This seems to be the meat of the op John. I suppose you could make the case that Mr’ O’Reilly made an honest mistake about Malmedy, but from what I’ve seen of Peabody McYellsalot it’s just as possible that he’s twisting facts to suit his views and hoping that his fanbase won’t do any research.
I don’t see why you wouldn’t assume it was an honest mistake since there must be plenty of other examples that would suit the argument. Were there no attrociities against civilians in WWII? My understanding of the Peabody fubar was that he won a Polk award and mistakenly called it a Peabody. And he admitted the mistake as soon as he was called on it.
Don’t get me wrong. I think O’Reilly is a blow hard and is sloppy with his facts. He’s also a bully and is given to absured generalizations. But my experience is that a Pitting of O’Reilly on this board is as likely to be based on faulty analysis as not. I think that is the case here.
To be fair to Clark, he did say that this incident was an “indication” of something wrong with the strategy, and I can see O’Reilly blowing that out of proportion and nit-picking him on that. But this is just two guys with agendas going at it.
By the same token, that’s a pretty stupid error to make. I’m not sure how you get “Nazis killing americans” the wrong way without lacking the intelligence to wipe the drool away from your mouth.
I will readily admit that I base my decision on my massive dislike for O’Reilly. He’s a loudmouth and a bully who rarely (if ever) checks his facts, opting instead for what makes a good soundbite. It’s possible FinnAgain has come to his conclusion the same way that I did.
Still, I will maintain that this being an honest mistake on O’Reillys part is 50/50 at best. His mistakes seem to be entirely for his own benefit (or for his arguments), and iirc he wasn’t even on Inside Edition when the won the Polk Award.
I think any further argument on O’Reillys credibility will result in more head butting than it is worth as neither side is capable of reading his mind to discern what his motivations are. Let’s just chalk this one up to YMMV and let it pass. Sound good to you?
O’Reilly didn’t win either a Peabody or a Polk. The tabloid show he used to work for, Inside Edition, won a Polk more than a year after he left the show. O’Reilly first claimed (at least four times publicly) to have won a Peabody (he phrased it as "we won a Peabody, or on one occasion “we won Peabodies” even though he had nothing to do with the Polk and the show never won any Peabodies), then when Al Franken called him on it, he first denied he’d ever said it, then said he’d “mispoken.” Four times. Each time trying to imply that he personally had won an award. Then denying he’d ever said it once.
After being embarrassed by Franken, O’Reilly expressed a public fantasy to “shoot him between the head” old west style. O’Reilly is lying scum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_O’Reilly_controversies#Peabody_Award
Aww…that’s adorable. It looks like John is being Fair and Balanced.
Thank god. Can’t have a thread without some limp-wristed attempts at deflection and denial! Protect us from the libruls, John! Only your hilarious nitpicking can save us!
-Joe
Hmm…not sure why that url didn’t code. Here it is again.
Interestingly enough, Faux News seems to have taken down the transcript. The page shows up for an instant, then vanishes. “Page cannot be found” my ass.
I’d certainly agree to that. And as you pointed out, the real meat of my OP is that he slandered murdered American soldiers and as yet has only weasled, and has not given a proper apology. In my mind is pretty much impossible to ignore.
He is absolutely not correct, John.
Can you answer Clark’s question to him?
Moreoever, his response to Haditha is a rhetorical Red Herring. “Well… American troops murder innocent people all the time.”
He clearly lied (or was just so horribly, stupidly wrong as to confuse Nazis and Americans) and switched honest American solders who were -murdered- by Nazis and those Nazis. It’s also rather clear to methat he did this to set up a false equivelancy. In the same breath as saying they should be punished, he was saying it happened all the time.
Obviously something that happens all the time is not as memorable as something that only happens once in a blue moon. Nor is it deserving of special scrutiny. Nor is it indicitive of problems that can be solved if it ‘happens all the time and is just part of what happens when our troops go to war’. And, of course, something that happens all the time is excused from being analyzed on an individual, case by case basis. You don’t need to look for the reason that discipline broke down, you can just excuse that, just handwave it away by saying “Oh, that? Happens all the time. Don’t even know why you’re surprised. Just punish them and forget about it.”
