Factoring in Bill O'Reilly

I am not a big fan of the cable news shout fests, like The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball with Chris Matthews, or Keith Olbermann's program. Once in a while, via the constant news feed at work, when I am there in the early evening, I'll catch a few minutes of one of these programs. However, I do think that these folks perform a service, the kind of service Jon Stewart was urging Jim Cramer to perform in his now famous Daily Show interview. This service consists of asking the tough questions that we all want to ask and pressing interviewees hard for answers, not letting them off the hook in the easy manner in which they are let off on, say, ABC's This Week, and other more convivial shows.

I have to admit that at least Bill O'Reilly has a sense of humor about himself and appears on The Colbert Report, on which he is known as Papa Bear, and has also appeared on the Daily Show. Even though he and Jon Stewart could not have a more different political frame of reference, I think Stewart respects O'Reilly, at least as much as he respects anyone, though not to the point of not criticizing him, as when he lambasted O'Reilly's two-faced take on women running for high political office, depending on whether he was talking about Hilary Clinton or Sarah Palin.

For some odd reason, I linked to an interview with O'Reilly off the Yahoo home page this morning because I really had to find out who the actor was that O'Reilly would not even go see his movies- Sean Penn. I actually found the interview interesting and O'Reilly's answers to be refreshingly straightforward and candid. He has a lot of very complimentary things to say about a lot people. It was nice to read about this side of a guy whose on-air persona is gruff and often angry. On his Hollywood A-List? Clint Eastwood. His favorite Eastwood film? Unforgiven. I can't fault him for taste on that!

The part of the interview I liked the most and to which I found myself saying Yeah! to was this:

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: WHY ARE ACTORS SUCH FREQUENT TARGETS OF "THE FACTOR"?

O'Reilly: My job is to watch the powerful. A performer has a forum that other people do not, and all we ask is that they be fair. If they believe something and use their TV show, movie or concert to spout off about it, that's fine. But if we have some questions about their beliefs, I think they should answer them -- and not be drive-by people.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: WHO ARE THESE DRIVE-BY PEOPLE YOU SPEAK OF?

O'Reilly: I take it case by case. We took on George Clooney over the 9/11 charities, and we were absolutely right, but Clooney does a good job with Darfur. We took on Bruce Springsteen for things he has done at concerts because we want to know what his frame of reference is. These are powerful people, and we're not going to give them a free ride. If there was somebody screaming right-wing stuff, we'd do the same thing. But there is no one like that because if they do that in Hollywood, they're not going to work, which is an interesting story in and of itself.

After all, how many drive-by attacks has the Holy Father endured both with regard to his largely misunderstand and misinterpreted lifting of the SSPX excommunications and his all too accurate statement that condoms are not the answer to HIV/AIDs in Africa?

The easily manipulated so-called third estate

UPDATE: Today, in an act of school yard chivalry, Sen. McCain, who once used the lipstick on a pig phrase to describe Sen. Clinton's health-care plan, saying it was the same one she worked during the first two years of her husband's administration, which a was a single-payer government administered plan- a claim, like an increasing number of his claims, that was factually erroneous and easily proven to be false- admitted that Sen. Obama did not call Gov. Palin a pig. I guess they were able to get about a week's worth of distracting the media and, hence, the public out of their ploy. It also bothers me that Michelle Obama was roundly criticized earlier this year when she said that patriotism was difficult for some African-Americans, which should be a non-controversial truism. So, why does Todd Palin, who until 2002 was a member of some nutty Alaskan independence party, to which Gov. Palin herself may have belonged, get a free pass? Besides, it looks like the blatant racism is starting to rear its ugly head at, of all places, a Values Voter summit. Have you heard of Obama Waffles? This as disgraceful as it is disgusting, all the more so because it is apparently sponsored by a Christian group.

