Bill O’Reilly’s Long, Hot, Summer of Love…
Well, a couple of weeks ago when I announced that I’d be reviving the CallingAllWingnuts concept at Democrats.com, I also told you all that I had some activist efforts cooking and that I’d be calling on y’all to help out.
Well, the day has come… the plan is fleshed out; the die is cast.
Bill O’Reilly is one of the most arrogant and narcissistic personalities in all of show business. (He’s not in news; he is by the strict definition of the term, a vaudevillian entertainer). For the two or three of you not in the know, here’s a review (for the rest of us, we do this because it is so much fun to mock the ignoramus with a gigantic head).
We start way back. He was an anchor at Inside Edition (a show that won journalisms’ highest honor, a <a href=”
http://www.oreilly-sucks.com/peabodyfacts1.htm”>Peabody… or Pinocchio…</a> or something that began with P. And, uhm… yeah. It was won after O’Reilly left the show. No matter – BillO will take the credit.)
Anyway, enjoy:
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That was long before I had ever heard of Bill O’Reilly… But it sets the stage.
In 2002, I, like many of you, was going about my business without thinking too much about politics or media or war or anything that tended to distract me from organic chemistry (I had fanciful thoughts of becoming a doctor at the time).
But then, one Saturday afternoon in the fall, I was cleaning my house. (If you knew me, you’d know how much fate had to do with this – me… clean house?) I was sick and tired of listening to the same ol’ music – I think that happens to a lot of us in our early 30’s – so I flipped on the radio for the first time in years. It happened to be set to AM and some guy was talking about war in Iraq.
Well… I had spent 4 years in the Marines; I finished my enlistment in February, 1990. I still remember purchasing a New York Times at an airport that year. Flipping through the pages, I found a mid-sized article about Iraq massing its troops on the Kuwaiti border.
Months later, the war machine, pretty much moth-balled since Vietnam, began sputtering to life. As a recently discharged Marine, I was torn. God knows, I wasn’t cut out for the service; I knew by the end of my first day at boot-camp that the military would have to do without me at the end of my four years… But the thing is… you develop a real bond with your brothers in arms. If they were going to be sent to the desert, well, there was no fucking way I was going to go, but I certainly wanted to know as much as I could about what was going on.
And the more I looked into the first Gulf War, the more I realized the country was being duped. I mean, c’mon… Since when did we care what a bunch of Arabs were doing ½-way across the world?
So I started thinking more about it. Mid-East… Oil… Israel… Geo-political strategy vis-a-vis the Cold War… In that context it made sense. Before 1990, the United States had no bases in the Middle East. The Russians had tried to establish a foothold in Afghanistan, but they had been beaten back. But the message was clear – the Mid-East was a fulcrum point in the Cold War. Oil and Israel. That was why we were going. It had nothing to do with Saddam’s army ripping babies out of incubators…
What does all of this have to do with Bill O’Reilly?
Well, I bring it up because on that fall day that I turned on AM talk radio and heard the discussion about the war, all of these thoughts came roaring back. For me, discussion of war in 2002 wasn’t a way to gin up my ratings. It had nothing to do with politics. I, perhaps naively, thought that the decision of whether or not our country should go to war was an important one… you know, kinda serious.
So I called in to that talk show and shared my thoughts about the first war on Iraq. The host, Dr. Joe Parisi, knew much of what I knew and a little more. We had an all-American and engaging conversation about the enormity of the decision.
The next day, I turned on the radio again. I heard this really engaging guy; he sounded so reasonable. But then I listened to the words. This guy was lying!! Over and over again! His presentation was impeccable, but his words were poison… I was listening to Bill O’Reilly for the very first time.
At the time, I had no idea O’Reilly had a cable television show. Hell, I had no idea O’Reilly’s radio show was national until I heard where the callers were from. Of course, that only made it worse for me – this guy was lying to a national audience?!
Ahhh… Talk-radio virginity…
Well, I wasn’t going to let it stand. I picked up the phone. I called Bill O’Reilly. Maybe he was misinformed. Maybe he just didn’t know. I’d fix things.
I got a busy signal. And another. And another. And another. I didn’t get through that day.
So I tried again the next day. Ugh. Busy signal. Another. Another. Another. Another.
Dammit.
Next day. Busy. Busy.
DIAL-TONE!!
I got through!
The screener asked my name and where I was calling from.
“Mike, I’m from Albany, NY.”
“What do you want to say to Bill?”
“Well, the other day when Bill was talking about…”
“We can’t talk about anything from the other day – do you have anything to say about today’s topic?”
“Uhm… Yeah. Uhm... Uhm…”
“Call me back when you’re ready to go on the air.” Click.
It was about two or three days before I tried again. I ended up getting through, the topic was fuel prices and gas mileage and – on this one topic – O’Reilly was making sense. I got on the air and stammered an incredibly nervous statement that thanked him for taking the right side of this issue. I was on the air for about 20 seconds.
