March 8, 2015

Elizabeth Warren: The Outsider

~snip~

To this day, she isn’t sure Clinton quite knew who she was; East Wing policy staff simply wanted her to explain a GOP-sponsored bankruptcy bill, then get out. Clinton greeted her briskly, then tucked into a hamburger and fries as Warren launched into a passionate presentation against the bill: Tell the president to veto the damn thing, she said; it was a travesty designed to squeeze “the last couple-tenths of a percent” profit out of hard-pressed women and children who had fallen on tough times as a result of divorce, financial ruin or medical catastrophe. “I mean this in the nicest possible way: She didn’t know this stuff. … But [she was] one of the smartest people I ever sat down with,” recalls Warren, remembering Clinton peppering her with questions between bites—and pushing the plate to the middle of the table to offer fries. “We get all the way to the end—and I still remember this ... she stood up and said, “‘We need to stop that awful bill!’” Next came a first glimpse of the Hillary whirlwind: “She whips me outside of this tiny room … and she says, “‘PICTURE?’”—and here Warren impersonates Clinton by raising her voice to a crescendo—because the only possible answer was yes. The first lady did, in fact, go back to persuade Bill Clinton to veto the bill, in Warren’s account: “The next thing that happens, there were skid marks in the hallways of the White House from advisers changing their positions after Mrs. Clinton got involved.” But what happened later was even more telling—and set the stage for a complicated, tense and still-evolving relationship between the two strikingly dissimilar women atop the Democratic Party in 2015.


Three years after the hamburger summit, in 2001, Hillary Clinton, by then the junior senator from New York, had her own chance to weigh in on the bankruptcy bill. She voted in favor of a modified version (that provided limited protections for women and children) over the vehement objections of Warren and other consumer advocates. It passed, yet when Clinton was running for president in 2007 she glossed over that “yes” vote and claimed, during debates, that she “fought the banks” on bankruptcy reform. Warren has complained about it ever since, one of the reasons Bill Clinton refused to campaign for her during her 2012 Senate campaign. Another is Warren’s attacks on Clinton’s former Wall Street allies, a former Clinton aide tells us. But Warren has a knack for getting the last laugh. She is now her party’s leading liberal alternative to Clinton, a role she clearly relishes. Despite her repeated denials she is considering the possibility of running, she remains a threat, and not just because her denials always seem phrased only in the present tense. Warren speaks the language of populist grievance and scoffs at the Clintonian soft-pedal: She has told someone close to her that she remains “worried that Hillary and her people are still too damned close to Wall Street.” Sure, Clinton leads all potential Democratic challengers—Warren included—by 40 or 50 points, depending on the poll, but she lacks that kind of leftist brio. Plus, Clinton is rusty as a campaigner, addicted to six-figure personal appearance fees and a multimillionaire friend of Wall Street at a time of widespread concern about the country’s glaring economic inequality.



Some of Warren’s friends told us she would reconsider if Clinton were to exit the race unexpectedly. (“Opportunity knocks, and she runs towards it, obviously,” says Jody Freeman, a friend from Harvard, speaking more generally of Warren’s approach.) Run Warren Run, a group pressing her to run that is infused with $1.25 million from liberal groups MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, now has offices in New Hampshire and Iowa. In an interview, Warren maintained, with a dismissive sweep of her hand before the question could even be posed, that the White House thing just isn’t going to happen. And she pushes back, hard, when we suggest that she is using her hard-won national platform merely to pull Clinton to the left in 2016. “You are framing it, in a sense, too narrowly,” she says. “No, the question for me is how can we change, how to make this country change, how to get this country back on a path where people can build real economic security.” As for Warren’s own path? “She’s much, much too smart to run for president,” says her friend and ally, former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, who co-authored the Wall Street regulation bill passed after the 2008 financial crisis that included Warren’s signature initiative, a consumer board that looks after the interests of bank and credit-card customers. “She has no chance to win—none—and she would kill her credibility if she did. She’s devoted her life to issues that she cared about, and the second people perceive her as ambitious, you know, interested in running, that’s over.”