I can prove the point made by Dr. Reno in his post Putting Politics in its Place with one word: lipstick! Lest I be misunderstood, the McCain campaign understands metaphor perfectly well, but the news media does not, or at least not the context of the metaphor used by Sen. Obama to describe McCain's- listen carefully- economic policies, not his running mate, who famously used lipstick in her convention speech last week. "On Tuesday, Obama criticized McCain's economic policies as similar to those of President Bush, saying: 'You can put lipstick on a pig ... it's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years'" (Nedra Pickler writing for the AP). No doubt Sen. Obama's use of the word lipstick was a vague allusion to Gov. Palin's convention speech. This gave his comment some currency and added a little humor. He did not back-handedly call Gov. Palin a pig, which is what the McCain camp is claiming to the news media as a diversionary tactic.

Obama said the McCain campaign moved to "seize an innocent remark and take it out of context because they knew it's catnip for the news media" (Ben Smith). It is, the media went right for it. So, the McCain campaign is stupid like a fox, to employ an analogy. Obama was correct today when he said: "See, it would be funny, but the news media decided that would be the lead story yesterday. This happens every election cycle. Every four years, this is what we do. This is what they want to spend two of the last 55 days talking about...Enough!" (ibid) Enough, indeed. It is easier to manipulate the media in this way in an effort to detract attention away from the criticism made by Sen. Obama than to respond to the criticism.

The real pig, it seems, wearing lipstick, rouge, and a silky dress, is the media in our political culture, especially those in the media who have the audacity to criticize bloggers for irresponsibility. The third estate? In a pig's eye! Such media manipulation is not the exclusive domain of the McCain campaign, this is just the latest installment in the news media's on-going trivialization of U.S. politics. All this after the juvenile antics of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews and in the wake of Mr. No Spin's spinning, etc. Tim Russert, we need you!

Despite the vitriol I just heaped on the news media, I still think it fair to ask why Gov. Palin is not making herself available to speak with reporters and is being limited to reading from written scripts in front of friendly and fawning crowds. Perhaps she is being closely contolled by the campaign because of her penchant for invoking God's will for things like the Iraq war and the Alaskan natural gas pipeline, as she did in a speech to ministry students at her church last June. If nothing else, it will make for an interesting debate at St. Louis' Washington University with her opponent and apparent polar opposite, Sen. Biden, who can't bring himself to make a consistent judgment on the basis of his belief, which is taught by his church to be derived from reason, that human life begins at conception, come 2 October.

Odd Holocaust Thriller

The 2006 Dutch film Zwartboek, or The Black Book, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is exciting but disturbing for its amoral plot. The tagline is: "To fight the enemy, she must become one of them," wholly appropriate for a spy movie. As with the best portrayals of human nature, the lines blur between the good guys and the bad. But even given that, the moral faultline never settles. The press was divided on the film in the Netherlands.

The strange depiction of Christians cannot go unnoted. They are, without exception, bigoted and cruel. A Christian resistance fighter will not shoot to save friends, but only when the enemy blasphemes. A family sheltering a young Jewish woman forces her to memorize Gospel verses in order to receive a meal. After the war, a "Christian" mob abuses those who cooperated with the enemy. This is a strange and suspiciously ideological treatment of Christians as violent fundamentalists, given the country's rescue of some 5000 Jews from the Nazis.

More Dutch have been honored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, as `righteous gentiles' than from any other country" (Survival and Resistance: The Netherlands Under Nazi Assault).

Carice van Houten who plays Rachel is a winning heroine who is quick-witted and able to subdue her natural feelings to take up the task at hand. Sebastian Koch is sympathetic as the German official Ludwig Müntze with a tragic story of his own.

It is no surprise that the Resistance may also be infiltated by spies, and so-called friends may profit from the plight of the Jews. Then too enemies can turn out to be the only true friends. Still, overall the plot is capricious in its contortions as bitter betrayals are counteracted by surprising alliances. No one appears to act from principle, but only for personal motives. In the end, only individual survival and revenge prevail.