Ho, hum. Another day, another right-wing family-values torch-carrier exposed as a big fat hypocrite — with something other than the Sword of Truth in his hand, no less.
Bill O’Reilly, sued for sexual harassment. You can read the whole thing or, as The Smoking Gun has thoughtfully partitioned it, just the really dirty parts.
Lance did a nice job with Christopher Reeve today, devoting way more time to his acting career than anyone else I read on the subject. He pointed me to another blog, which helpfully sampled the Free Republic on the subject. The gist: It’s good that he was dead, and now he’s burning in hell because he promoted the bloody slaughter of unborn babies just to ease his suffering. Selfish, selfish bastard.
(Shudder.)
But remember, it’s the left winning the vileness derby. I read it in the New York Times, so it must be true.
If you don’t understand the reference in the above paragraph, you’re…just not keeping up. And I don’t have the energy to go hunt down all the links in what is essentially a story that can be boiled down to this: A man sent a hideous e-mail to a New York Times reporter, signed his name, had it printed in the Sunday ombudsman’s column and lived to regret it. John Scalzi had the best single take on it (including all those links I’m too lazy to include), with this refreshingly vulgar but amusing bit of cornpone commentary, which you’ll never read in the NYT: …anyone who e-mails a reporter expressing a wish that a specific reporter’s kid gets his or her head blown off has set up a sphincter kiosk on Asshole Avenue and is doing gangbuster business.
I’m going to remember that one. “How’s your sphincter kiosk doing, anyway?”
Wish I had more to report, other than: It was a cold, dreary day — Los Angeles weather has flown, it seems — and I had a mood to match. But! There’s a roast chicken in the oven with my name on it (on part of it, anyway), and Alan did all the work. How bad can a day be with this as its coda? I ask you.
So, ciao.
Oh, one more thing: I read stuff like this and I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still have a capacity for outrage. Do you?
Lance Mannion said on October 13, 2004 at 9:46 pm
Thanks for the shout out again, Nance. I’m beginning to feel like the high school geek whose big sister has to find him a date for the prom. But that’s ok. But please find one who isn’t taller than me in heels, ok?
Scalzi’s wrong, btw.
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Mary said on October 14, 2004 at 11:53 am
The Nevada voter registration thing is being denied heavily by the Sproul company, the folks who are the parent company of voter registration firm. Disgruntled employeee stuff, they say.
Personally, I’m outraged. Older son wears a tee shirt that says, “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention,” and I concur. I was outraged at the outrage expressed by the old fart white guys after the debate last night about Kerry mentioning Cheney’s gay daughter. It was obvious they all found gayness something to be ashamed of, but couldn’t say it. They just don’t get it, do they?
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Dick Walker said on October 14, 2004 at 12:10 pm
Nance, I see a timely new verb coming: “As soon I hit send, I realized I’d schwenked myself.”
On voter registration fraud, suppression of minority voting, etc, some of these characters had better hope Bush wins. Otherwise I’m predicting that the Justice Department’s gonna wake up with some brand new – and easily achievable – goals on January 21.
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TSO said on October 14, 2004 at 12:52 pm
It’s amazing how charismatic alpha males can’t think outside their johnson. Clinton, Gringrich, Rudy G, Jesse Jackson, O’Reilly, etc… I’ll never forget hearing that Martin Luther King rationalized it by saying he was “f–king for Jesus”. Wowsa.
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Nance said on October 14, 2004 at 1:59 pm
“Thinking outside the johnson” — now there’s a phrase for your next staff meeting, don’t you think?
BTW, I probably should have mentioned that Reilly claims this woman is trying to extort money from him, which wouldn’t surprise me. How can you not be suspicious of someone who claims she was “subjected to” phone sex? I mean, hanging up always worked for me. But then, if she hung up, that would shut off the tape recorder, right?
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Dave Reilly said on October 14, 2004 at 6:05 pm
That’s O’Reilly, Nance. Not Reilly. O’Reilly!
Oh, really, you say?
No, O’Reilly.
I want it clear he’s no relation. The Reillys are descended from kings!
I suppose it’s possible that O’Reilly was just reading his latest novel to her, hoping to get her opinion on its literary merits.
I don’t care what the woman is up to. My feeling is that after putting up with his nonsense at work for as long as she could stand it she decided she deserved what ever she could get out of him and he deserved whatever she could do to him.
O’Reilly’s crazy, in case anybody hasn’t noticed. So are most of the right wing gasbags. Charles Krauthammer’s obsession with the psychological pathologies he perceives in all liberals is a symptom of the right’s general habit of projecting on us all they hate about themselves. (It continued today with Lynne Cheney’s weird attack on John Kerry’s supposed homophobia.) Paranoia is the guiding force of their whole world view, and paranoia is not a healthy state of mind.
I know, I should shut up. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
But he never says shut up, does he?
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John Scalzi said on October 15, 2004 at 9:32 pm
Lance Mannion says:
“Scalzi’s wrong, btw.”
Nuh-*uh.* I’m, like, *totally* right.
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Dave Reilly said on October 16, 2004 at 7:58 am
John,
Before I surrender to your inexorable logic: What do you know about Schwenk outside of what you’ve deduced from what he wrote to Nagourney and in defense of himself? Is wishing harm to people’s children his normal mode of discourse?
Is he in the habit of running around in the real world wishing harm to people’s real children? Is what he did virtually indicative of his character? If I was going to publicaly humiliate a guy and ruin his reputation, I think I’d like to know that he’d done more than lose his temper once in an email exchange.
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