~snip~

But the campaign left Warren chastened, and more overtly politician-like, sapping the spontaneity that made her such an appealing figure in the first place. Nowhere is that more apparent than on Capitol Hill, where she has hit the mute button around the Hill press, a strategic decision made for the purposes of self-preservation, brand-protection and focus. She doesn’t want to stand around spit-balling on topics—the Islamic State, Keystone, immigration—that diverge from her core economic message. “What I’m doing today is not different in intent from what I was doing 25 years ago,” she told us. “I’m on the same mission.” But to John McCain, an old Senate bull who loves the back-and-forth, Warren’s attitude is small-ball, and ultimately self-defeating, because she won’t always be quite so in-demand. “That’s just foolish,” the Arizona senator and two-time presidential candidate told us. Yet her diffidence is also a signifier of her status, and an Obama-like lack of neediness (she has little of the dive-for-the-microphone impulses of many colleagues). “She knows exactly what she’s doing and who she is,” says a fellow Democratic senator. “She doesn’t need to play the inside game, she’s got the outside game.” Like Clinton and Obama, she stands conspicuously apart, a stiletto in a Senate full of thick-handled butter knives. If you blur the eyes it’s not hard to see a flicker of Hillary circa 2006: the blonde hair and pantsuits, the harried aides briefing on the fly, the head-snap reactions when she enters the room—the momentum of ascendant power whooshing by you to its uncertain destination. She is going somewhere, and fast. But where? Her populist appeal permits her to campaign in red states Obama couldn’t set foot in, like Kentucky and West Virginia. She raised about $6 million for Democratic candidates in 2014—including some who weren’t in cycle, such as Washington Senator Patty Murray. This helped her within the caucus, particularly with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who insiders say had been skeptical about Warren initially. He’s now one of her biggest boosters, in part because she’s one of the few Democrats who can rile up voters on the campaign trail.





cont'


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/elizabeth-warren-profile-115489_Page4.html#.VPytHkIwJic

March 8, 2015

Face The Nation: What Are The Political Ramifications Of Hillary Clinton's E-mail Secrecy?

.

March 8, 2015

Dianne Feinstein: Hillary's 'Silence' on Email Scandal 'Is Going to Hurt Her'

.

March 8, 2015

Sen. Feinstein: Hillary Clinton Needs To ‘STEP UP AND COME OUT’ On E-MAIL Firestorm

~snip~

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called Sunday on Hillary Clinton to "step up and come out" to explain in more detail why she used a personal e-mail account to conduct government business during her time as secretary of state.

The comments, coming from the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, are some of the most forceful that Clinton has faced from a prominent member of her party since questions about her e-mail use flared up last week.

"What I would like is for her to come forward and say just what the situation is, because she is the preeminent political figure right now," Feinstein said on NBC's "Meet the Press." The senator called Clinton the "leading candidate" for president.

Feinstein did not accuse Clinton of any wrongdoing, but she suggested that Clinton "needs to step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is." She added: "I think from this point on the silence is going to hurt her."



cont'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/03/08/sen-feinstein-hillary-clinton-needs-to-step-up-and-come-out-on-e-mail-firestorm/

March 8, 2015

Hillary's Only Hope To Tame Worst Habits: A Real Primary Challenge -Preferably From Elizabeth Warren

~snip~

The obvious challenger, the 1 with a true chance to sharpen Hillary’s candidacy if not derail it totally, is Elizabeth Warren. What we learned this week, by way of the New York Instances and Connected Press, is that Clinton deliberately set up a private e-mail method to use for all of public small business she conducted as the nation’s chief foreign policy officer. She did so despite explicit rules prohibiting that behavior. When asked to turn over documents to the State Division, her aides combed by means of and turned over thousands of pages. What was held back? Or altered? Or erased? We have no thought. And with every single passing day, suspicions of her motives grow darker. Technologies authorities now say her private e-mail program gave her the potential to delete messages. It opened her communications to hackers that State warned were a threat. Most shocking is the truth that her secretive e-mail address seems to have enabled Clinton and the State Department to evade Freedom of Info Law requests from journalists. This law is 1 of the triumphs of liberalism, meant to safeguard the public’s ideal to know when a government official refuses to give up information and facts. Due to the fact she used a private address, such requests by The AP to the State Division came up empty for a year. The organization is now deliberating no matter if to sue. In spite of the cascade of bad news, the Clinton camp’s predictable reaction to such revelations is to hunker down and attack the messengers.


