didn't have the potty mouth of a mean 12-year-old who's afraid of girls. I thought conservatives were all about individual accountability.

Lord's "left is right" logic gave me a headache. Go here to read about the meaninglessness of "fascist" as an epithet. When I was in college, campus radicals hurled it at university administrators because of their decisions about teaching assistant compensation. A couple of years ago, Roger Ailes called NPR executives Nazis. And so it goes -- name-calling in lieu of substance, what all too often goes for political discourse in the 21st century (a persuasive argument against evolution, which ought to please the ignorant right-wingers-- Oops!...sorry).

Penny Saver

Bill O'Reilly takes on One Million Moms:

He likened the group's boycott of the Texas-based retail chain [JC Penny] after they hired [Ellen] DeGeneres to a "witch hunt." He went on to note, "What is the difference between the McCarthy era of the '50s and the Million Moms saying, 'Hey, JCPenney and all you other stores, don't you hire any gay people. Don't you dare.' What is the difference?"

Huck Spin

In a radio interview on Tuesday, Mike Huckabee presented a detailed fantasy about a Kenyan boyhood of Barack Obama that never occurred. His spokesman quickly said that he'd meant to say that Obama was raised in Indonesia. With Andrew Sullivan, I can't understand how Huckabee could claim just to have made an error about the country, since his full statement doesn't track if you substitute Indonesia for Kenya:

One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American ... his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Obama never lived in Kenya, and his father essentially abandoned him.

Tonight Huckabee went on Fox News (which employs him) to defend himself. He told Bill O'Reilly that he'd made a verbal gaffe after participating in 40 interviews in a row and that he'd written in the book he was promoting that Obama had grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia. Without even the hint of an apology to Obama, he quickly went on the offensive, blaming the "left-wing media" for covering the story. He made a Palinesque reference to one of Obama's own microgaffes (the "57 states" one). He said that growing up in a foreign country meant that Obama had a "different world view," the result of not being a Boy Scout or playing Little League, a point which enabled Huckabee to minimize Obama's Hawaii years to the point of insignificance, just as his enormogaffe had done. (Obama, who plays basketball, lived in Indonesia between ages six and 10.) Huckabee concluded by saying that refusing to say that Obama hates America "makes me persona non grata with some conservatives."

Huckabee's performance on Fox added some credence to the idea that he said just what he meant to say during his radio interview -- or, at the very least, that he doesn't especially regret it. As he continues to ponder whether to announce for president later this year, he candidly admitted to O'Reilly that he's mindful of those members of the conservative base who think Obama is disloyal (what other construction can one put on "hates America")? Now he's got a twofer. His Kenyan kilogaffe gave him a little boost with the fringe right. His denial gave him a chance to claim victimization by the left (as though conservatives wouldn't have howled with rage at a leading Democrat's internally coherent, 15-second-long supergaffe about the upbringing of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush). Without being a Birther, he's won himself some Birther cred, an ambiguity that might help a candidate win the nomination and then actually contend in November.

When half of likely GOP voters believe Obama is a Muslim and liar, most candidates probably assume they have to go around the bend to be nominated. That's what Huckabee's doing, whether with his gigantogaffe or his Fox News defense of it. But thinking you have to do it doesn't make it right. You can choose not run. You can switch parties. You can even boldly denounce all toxic, paranoid fantasies, say, "I know the president loves our country no less than I do," and then disagree with him on every single issue. That's the way it used to be done.

Living In Their Own Private Iowa

After a major Bill O'Reilly interview, such as yesterday's with Barack Obama, Fox News usually spends a considerable amount of time analyzing how Bill did, what an expert thought of Bill's body language, how about Bill for keeping his cool or getting under the guy's skin, what was Bill's best question, that kind of thing.

This evening the excitement washed over into Sean Hannity's hour, when producers assembled a focus group in Des Moines for a blow-by-blow analysis of Bill's triumph that was barreling right along until it developed that nearly half said they thought the president was a Muslim. This was startling enough that even Hannity felt he had to admit that Obama's a Christian, albeit the radical, Jeremiah Wright kind.

Is the Des Moines effect a manifestation of Sam Tanenhaus's vitally important insight -- evangelical Christians saying that the mainline variety (such as Obama, baptized in the United Church of Christ) aren't really Christians at all and therefore as good as Muslims? Or are they just conspiracy hounds? Either way, their candid admission makes me wonder how much voter delusion Republican candidates will have to indulge or embrace during the 2012 primaries, and after doing so, how they can possibly get elected.

