Say Anything Blog

I’m no fan of Bill O’Reilly.  I think he represents the very worst sort of reactionary, emotion-driven, tabloid punditry.  I’m surprised they make televisions big enough for his head to fit on.  That being said, I don’t think his past on-air criticism of Dr. George Tiller had anything to do with Mr. Tiller’s murder.

May 31, 2009 | When his show airs tomorrow, Bill O’Reilly will most certainly decry the death of Kansas doctor George Tiller, who was killed Sunday while attending church services with his wife. Tiller, O’Reilly will say, was a man who was guilty of barbaric acts, but a civilized society does not resort to lawless murder, even against its worst members. And O’Reilly, we can assume, will genuinely mean this.

But there’s no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists. Tiller’s name first appeared on “The Factor” on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O’Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as “Tiller the Baby Killer.”

Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

The problem, of course, is that Tiller was in fact a baby killer.  Though that certainly doesn’t justify his murder, there’s no denying that Tiller was a controversial figure.  And, frankly, O’Reilly’s rhetoric aimed at Tiller (not to mention that of Tiller’s other critics among the pro-life crowd) wasn’t any worse than some of the Bush=Hitler nonsense we’ve been hearing from the left over the past eight years.

I remember when Markos Zuniga, proprietor of the biggest liberal blog on the planet Daily Kos, said “screw them” in response to some American security contractors being murdered in Iraq and drug through the streets.  That’s much worse than anything O’Reilly said about Tiller, and yet Kos is still a member in good standing of the mainstream liberal community.  And what if George W. Bush were to be assassinated tomorrow.  Could we blame the folks at MoveOn.org and Michael Moore for whipping up so much hatred for him?

That wouldn’t be fair.  And neither is blaming O’Reilly for Tiller.

This is the same nonsense we saw after Oklahoma City when the Clintons were trying to pin McVeigh on conservative talk radio.  It’s not about truth or any sense of responsibility.  It’s about leveraging a tragedy to silence dissent and advance a political agenda.

It’s sickening.