~snip~

Taking a web page from Hillary’s playbook, Brock appeared on MSNBC to blame the scandal on an anti-Clinton media. I suppose he would have us think that the Washington Post is biased against Clinton. That should be why the Post was 1st to report that at different times, the Clinton Foundation has accepted millions of dollars from foreign governments, including Hamas-supporting Qatar and Saudi Arabia, an ostensible ally with strong hyperlinks to radical Islam. Is it Republican paranoia to be concerned that such countries might use the Clinton Foundation as a backdoor to seek favors from a future President Clinton? But the fallout to the e mail bombshell must once and for all place the lie to the “right-wing conspiracy” theory. The complete liberal cast of MSNBC, from Mika Brzezinksi on “Morning Joe” to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, have sounded aghast all week that Hillary is once again behaving as if she is above the rules that apply to ordinary humans. I am not a Hillary hater. In reality, I would be overjoyed in 2016 to see the first face in the Oval Office that appears like the other half of the American population. And I believe Hillary Clinton has the intellect and the experience to be a great President. She has earned the respect of leaders all more than the world. As a tireless diplomat, she did her very best to restore trust in the United States while George W. Bush’s unnecessary war and futile occupation of Iraq wound down. But even those of us who might help her candidacy have to face a painful question: In at least a single significant way, is her character flawed?


~snip~

Quite a few sources who have worked inside Hillary’s bubble have told me how formidable and intimidating she can be. “When she says ‘Fix it!’ or ‘If there’s a challenge, fire ’em!’” she does not appreciate how she can make persons jump,” Sherburne told me. “Hillary lacks self-awareness of this trait and how it affects persons.” These perpetual and deep-seated problems make it all the a lot more required that a prominent Democrat keep up the political stress on Hillary — at least to discipline her worst instincts, if not to serve as an understudy in the occasion her candidacy implodes. I don’t imply Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley. They’re decent enough politicians but without the need of the required chops. Joe Biden would be much more formidable, but he’s too closely yoked to the Obama years. The only one who has the political argument and individual fire to make a powerful stand is Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The liberal Democratic heroine was asked last week by the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” no matter if Clinton would be a “progressive warrior.” Warren’s reply was cool as the snow blanketing her dwelling state. “You know, I feel that is what we gotta see,” Warren responded. “I want to hear what she wants to run on and what she says she wants to do. That’s what campaigns are supposed to be about.” Bill Clinton, I am told by a Warren insider, is the a single who sees Warren as a threat — a all-natural politician who excites the base in approaches that Hillary cannot seem to do. Ex-Sen. Clinton herself was nervous sufficient to attempt inviting the common freshman Sen. Warren for a cozy chat at the Clintons’ Washington property last December. She tried to persuade the fiery populist to abandon her own national platform as a media darling who fights for operating households. Wouldn’t she favor to take the veil as one particular of Clinton’s 200-plus friendly insiders? Not on her life. “Elizabeth is a rock-thrower,” says a close advisor, who insists on being nameless as do all on Warren’s group. The senator even keeps a bowl of rocks on her desk. When an advisor offered to send a lot more rocks from a New Year’s gathering of mostly liberal political junkies, Warren responded, “Don’t bother, I have a lot.”