That Hoity-Toity Krauthammer

Jonathan Tobin didn't like Sarah Palin's response when Bill O'Reilly asked her about Charles Krauthammer's criticism of her reality TV show:

Her response was vintage Palin, combining a sort of schoolyard banter with bristling resentment. “Oooh. Sorry that I’m not so hoity-toity,” was the best she could come up with as a retort while gesturing that she was not someone who had to put her finger in the air to determine what to think, as if the intellectual yet down-to-earth conservative sage Krauthammer was some liberal media consultant. Just as disturbing as the obnoxiousness of her response was the vague thought that perhaps she’s not quite sure who exactly Krauthammer is.

Seed Corn

All these weeks I thought "The Switch" was a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman and also, thanks to the fuss Bill O'Reilly kicked up, a paean to single motherhood. Instead, it's a vehicle for a touching love story between a father and son, Wally (played by Bateman) and Sebastian (the charming Thomas Robinson), who bond over their shared hypochondria and dad's suggestions for dealing with playground bullies.

Wally was abandoned by his own father and so has been unable to take an emotional stand, especially when it comes to admitting to Kassie (Aniston's character) that he loves her. But long before he realizes they're related, he finds Wally impossible to resist. The best scenes feature just the two of them. Sebastian inherited an adult dose of his father's anxiety but none of his timidity. An animal rights advocate, at nine he refuses to blow out the candles on his birthday cake unless a family friend agrees to adopt a three-legged dog from a local kill shelter. Drawn to Sebastian's gutsy little man, Wally finally discovers his inner one.

While Aniston's not incidental by any means, she's stationery. As with her and many of her leading men (such as those in "Along Came Polly," The Breakup," and "Love Happens"), she abides in sunny, grownup charm while Wally seeks after the wisdom and self-awareness to which men must attain in order to adore and serve her.

More or less in the middle of his heart's 13-year travail, he becomes Wally's father by substituting his sperm for Aniston's intended donor's. He obtains it while gazing at a picture of a prominent member of Richard Nixon's White House staff and indulging his imagination. The movie is at its most unrealistic when it begs us to believe that for the first nine years of Wally's life, he doesn't remember doing this. In equally lame scenes, he plants the seed (in the form of an incoherent drunken delusion) with his colleague and best friend, played by Jeff Goldbum, who conveniently helps him recover the memory years later. That's not to say that the gangly, off-beat Goldblum doesn't do a great job. Besides, he's rooting for Aniston the whole time -- and so are we, because that's what we do.

Both Wrong

It's hilarious when Bill O'Reilly says the New York Times is in trouble because it's too liberal. And it's hilarious when Russell Baker says the Washington Post is in trouble because it's not liberal enough.

(To read the Baker article, you'll have to subscribe to the "New York Review of Books," which still seems to be pretty fat and sassy, and for reasons that probably have nothing to do with ideology. My guess is it's because it doesn't give its content away and its advertisers, book publishers, will be the last industry to abandon print.)

Imagine

Bill O'Reilly's day as White House chief of staff.

How Soon They Forget

Reading a letter from a viewer in Nokomis, Florida and mispronouncing the town's name, Bill O'Reilly said tonight, "I don't know where that is." Here's where:

[Sept. 11 terrorist hijackers Mohamed] Atta and [Marwan al-]Shehhi then moved into a small house nearby in Nokomis where they stayed for six months.

Monopoly On Reporting

Bill O'Reilly says the New York Times is failing financially because it's left wing. If so, you'd think it would've happened 40 years ago. Since there are scores of papers doing as bad or worse, radically changing media markets and not ideology are obviously 90% of the problem.

In his column, O'Reilly does acknowledge that the Times has journalistic talent. I'd go him one better. It and our best papers, their political leanings aside, have a journalistic monopoly. If they go, and no other media step in to do quality reporting, then Bill O'Reilly, Katie Couric, and all the bloggers sitting in Starbucks and living rooms spewing their opinions will be as blind as bats.

"Secret" Plan

Confusion continues to reign at Fox News over President Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Earlier in the week, Bill O'Reilly said erroneously that RN hadn't met with Communist Party chief Mao Zedong. Now Ollie North writes:

Richard Nixon's "secret" trip to Beijing precipitated still ongoing changes in the People's Republic of China.

While much of the maneuvering leading up to President Nixon's July 1971 announcement of his China trip was secret, the February 1972 trip itself obviously wasn't. Hard to tell what Ollie meant by the quotation marks.

Mao Tie

Bill O'Reilly is being subjected to severe interrogation techniques (it's up to him to say if it's actually torture) for saying that Richard Nixon never met with Mao Zedong, which, of course, he did, in February 1972. Here's the lashing by the "Economist."

"The Fix Is In"

Bill O'Reilly on the PE's relations with the media:

[I]f the liberal press didn't scream about the conservative preacher Rick Warren praying at the inauguration, you know the fix is in.

