Did Bill O'Reilly bring Coulter on to condemn her for calling John Edwards a "faggot" or for writing this about the Edwards' dead son:
John Edwards injects his son's fatal car accident into his campaign by demanding that everyone notice how he refuses to inject his son's fatal car accident into his campaign.Or did Bill condemn her for writing a vile, bigoted hate-book in which she asserted that all non-movement conservatives (aka, "liberals") are atheists and wrote that the default position for "liberals" is to always kill human life unless it is going to fly planes into a building and in which she told the 9/11 widows who lobbied for an inquiry into the nature of why their government failed to prevent terrorists from killing their husbands that had their husbands lived they would have divorced them?
Edwards has talked about his son's death in a 1996 car accident on "Good Morning America," in dozens of profiles and in his new book. ("It was and is the most important fact of my life.") His 1998 Senate campaign ads featured film footage of Edwards at a learning lab he founded in honor of his son, titled "The Wade Edwards Learning Lab." He wears his son's Outward Bound pin on his suit lapel. He was going to wear it on his sleeve, until someone suggested that might be a little too "on the nose."
If you want points for not using your son's death politically, don't you have to take down all those "Ask me about my son's death in a horrific car accident" bumper stickers? Edwards is like a politician who keeps announcing that he will not use his opponent's criminal record for partisan political advantage. I absolutely refuse to mention the name of my dearly beloved and recently departed son killed horribly in a car accident, which affected me deeply, to score cheap political points.
Or did Bill bring her on to tell her that enough is enough and that she should have stopped with her over-the-top rhetoric when she made the racist remark of calling Muslims ragheads?
Nope. Nothing like that. Bill just wanted to get her opinion on immigration and her phone confrontation with Elizabeth Edwards on Hardball. Did Bill point out to Coulter that Edwards was not asking Coulter to stop writing or talking but instead to stop slinging hurtful insults? No. Did Bill tell Coulter that she should stop trying to change the subject or deny any wrong doing whenever someone points out her immoral actions? No.
What Bill did was portray Coulter as the victim. Yeah, that's right. Poor Ann Coulter, beat up on by Elizabeth Edwards who called in to ask Coulter to stop trivializing her son's death, to stop calling her husband a "faggot," and to stop making jokes about wishing her husband would die in a terrorist attack.
Why did O'Reilly do this? Because he called Elizabeth Edwards and asked her to come on The Factor to talk about Coulter and she declined. And since his show has a larger audience than Hardball, reasoned O'Reilly, Edwards must not have been sincere when she called into Hardball and instead was just engaging in a political stunt to raise money for her husband's presidential campain. Later in the program, O'Reilly had on political slime-ball Dick Morris to further smear Mrs. Edwards.
Let me offer Mr. O'Reilly an alternative explanation for why she declined to come on his program. Perhaps she declined because Mr. O'Reilly is a brutish bully and a hack demogogue who had previously announced her husband's campaign dead because he hired two "anti-Christian" bigot S-P bloggers, that is, according to the allegations of right-wing hate-mongers like Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue. And perhaps she declined because she rightly recognizes that Bill O'Reilly is not a journalist and does not behave as a professional, but instead as spoiled tyrant, yelling and screaming at guests and/or cutting their mics on a regular basis - and in at least one instance physcially threatening a guest - when they fail to act as props to help O'Reilly disseminate his opinions.
After watching Bill O'Reilly two nights ago start hollering and shaking with rage at one of his guests while charging the man with being an apologist for murder when he tried to offer the background information that Chris Benoit's son had a rare condition in order to dispel the caricature O'Reilly had painted of Benoit as some madman who had been injecting his son with human growth hormone for no reason I myself became livid at O'reilly.
Why? Because that kind of yelling and threatening demeanor is an act of intimidation. It is confrontational, and watching it, the antagonism of such an act is visceral. How is a guest supposed to respond? O'Reilly obviously believes that by yelling and shaking with rage at a guest that he is putting them in their place, but what if the guest were to respond in kind? Would the person who yelled the loudest be correct? No, because the escalated yelling tends to be followed by physical confrontation. I've witnessed many many fights break out over the years and this is an essential pattern. Every time O'Reilly does his yelling routine, on a primal level there is an implicit hidden threat of force, which I've remarked, has only once that I know of become explicit (when he told Jeremy Glick he didn't know what he'd do to him if he saw him off camera in the studio.)
If O'Reilly were working for an actual news network he would be told by management to behave professionally or he would lose his job, but since he is working for Fox News he instead gets paid for precisely this kind of behavior. It's sickening.
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