But all that is, really, secondary. If you want me to drop my argument that he was excusing Haditha by suggesting that stuff like that happens all the time I’ll be happy to drop that tangent with you.
Will you or will you not condemn O’Leily for slandering American soldiers?
There is no reason, at all, why you should be unable to do that. Even if I started my OP by saying that the moon was made of green cheese, that shouldn’t detract from your ability to agree that slandering soldiers who were murdered as part of a war crime is a vile, vile action.
John, that’s not at all a good paraphrase of what Clark said.
So no, he never sad that the ‘overall stragety’ was flawed. He cited a problem. He said that it was indicitive of problems on the margins, and that they needed to be dealt with. He said that the strategy was on the edge of feasibility, as in on those ‘margins’, it was no longer working as it should. O’Liely was just doing battle with the strawman of a reflexive-bush-bashing-know-it-all-Liberal.
If???
I still find it hard to believe that you view it as more important to argue about exactly why O’Liely included his Red Herring and bout of False Equivelancy and don’t even care that he slandered soldiers who were murdered by the Nazis.
That you couldn’t care less that he slandered murdered American soldiers because such events took place in various wars, then, I really don’t know what to say.
You handwave away O’Liely slandering the memories of murdered American soldiers, but you’re more interested in nitpicking my OP and arguing over what, exctly, he was implying when he essentially said “They should be punished, but come on, our forces do this kinda stuff all the time.”?
You want to find out the ‘truth’ behind my OP, but don’t care one iota whether or not O’Liely claimed that the victims of a Nazi war crime were really war criminals themselves? This is truly through the looking glass.
Again you handwave away slandering murdered soldiers as ‘getting a few facts wrong’. I am blown away.
I’ll try to be more clear, as Harborwolf nailed it in one:
The most vile, and disgusting part of this is that O’Leily claimed that American soldiers who were murdered by the Nazis were, themselves, war criminals. That is so far beyond the pale that I really don’t have language to express it.
That he did this in the course of creating a false equivelancy to Haditha which, as I see it, was designed solely to suggest that there were no problems on the margins, everything was fine, and this is just the way our troops always wage war.
Heck, even that is a slander of our troops.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann has done some first-rate reporting on this. They’ve made a crusade out of bringing down O’Reilly:
These are YouTube, so they may disappear. Get’em while they’re hot.
The amazing thing about O’Reilly is how completely unfazed he is by being proven either mistaken or a liar, over and over again. Olbermann called him “the Sisyphus of morons”. O’Reilly lecturing General Wesley Clark about military history is almost as funny as O’Reilly lecturing John McCain about the effectiveness of torture, which he also did. Anybody can be an asshole sometimes, but Bill has a natural genius for it.
Anyone else think O’Reilly looks like Joe McCarthy’s separated-at-birth twin?
First off, I am solidly in the Olbermann and Franken camp when it comes to to O’Reilly: I think he’s a lying, scumsucking bully who believes in nothing but promoting himself. His argument that Haditha is no big deal because “we’ve always done it” is despicable, and he’s clearly wrong about the incident at Malmedy.
However…
According to a report I heard the other day on NPR (not exactly a bastion of neoconservatism), once word of the massacre at Malmedy spread around US troops in Europe, the numbers of German soldiers captured alive fell. IIRC, the report quoted a veteran who said that unit commanders decided on their own to execute prisoners in retaliation for Malmedy.
So, much as it pains me to say it, even though O’Reilly was absolutely wrong in what he actually said (on two occasions: last week and about eight months ago), there may be a germ of truth to what he was trying to say. And, in fact, in his non-apology apology a day or two after the original show, he made a brief reference to incidents after Malmedy.
None of this, of course, makes the incidents at Haditha any less serious or inexcusable.
Excuse me. After “defending” O’Reilly, I have to go take a scalding hot shower.