~snip~

Warren, people today tell me, has small regard for Hillary. In 1998, the then-Harvard law professor met with the former Initial Lady and gained her agreement to help fight for working households against “that awful (bankruptcy) bill,” as Clinton called it. But Bill Clinton was not ready to pick a fight with the banks. As a presidential candidate-in-waiting, Hillary has shown her conflicted stance, as a single who talks challenging on redressing the erosion of middle-class wages whilst she gladly accepts huge speaking charges to sweet-speak Wall Street titans. Warren is nothing if not impassioned. As she admits in her memoir, “A Fighting Possibility,” she wasn’t born with a lot of talents. She wasn’t particularly pretty, didn’t have the highest grades, didn’t play a sport or sing. Her a single talent was she could fight: “not with my fists, but with my words.” In her memoir she writes of the day she grew up, at age 12, when her daddy had a heart attack. Quickly immediately after, the family members lost their station wagon. Then they lost their property. Her father’s job selling carpets for Montgomery Ward was taken from him, and when little Elizabeth asked her mother why, she was told his organization robbed him of some thing he had worked for all his life. But why? The kid wanted to know. The answer came: “They feel he’s going to die.” Her mother walked to Sears Roebuck to interview for her initial job. She was 50. Protecting operating households who are struggling to discharge debts, locate relief from student loans and gather youngster assistance from debt-buried spouses is personal with Warren. And it would produce a great contrast with Clinton who, when push comes to shove, appears to side with the effective, or reflexively defend her own interests. Warren insists she won’t run. Clinton’s polling position — 56% of Democrats say they’d help her at this exceedingly early moment — leaves Warren 42 points behind. So why not stage an unconventional, rogue major campaign that is suited to her message and character? According to a Warren insider who also worked with the Clinton White Property, “Elizabeth couldn’t be happier with her function — she loves pushing Hillary on economic difficulties. She’ll get all of Hillary’s responses on the record and play this out to the final possible moment, till Hillary decides.” Warren is wildly ambitious, this supply says, not for her private success, but to alter the direction of the nation. This just might be her moment.





cont'

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/gail-sheehy-hillary-hope-article-1.2140351

March 8, 2015

Hillary's Only Hope To Tame Worst Habits: A Real Primary Challenge - Preferably From Elizabeth Warren

~snip~

The obvious challenger, the 1 with a true chance to sharpen Hillary’s candidacy if not derail it totally, is Elizabeth Warren. What we learned this week, by way of the New York Instances and Connected Press, is that Clinton deliberately set up a private e-mail method to use for all of public small business she conducted as the nation’s chief foreign policy officer. She did so despite explicit rules prohibiting that behavior. When asked to turn over documents to the State Division, her aides combed by means of and turned over thousands of pages. What was held back? Or altered? Or erased? We have no thought. And with every single passing day, suspicions of her motives grow darker. Technologies authorities now say her private e-mail program gave her the potential to delete messages. It opened her communications to hackers that State warned were a threat. Most shocking is the truth that her secretive e-mail address seems to have enabled Clinton and the State Department to evade Freedom of Info Law requests from journalists. This law is 1 of the triumphs of liberalism, meant to safeguard the public’s ideal to know when a government official refuses to give up information and facts. Due to the fact she used a private address, such requests by The AP to the State Division came up empty for a year. The organization is now deliberating no matter if to sue. In spite of the cascade of bad news, the Clinton camp’s predictable reaction to such revelations is to hunker down and attack the messengers.


~snip~

Taking a web page from Hillary’s playbook, Brock appeared on MSNBC to blame the scandal on an anti-Clinton media. I suppose he would have us think that the Washington Post is biased against Clinton. That should be why the Post was 1st to report that at different times, the Clinton Foundation has accepted millions of dollars from foreign governments, including Hamas-supporting Qatar and Saudi Arabia, an ostensible ally with strong hyperlinks to radical Islam. Is it Republican paranoia to be concerned that such countries might use the Clinton Foundation as a backdoor to seek favors from a future President Clinton? But the fallout to the e mail bombshell must once and for all place the lie to the “right-wing conspiracy” theory. The complete liberal cast of MSNBC, from Mika Brzezinksi on “Morning Joe” to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, have sounded aghast all week that Hillary is once again behaving as if she is above the rules that apply to ordinary humans. I am not a Hillary hater. In reality, I would be overjoyed in 2016 to see the first face in the Oval Office that appears like the other half of the American population. And I believe Hillary Clinton has the intellect and the experience to be a great President. She has earned the respect of leaders all more than the world. As a tireless diplomat, she did her very best to restore trust in the United States while George W. Bush’s unnecessary war and futile occupation of Iraq wound down. But even those of us who might help her candidacy have to face a painful question: In at least a single significant way, is her character flawed?


