Hullabaloo

Saturday, June 13, 2009

 
Into The Monster's Maw

by digby

Joan Walsh went on Bill O'Reilly's show to talk about Dr Tiller and lived to tell the tale. She's written about the experience and I urge you to read it all. It's just fascinating:

I thought about it, but not for long. I like doing TV. I'm not terrible at it. I criticized him, I should have the guts to repeat it to his face. I also need to say that when I announced I'd said yes, every one of the doubters, and more, sent me great advice and good wishes. (Thanks to Media Matters who, unbidden, just had staff start sending me clips to watch, about O'Reilly's lies. And if you're not on Twitter, well, Twitter rocked for me.) My daughter coached me; so did my litigator ex-husband, so did my friend and Salon co-conspirator Kerry Lauerman. It takes a village to debate Bill O'Reilly!

His producers also helped by doing that thing they do: "Hey, Bill really respects you for coming on the show! He wants to have a conversation! It'll be fine!" (And they promoted my appearance on the show by identifying me on the Web site as "Joan Walsh of Slate.com.")

Well, it was so not fine. I think the high or low point was when he shrieked at me, "You have blood on your hands!" At one point he also either told me to "Shut up" or "Be quiet," I can't remember. (If I'm wrong about that, when I see the clip, I'll correct it. UPDATE: Actually, he shouted "Stop talking!") He called me "vile." I think I said he was vile, too. There were a couple of "I know you are but what am I?" moments that I'm not totally proud of. It was a kaleidoscopic nightmare, a TV acid trip, and I don't do acid. It almost seems like O'Reilly does, but I don't think so. The man is driven by demons. God bless him and save him.

Joan has guts of iron to face that maniac and she did great. I would probably throw the mike down in disgust and walk off, thus giving him a big victory. (Those know-it-alls with the psychotic eyes that go dead when they get angry make my flight instinct go into high gear.) You can watch the vid, here. But Joan's account of the experience is what's most interesting. I'm in awe of anyone who willingly faces that giant jackass and then has the presence of mind to retell the experience in such riveting, almost Hunter S Thompsonesque detail.

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Update: At the end of a great post about Joan Walsh's O'Reilly smackdown, with video and backround, David Neiwert has posted the opening of hihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs book The Eliminationists and I just wanted to reprint it here for posterity:

Just to back up Walsh's point: Below is an excerpt from the opening pages of my new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right:

In July of 2008, a graying, mustachioed man from the Knoxville suburb of Powell, Tennessee, sat down and wrote out by hand a four-page manifesto describing his hatred of all things liberal and his belief that “all liberals should be killed.”

When he was done, Jim David Adkisson drove his little Ford Escape to the parking lot of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. A few days before, the church had attracted media attention for its efforts to open a local coffee shop for gays and lesbians. Leaving the manifesto on the seat of the car, he walked inside the church carrying a guitar case stuffed with a shotgun and 76 rounds of ammunition.

The congregants were enjoying the opening scene from the church’s production of the musical Annie Jr. when Adkisson, in a hallway outside the sanctuary, abruptly opened the guitar case, pulled out the shotgun, fired off a harmless round that startled everyone, then walked into the sanctuary and began firing indiscriminately. Witnesses report he was saying “hateful things.” An unsuspecting 61-year-old grandmother and retired schoolteacher named Linda Kraeger was hit in the face with a shotgun blast. A 60-year-old foster father named Greg McKendry got up to shield others from the attack and was hit in the chest.

When Adkisson stopped to reload, a group of men, who had already begun closing around him, tackled him and wrested away his gun. Adkisson complained that the men were hurting him. "The only thing he said was he was asking us to get off of him, that he wasn't doing anything," said Jamie Parkey, one of the men who tackled him. "We just looked at each other incredulously, like 'How dare you?' "

Greg McKendry was dead at the scene. Linda Kraeger died the next day. Seven other congregants were wounded.

A detective who interviewed Adkisson and examined his four-page manifesto reported to his superiors that Adkisson targeted the church "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

When the detective interviewed Adkisson, he said he’d decided that since "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office."

Knoxville’s police chief told reporters the next day that Adkisson was motivated by his "hatred of the liberal movement" and "liberals in general, as well as gays." He was also frustrated by his inability to get a job, a problem he also blamed on liberals. His neighbors in Powell described Adkisson as “a Confederate” and a “believer in the Old South.”

When detectives went to Adkisson’s home in Powell, they found—scattered among the ammunition, guns, and brass knuckles—books written by leading conservative pundits: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity, and The O’Reilly Factor by Bill O’Reilly, among others. Adkisson’s manifesto, released some months later to the public, was in fact largely a distillation of these works, ranting about how “Liberals have attack'd every major institution that made America great. … Liberals are evil, they embrace the tenets of Karl Marx, they're Marxist, socialist, communists.”

And then he went the next logical step, in the logic of anger:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

… If decent patriotic Americans could vote 3 times in every election we couldn't stem this tide of liberalism that's destroying America. Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great Nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is Kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather.

I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just Kill yourself, do something for your country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

The events that sunny Sunday left the church’s pastor, Rev. Chris Buice, with a shattered congregation. “People were killed in the sanctuary of my church, which should be the holy place, the safe place. People were injured,” he told PBS’s Rick Karr a couple of weeks later. “A man came in here, totally dehumanized us—members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?”

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digby 6/13/2009 09:00:00 AM |