I can, almost, maybe, buy that possibly, if I squint right, that he may’ve been trying to talk about events after Malmedy.
But he was so damn specific and clearly was talking about events “at” Malmedy, which he spiced up by giving a lil ol’ dramatic retelling with American soldiers telling the Germans to put their hands over their heads, and then murdering the Germans.
And, also, that stupid of a mistake seems too dumb even for him. Who can’t tell the difference between “at” and “after”? The fact that it was a self-serving ‘mistake’ that just happened to play into his argument makes me even more dubious.
And while, yes, pr’aps he really is just a brainstem level troll, his non-apology apology still makes me furious. When you directly state that Americans who were murdered were, in fact, war criminals, you have to do a hell of a lot more than weasel.
That’s what I was trying to get at. It’s hard to tell because we’re talking about a guy who is also happy to keep lying for as long as he can get away with it. Perhaps it’s best to focus on the stupidity of his overarching point.
You captured my thinking exactly. O’Reilly is a pig. His argument about Haditha is deeply flawed. His statement about Malmedy is factually incorrect. BUT his biggest mistake here was not to forthrightly acknowledge his error and apologize.
You could say he “slandered” the victims at Malmedy if he had gone on at length about their supposed crimes. That’s not what he did. He made a reference to actions that probably were committed by U.S. troops at some point and mistakenly put the “Malmedy” label on it. When challenged, he issued a churlish clarification rather than being man enough to take real responsibility.
It was scummy, but not as scummy as Olbermann would have us believe.
From the Washington Post:
*The girls killed inside Khafif’s house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.
It was the home of 76-year-old Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. Although he had used a wheelchair since diabetes forced a leg amputation years…Ali took nine rounds the chest and abdomen, leaving his intestines spilling out of the exit wounds in his back*
Ect Ect
BO’s comparison seems misguided unless US troops do this sort of thing regularly.
Why is length required? If I say “Clark K eats kittens” it’s slander whether or not I elaborate about what color their fur was.
Jack’s earlier quip about Auschwitz was spot on. It is disgusting beyond word to say that the victims of a horrible crime were the actual war criminals. That really just fills me with inarticulate rage and I don’t think that perversion of the truth can be handwaved away by claiming that you meant to talk about people after that event.
He owes the family members a direct apology, but more importantly, he owes the memory of our fallen heroes a direct apology. Not some mealy-mouthed bullshit.
Yeesh, beyond words.
I’m going to stop posting in this thread for a little while because I really am absolutely furious and that’s not the best space to post from. And it’s certainly not a good place to catch typos from.
G’night all.
What’s he got to be worried about, when there are folks like John Mace who will gladly contort themselves into balloon animals to dismiss his screwups?
Even if O’Reilly mis-spoke and only meant that US soldiers killed Nazis after Malmedy he still sent way too far. He stated this as a historical fact. That we know it happened. But if he was talkign about what happened to Nazi prisoners after Malmedy, we don’t know any of them were murdered. We have accusations, but no proof. It is possible that Americans murdered German prisoners, but it is not an absolute part of the historical record.
But what is a part of the historical record is that Nazis murdered Americans at Malmedy.
O’Reilly is an asshole.
(can’t sleep, clown will eat me.)
Ya know, John is a poster who I respect but rarely agree with… but I’m baffled by his conduct in this thread.
Taking the least important part of my post, which really only served to provide context and had very little to no impact upon the meat of my OP, and which I made clear I wasn’t even really bothered about, he worries at it like a terrier… meanwhile ignoring the fact that Bill’s mistake is not minor, nor can it be handwaved away. It is a ‘mistake’ as serious as claiming that the Jews were really trying to murder all the Nazis. His ‘mistake’ dishonors the memory of the victims of a terrible war crime, and paints them as murderous war criminals themselves.
But John doesn’t seem to care about this, at all, as long as he can nitpick two sentences that I included simply to provide context for O’Leily’s slander of men who gave their lives so that the Nazis would not enslave the world.
John’s priorities remain a mystery to me.