Canadian Cynic

Bill O'Reilly -- spinning hard in the no-spin zone

Would anyone expect Faux News' resident blowhard Bill O'Reilly to do anything but try to spin the current stories of torture of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison? (Rhetorical question, don't answer that.) To see just how desperately O'Reilly is looking for that pony in the pile of manure, you have to read this partial transcript of O'Reilly's interview with New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh.

To give you a taste of just how much of a suck-up apologist O'Reilly is for the Bush administration and the military, I've cherry-picked some of the funnier nuggets from the interview, but you should read the whole thing anyway.

O'REILLY: All right. But there's a difference between being a poor administrator, as this -- your -- and knowing about torture and looking the other way...

O'REILLY: All right. Well, the damage to the country obviously is just immeasurable. But reading your article in "The New Yorker." I just get the feeling that the Army, when they heard about it, started action almost immediately. It wasn't a cover-up situation. Or did I read your article wrong?...

O'REILLY: OK, but Sanchez the commander put him in charge fairly quickly. They mobilized fairly quickly...

O'REILLY: No, there's no question about it. And there's no question. There's no justification for it. But how do you wind up in a prison if you're just innocent and didn't do anything? See, our commanders and our embedded reporters tell me that they're way too busy to be rounding up guys in the marketplace and throwing them into prison.

So I'm going to dispute your contention that we had a lot of people in there with just no rap sheets at all, who were just picked up for no reason at all. The people who were in the prison were suspected of being either Al Qaeda or terrorists who were killing Americans and knew something about it...

And on, and on, and tediously on. Is there a more pathetic excuse for a journalist than Bill O'Reilly? (Again, rhetorical question.)