Cheney Ends Up As The New Nixon, Anyway

The VP was evidently so grateful to Chris Wallace of Fox News for defending the Bush Administration against comparisons to Richard Nixon that he agreed to give Wallace an “exit interview” — ironic, since Mr. Cheney’s interview with Wallace has itself drawn a comparison by Matt Corley to RN’s famous assertion to David Frost about the President’s latitude during a national security crisis.

As TNN’s Robert Nedelkoff has noted, when Frank Langella, portraying RN, says that when the President does something, “it’s not illegal,” the script makes it appear as though he’s talking about the Watergate break-in and cover-up. In real life, Frost and the former President had been talking about the Huston Plan for wartime intelligence-gathering about domestic radicals. The plan was approved and later rescinded by the President.

It’s hard to defend illegal activity by the government under any circumstances. But it would be interesting to know how much latitude the American people would give it in the event of an imminent threat. At his appearance at the Nixon Library on Friday, Bill O’Reilly said that arguments against extreme measures would lose much if not all of their salience if the U.S. is hit again as on Sept. 11.

That doesn’t justify such actions, either. But journalists should not assume that Americans are of one mind on the subject. That’s why, at the start of the new administration, debate and dialogue would be better than the legal scapegoating of Bush Administration officials which is so intensely craved by the President’s and VP’s political opponents.

As for “Frost/Nixon” director Ron Howard and playwright-scriptwriter Peter Morgan, it would be interesting to know why they chose to misconstrue RN’s quote. Without knowing their motives, its likely that most theatergoers are more appalled by the “not illegal” formulation when it’s applied to political shenanigans as opposed to wartime national security policies.

O'Reilly On Obama's Unknown Factor

Bill O'Reilly, host of the most popular news program on cable television, believed that he's summoned, and uniquely positioned, to serve the public, which he calls "the folks," in an era of change and crisis. "The television 'Factor' is going to be a major factor in this country," O'Reilly said Friday evening before a crowd of nearly 1,200 at the Nixon Library. "The O'Reilly Factor's" mission in the year to come: Figuring President Obama out and, if necessary, holding him accountable. "Nobody else in the media's doing what we're doing," he said.

While O'Reilly believes that Obama realizes his political future depends on rescuing the economy in his first two years, the PE's perspective on the war on terrorism seems murkier. One reason: his aggressively anti-torture AG-designate. "There's not an intelligence guy in the country who wants to look over his shoulder and see Eric Holder, who may indict you for anything," O'Reilly said, adding that his sources tell him that professionals are leaving the intelligence services at a startling rate as Bush Administration opponents demand indictments and trials. If there's no new terrorist attack, O'Reilly said, "then they'll harass Bush and Cheney until 2022." If, heaven forbid, there is a new attack, then the anti-torture movement will lose its salience: "Bush and Cheney will say, 'Yeah, [when we were in] we beat the crap out of 'em'."

As harsh as that looks in type, it went over great with O'Reilly's audience, with whom he got into an easy rhythm the moment he took the stage. He's plain-spoken, non-ideological, funny, and unapologetic about his sometimes aggressive populism. It sounded as though everyone watches his show daily and had seen the recent greatest hits, including his famous brawl with Rep. Barney Frank. "I haven't paid for a sandwich and soda in a deli since that interview," he said, adding that the secret of his success is that "I just reflect what you feel." Whether on the left or right, he said, Americans are angry, "and it's justifiable, when your 401(k) evaporates, and people on Wall Street are stealing us blind."

One of the reasons Sen. McCain lost the election, O'Reilly said, is that he didn't sound angry enough at those who had brought the economy to the brink of chaos. O'Reilly said he was sorry he too hadn't paid more attention to economic issues on "the Factor" before the mid-September crash. "We were busy looking to the outside for the threat," he said.

O'Reilly is promoting his fifth non-fiction bestseller, the highly readable memoir A Bold Fresh Piece Of Humanity. He invoked old-fashioned virtues of family and discipline as learned from his parents in Levittown, New York and the nuns in parochial school. An opponent of gay marriage, he said Obama's choice of the evangelical Pastor Rick Warren to pray at his Inauguration was "a stroke of genius" designed to further separate himself from his controversial former pastor and friend, Jeremiah Wright. "Obama's thinking, 'Okay, the gays are mad. Where're they gonna go?' My five-year-old son says, 'I'm running away,' and I say, 'See you later'." Only if Obama fails to deliver on key domestic issues such as national health insurance, O'Reilly said, would he be in danger of losing substantial elements of his so-called progressive supporters.

Asked about President Nixon, O'Reilly said that Fox News colleague Monica Crowley, an aide in the former President's New Jersey office, has told him of RN's graciousness and many unheralded gestures of support to those in need. "He was on the way of doing some significant things when he got hung up on Watergate, the same way Bush got hung up on Iraq," he said. "He paid for his mistakes."