~snip~

Quite a few sources who have worked inside Hillary’s bubble have told me how formidable and intimidating she can be. “When she says ‘Fix it!’ or ‘If there’s a challenge, fire ’em!’” she does not appreciate how she can make persons jump,” Sherburne told me. “Hillary lacks self-awareness of this trait and how it affects persons.” These perpetual and deep-seated problems make it all the a lot more required that a prominent Democrat keep up the political stress on Hillary — at least to discipline her worst instincts, if not to serve as an understudy in the occasion her candidacy implodes. I don’t imply Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley. They’re decent enough politicians but without the need of the required chops. Joe Biden would be much more formidable, but he’s too closely yoked to the Obama years. The only one who has the political argument and individual fire to make a powerful stand is Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The liberal Democratic heroine was asked last week by the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” no matter if Clinton would be a “progressive warrior.” Warren’s reply was cool as the snow blanketing her dwelling state. “You know, I feel that is what we gotta see,” Warren responded. “I want to hear what she wants to run on and what she says she wants to do. That’s what campaigns are supposed to be about.” Bill Clinton, I am told by a Warren insider, is the a single who sees Warren as a threat — a all-natural politician who excites the base in approaches that Hillary cannot seem to do. Ex-Sen. Clinton herself was nervous sufficient to attempt inviting the common freshman Sen. Warren for a cozy chat at the Clintons’ Washington property last December. She tried to persuade the fiery populist to abandon her own national platform as a media darling who fights for operating households. Wouldn’t she favor to take the veil as one particular of Clinton’s 200-plus friendly insiders? Not on her life. “Elizabeth is a rock-thrower,” says a close advisor, who insists on being nameless as do all on Warren’s group. The senator even keeps a bowl of rocks on her desk. When an advisor offered to send a lot more rocks from a New Year’s gathering of mostly liberal political junkies, Warren responded, “Don’t bother, I have a lot.”


~snip~

Warren, people today tell me, has small regard for Hillary. In 1998, the then-Harvard law professor met with the former Initial Lady and gained her agreement to help fight for working households against “that awful (bankruptcy) bill,” as Clinton called it. But Bill Clinton was not ready to pick a fight with the banks. As a presidential candidate-in-waiting, Hillary has shown her conflicted stance, as a single who talks challenging on redressing the erosion of middle-class wages whilst she gladly accepts huge speaking charges to sweet-speak Wall Street titans. Warren is nothing if not impassioned. As she admits in her memoir, “A Fighting Possibility,” she wasn’t born with a lot of talents. She wasn’t particularly pretty, didn’t have the highest grades, didn’t play a sport or sing. Her a single talent was she could fight: “not with my fists, but with my words.” In her memoir she writes of the day she grew up, at age 12, when her daddy had a heart attack. Quickly immediately after, the family members lost their station wagon. Then they lost their property. Her father’s job selling carpets for Montgomery Ward was taken from him, and when little Elizabeth asked her mother why, she was told his organization robbed him of some thing he had worked for all his life. But why? The kid wanted to know. The answer came: “They feel he’s going to die.” Her mother walked to Sears Roebuck to interview for her initial job. She was 50. Protecting operating households who are struggling to discharge debts, locate relief from student loans and gather youngster assistance from debt-buried spouses is personal with Warren. And it would produce a great contrast with Clinton who, when push comes to shove, appears to side with the effective, or reflexively defend her own interests. Warren insists she won’t run. Clinton’s polling position — 56% of Democrats say they’d help her at this exceedingly early moment — leaves Warren 42 points behind. So why not stage an unconventional, rogue major campaign that is suited to her message and character? According to a Warren insider who also worked with the Clinton White Property, “Elizabeth couldn’t be happier with her function — she loves pushing Hillary on economic difficulties. She’ll get all of Hillary’s responses on the record and play this out to the final possible moment, till Hillary decides.” Warren is wildly ambitious, this supply says, not for her private success, but to alter the direction of the nation. This just might be her moment.





cont'

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/gail-sheehy-hillary-hope-article-1.2140351

March 7, 2015

Tens of Thousands Attend ANTI-NETANYAHU Rally in Tel Aviv

Tens of thousands of Israelis are gathering at a Tel Aviv square under the banner "Israel wants change" and calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be replaced in March 17 national elections.

