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Alan Bisbort: 'Oh really: A braying chorus wholly without merit'
Posted on Thursday, September 18 @ 09:53:39 EDT
By Alan Bisbort, Hartford Advocate

"If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he had nothing, I will apologize to the nation and I will not trust the Bush administration again." - Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, March 18, 2003

"If Bill O'Reilly does not apologize to the nation soon, I will apologize for him. That is, I will tell the nation what a sorry sack of it O'Reilly really is." - Alan Bisbort, September 18, 2003

Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them currently enjoys the Number One slot on the bestseller list. This is due mostly to the boost given to it by Fox News. You know the story. The fatuous Bill O'Reilly, Fox's leading intellectual, took exception with Franken's appropriation of his network's "Fair and Balanced" slogan (funnily enough, I also take exception with the slogan), as well as the use of his splotchy visage on the book's cover. The ensuing lawsuit -- which was roundly rejected as "wholly without merit" by the judge -- brought Franken's book more notoriety than 10 million glowing reviews would have generated.

It also pretty much made Fox News the laughingstock of America and proved Franken's point about O'Reilly, a bully whose favorite rejoinder is "shut up!" and whose boast is that he exists in a non-partisan "no spin zone." Among the many other lies cataloged by Franken, is O'Reilly's claim to be a registered "independent." Franken found his voter registration form, with the box for Republican clearly marked. So much for "no spin." Enough other anecdotes have accrued about O'Reilly's on- and off-air behavior to safely say that he also tries to physically intimidate his guests.

With that in mind, I sent O'Reilly the following letter:

"Dear Mr. O'Reilly,

I just read Al Franken's book. Thanks for bringing it to my attention with your lawsuit over the Fair and Balanced slogan that you feel belongs to, well, I'm not really sure what the hell you were thinking. I told my wife about the part in the book where you physically loomed over Franken's 109-pound publicist and screamed at her and then jabbed your finger repeatedly in her face. My wife weighs more than 109 pounds and she would love it if you came up to Connecticut and got in her face like you did Franken's publicist. She would especially love the jabbing of the finger in her face. She would make sure that you pulled your hand back minus one finger.

When my next book comes out, will you please sue me? I could sure use the sales boost. Just to give you a heads up, and maybe you and your crack law team can begin fomenting a strategy, I plan on characterizing your network's new slogan as Afraid and Imbalanced. And I plan on running an even less flattering photograph of you on the cover. Maybe a pink, porcine head shot of Fox CEO Roger Ailes, too. What the hay, I'll toss in a shot of Rupe Murdoch in his cups and claim 'I hit the trifecta.' Thank you for not telling me to 'shut up' before I finished this letter."

That was two weeks ago. Thinking about it now, though, my feelings are mixed about O'Reilly (and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter and all the other liars Franken "outs"). A large part of me agrees with Franken and I'm glad someone has tossed the pathology of deceit upon the mainstream table. But I can't help but feel less-than-amused while reading the book because of my anger toward those who have piloted this ship of state so insanely awry.

Ann Coulter, on whom Franken exhausts equal energies, is beneath contempt. Just this week, she was heard mocking the troops in Iraq for criticizing the handling of the war by Bush and Rumsfeld. She said, "These are the precise same arguments that were being made before the war. It's going to be a quagmire. What is the plan? When do we get out? How much is it going to cost? Someone in the military might get his hair mussed ... " (Coulter didn't even have the decency to admit she stole the "hair mussed" line from George C. Scott's Buck Turgeson in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove ). The best description of Coulter I've found is a totally unintended one, from lyrics to a Robyn Hitchcock song that appeared on his Moss Elixir album in 1996: "She was sinister but she was happy ... like a chandelier festooned with leeches."

My point is a simple one. O'Reilly, Coulter, Hannity, et al., are today's equivalents of Father Coughlin or Joe Pyne or Morton Downey, half-cocked, selectively informed shouters and panderers who briefly command an audience and then are swept into history's gutter. The content of their words are soon forgotten. If anything survives, it is the content of their characters: sinister, self-aggrandizing, bitter. They are the visible manifestation of frightened people. They bark louder than all the others because they fear, more than anything else, being ignored and forgotten.

Copyright © 1995-2003 New Mass Media.

Reprinted from The Hartford Advocate:
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