The next day, O’Reilly was back to his lies. In addition, I had come to the realization that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, my local morning guy, my local afternoon guy and just about every other right-wing talker peddled bullshit for a living.
At about the same time, sometime in 2003, I discovered Howard Dean and the blogosphere. Half of the lies I heard on talk radio sounded reasonable; I would have had no reason to disbelieve them without the benefit of the internet and blogosphere… So… As I sunk deeper into the tar-pit of talk radio, I brought with me an ever expanding oxygen tank of truth; I was always a step ahead of the liars.
That’s when things started to get fun. Before too long, I was going toe-to-toe with Rush Limbaugh and leaving him sputtering. Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt and all sorts of right-wing guests were forced to deal with inconvenient truths as a result of my efforts. Not every call ended perfectly – I was often cut-off, silenced or hung up upon – but for the most part, good things happened.
All of these guys were a lot of fun, but Bill O’Reilly was special.
I guess it started by accident. One of my major “truth-sources” was the Media Matters website. They don’t do a lot of reporting; instead, they act as a watchdog and correct misinformation in the media. Bill O’Reilly came to be one of their most corrected personalities, and he couldn’t stand it. Before long, he was railing against the “slime-merchants on the internet” – MediaMatters, MoveOn, bloggers and anyone else that found error in O’Reilly’s rants.
So… In 2005, the liberal blogosphere was immersed in the Valerie Plame investigation. Conservative misinformation was everywhere. Bill O’Reilly did his part too. One day I called him and told hijm one of the best sources of truthful, no-spin information on the topic was MediaMatters.com.
He threatened to come to lead a mob to my house to “surprise” me. Paul Krugman noticed and wrote it up in his column later that week. For the first time, I felt like my work was getting results.
A few months later, in early 2006, I noticed that Bill O’Reilly had put a petition up on his website calling for the host of MSNBC’s 8 PM program to be replaced by Phil Donohue. This perplexed me (not!). You see, Bill, many, many, many times on his program had espoused the value of ideas and free speech. It just didn’t make sense that Bill O’Reilly would want Keith Olbermann fired.
So…
I recruited a bunch of people to call into Bill’s radio show to tell him how much they enjoyed Keith Olbermann and that they didn’t think Keith should be fired.
Well, Bill didn’t like that very much. Throughout the week, he kept track of the phone numbers that called in to his show. Finally, after caller number 15 or so got through with the message, Bill could stand it no longer. He threatened to send Fox News Security after us, said we’d be getting a “little visit from our local authorities” and, in general, he was coming after us.
The next night, Keith Olbermann had one of my callers on his show and the entire media world was snickering – or laughing outright - at Bill O’Reilly.
There things stood for about a year. O’Reilly’s goons at his website canceled my subscription so I couldn’t download the audio of anymore shows, they used caller-id to screen out my calls and, for the most part, all I could do was highlight some of the more absurd things O’Reilly said on his radio show.
In August of 2006, I began law school; as a first year law student, I couldn’t afford to spend a lot of time on CallingAllWingnuts. Instead I turned my efforts to defeating George Allen in Virginia’s Senate race. That turned out pretty well too, but it’s an entirely different discussion.
BillO couldn’t leave well enough alone.
In the summer of 2007, with more time on my hands, I started paying attention again. B.O.’s newest crusade involved demonizing the premiere netroots political gathering, YearlyKos. When O’Reilly discovered the convention had acquired corporate sponsorship, he went ballistic.
JetBlue had offered several airline tickets to the organizers of the event in exchange for a couple of banner placements in exhibitor’s hall. O’Reilly savaged the company, eventually going so far as to send a camera crew to the home of JetBlue’s CEO to conduct an ambush interview.
That was all I needed.
I used to work at ICM – an agency for creative talents. I’ve cultivated contacts in the industry. I made a call and within a few hours, I had BillO’s home address.
So I visited him.
I brought a photo-journalist and my video camera with me. I brought the courtroom pleadings that contained allegations most-vile regarding O’Reilly sexual harassment of a young female producer at Fox. I made signs and spread them throughout his neighborhood. “Bill O’Reilly: Mackris has your cash” (the lawsuit was settled for millions); “Bill O’Reilly: Can’t be trusted around your daughters”; “Bill O’Reilly: Cheater” (he was cheating on his wife while she was pregnant with his child); “Bill O’Reilly: Liar”.
Here’s the video I made:
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So yeah… I’ll be blogging at Democrats.com this summer. I’ll be making another trip out to BillO’s place. If you want to come with me, you should email me at stark.m@gmail.com. Hopefully we’ll have enough people to charter a few buses. (He lives on Long Island; we’ll probably leave from New York City).
Also: I’ll be ramping up another call in effort. His show depends on calls. He can block my phone number, but he can’t block all of us. We’re just going to call his show and ask him how he kept the falafel together in the shower. (As part of the sexual harassment claim, BillO suggested that he’d rub the woman down in the shower – with falafel).
Y’all in?