Saturday night's rally at Rabin Square is the highest profile demonstration yet in the run-up to the election. It is organized by a non-profit organization seeking to change Israel's priorities and refocus on health, education, housing and the country's cost of living. Though not officially endorsed by any political party, it drew mostly supporters of leftist and centrist parties.

The rally's keynote speaker is former Mossad chief Meir Dagan who recently slammed Netanyahu's conduct and called him "the person who has caused the greatest strategic damage to Israel."






cont'

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/tens-thousands-attend-anti-netanyahu-rally-tel-aviv-29466324

March 7, 2015

President Obama OBLITERATES Any Republican Hopes That Keystone XL Will Be Approved

President Obama appeared to crush all Republican hope that Keystone XL will ever be approved while he is president during a town hall in South Carolina.






Those do not sound like the remarks of a president who is inclined to approve Keystone XL. In fact every time the president has spoken about Keystone, he states that he has not made a final decision, but he makes the exact argument that opponents of the pipeline use. It is easy to see that there is virtually no chance that Keystone XL will be approved while Barack Obama is president. The president is not giving Republicans a shred of hope. It is obvious that he doesn’t support the pipeline, and his remarks were a destruction of the Republican hope that Keystone will ever be approved.




cont'

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/03/06/president-obama-obliterates-republican-hopes-keystone-xl-approved.html

March 6, 2015

More About That 'CENTRIST' Democratic Counterattack

Howie Klein and others covered this news from The Hill — "Centrist Dems ready strike against Warren wing" — for example, here. But in most cases the focus was on the "centrists" themselves. I'd like to focus on the article. First though, read the headline from The Hill, then consider — this is very good news. The battle between real progressives and Big Money will be engaged, not shunted to the wings, and engaged on our ground, not theirs. Their prime argument? "Democrats will lose if they run progressive candidates. Only "centrists" can win." Our prime argument? "The party ran that experiment in 2014. The results shows the opposite — most of their 'centrists' lost."


Keep that in mind as you read through this.

The Article and Its Framing
Let's start where the article starts, by framing the news. From The Hill (my emphasis):

Read the rest of the article, since there's more of the same stuff in it. After you're done, let's deconstruct this a bit.

Now A Modest Translation

First, "centrist" is code for "corporate" without the negative-sounding name. "Moderate" is also code for "corporate." "Businesses" is code for "corporations" even though they'd like it to echo "small business" — like the mom-and-pop operations their campaign contributors work so hard to gobble and destroy (think of all the small cable companies like Storer that were eaten to become Comcast).

Now my translation of the same passage, with a few more interpolations added:



It's now a wholly different article, right? Yet a more accurate one, even with respect to its undeclared but obvious purpose — presenting the news. Note that my translation is not snark, but literally true. The almost total extent to which New Democrats owe their funding and careers to "corporate service" is well documented. For example, here's Howie Klein writing about the above-named frontman for this policy group, Rep. Scott Peters:



People who vote with Republicans vote with Big Money, and a guy who can spend over $3 million on his own election is Big Money (mostly; in terms of wealth, he looks up at the soles of David Koch's shoes, but most of us still look up at his). The choice of Peters to represent the Big Money pushback on the "Warren Wing" — the anti–Big Money wing — of the Democratic party is inspired. And Peters is clearly eager to be as service. If my translation is accurate, then the writer's framing is misleading — because he disappears the corporate "thank you for your service" aspect of the New Democratic operation, and substitutes their "we just disagree" cover story as if it were factual. That framing is the opposite of factual, a counter-factual cover story in so many respects.




cont'


http://crooksandliars.com/2015/03/more-about-centrist-democratic

March 6, 2015

Go Ahead And Call Bill O'Reilly What He Is: A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR

A good rule of callout culture is to never target someone for the same things you do. No adulterer is more insufferable, after all, than the fire-and-brimstone minister. But when NBC anchor Brian Williams was exposed for fabricating stories of journalistic heroism, poor Bill O'Reilly just couldn't help himself. There was Williams, that prick, garnering widespread acclaim for the kind of stories Bill had already been making up for years. A real American doesn't tolerate that kind of crap, and Bill O'Reilly is a real American. He has evolved into a post-fact reality, nightly defending a singular nation of fear and confabulation against all enemies foreign and domestic. He is a fiction more palpable than himself, and he can't stop, because it's all he has.


~snip~

There are two schools of thought on what to do with this information about Bill O'Reilly. The first comes from Gabriel Sherman (on whose indispensable book I relied on for a podcast review of Those Who Trespass). It goes like this: Fox News and Bill O'Reilly are part of a larger right-wing victim complex that feeds on attack because the attacks confirm their false narrative of being besieged "truth-tellers" so dangerous to the left-wing academic-government complex that deranged libturds will try to silence them via any possible smear. Sherman's reading is correct, and I won't put words in his mouth by drawing any conclusions about what action he thinks should be undertaken. That said, there is no shortage of online strategists and sages who will tell you not to bother going after O'Reilly and Fox for the same reason that people tell you, "Don't feed the trolls." Fuck that. This chickenshit attitude ultimately lets trolls like O'Reilly win by default. They win when they attack you, they win when you attack them, they win when you go silent. It's the same line of thinking that tells feminist writers threatened by online rapists that they should just delete their accounts and hope their profiles go away for long enough to no longer be provocative to scum. What consequence is there for real journalistic organizations anymore when it comes to going after O'Reilly? They get called attackers? O'Reilly calls them attackers merely for reporting facts inconsistent with his epistemic bubble. His fans aren't going to watch or read those other sites or channels? They don't already. By this point, O'Reilly has trained his audience to consider digesting independent news an act of race treason on par with slaveowners letting negroes learn to read.


~snip~

The response will be the same no matter the offense, so go ahead and call Bill O'Reilly what he is. A pathological liar and a paper tiger elevated to a glass desk in front of millions of people he wants to be as scared as he is of the intruding world. Let him revel in being attacked, then keep calling him the same things, and repeating them until they're the only Google search result anymore. What's he going to do? Sue historicity? O'Reilly isn't a newsman, he's a blue-eyed cirrhotic cyst erupting acid onto the brass rail at the Now I'll Tell You What the REAL Problem Is Pub. He's the guy who sits next to you and brags about how he'd kick the hell out of any thugs daring to bring violence into his neighborhood, stumbles off his barstool, goes outside, reflexively crosses the street to avoid two black kids on the sidewalk two blocks up, then drives home drunk. He's the guy who picks a fight with you if you correct him, then refuses to throw down because he "was Gold Gloves in college and doesn't want to end you, man," then backs away toward his driveway while trying to make eye contact with anyone he thinks is a friend and saying, "I feel sorry for him! I have a pool in my backyard." Because that's the other school of thought about Bill O'Reilly, and something that explains why he leapt on Brian Williams with a predatory recognition of common weakness. O'Reilly long ago turned up the volume on his Real American Thug schtick to drown out the fact that almost everything he has to say is either a lie, bullying or a deracinated piece of non-data. As part of that, he understood something that Brian Williams did: that there is nothing more authentic than a classic American tough guy who's seen combat.


~snip~

That same desire burns in Bill O'Reilly with an intensity that manifests as sociopathy. He's just aware enough to know he shovels shit for a living and is lucky if he's not contradicting himself from one day to the next. Bill O'Reilly is all ad hominem because he has nothing else. In an atmosphere devoid of facts, a legend will have to do, and those who challenge it must be shouted down, threatened or "sanctioned" to intimidate anyone else who might threaten to puncture him next. The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the L.A. Riots, even Levittown — all falsehoods mired in death or toil — elevate him to a standard of heroism where questions aren't allowed anymore. Like critics of all good American legends, people who insist on mentioning facts about him are losers and college students, people who lack love and loyalty, whose smartassed treason merits justice swift, uncompromising and unmerciful. If Bill O'Reilly can just prove to you that he's seen enough combat in service of this country, then no amount of violence and no fiction is impermissible. Give him time to tell enough stories, and he may even ascend to an unassailable, ethereal plane. One of these days, Bill O'Reilly will be so real it won't even matter if anything about him is true anymore.





cont'

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/go-ahead-and-call-bill-oreilly-what-he-is-a-pathological-liar-20150305