Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

O'Reilly related that he admired Barack Obama.  Had any of this been observable during the campaign from either O'Reilly or any of his right wing Fox cohorts?  O'Reilly then declared that Obama had won because he had seized the moment as a candidate who appealed to the controlling segment of voters.

After all the frenzied left wing denunciations with the aforementioned Marxist and Socialist labels hurled with impunity by Fox "commentators" that would hopefully stick beyond the normal zombie "accept everything" element that watches the network religiously, O'Reilly exclaimed that Obama was able to garner the votes of sufficient numbers of America's right-center coalition.

O'Reilly then told Stewart that he needed to expand his horizons beyond his Greenwich Village base and see what Americans really think.  He used Alabama as an example, noting that Stewart would "get killed" if he ever visited there.

Since this was the only concrete example O'Reilly used, can we presume that Alabama is a national model of what America really believes, the true manifestation of the center-right coalition where America's central political value core lies?  If so, did all those voters who strayed so mightily away from the McCain-Palin team get snookered by the left?  

If the example set forth by Bozell, O'Reilly and others enunciated about Obama, someone Big Bad Bill says he admires, then why did states like Alabama, Texas, Utah and Idaho fail to get the message?  If Obama and Biden represented the center-right coalition, then what did McCain and Palin represent?

O'Reilly then confronted an issue that was earlier discussed by rightist talk show host Lars Larson on Larry King Live before the election.  O'Reilly told Stewart as Larson had explained to King and others in his discussion panel that there was a clear explanation that their leftist opponents needed to understand on why the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team invaded Iraq.

It was all about regime change.  Saddam Hussein was a bad man who needed to be removed from power.  

By the time Republicans reached this conclusion Saddam had been largely de-fanged by repeated bombings and sanctions.  Why were they so unconcerned that the Reagan administration was making weapons deals and supplying technical information that enhanced the ability of Saddam's scientists to manufacture poison gas?

Some of that weaponry along with poison gas was used by Saddam Hussein to perpetrate genocide on the Kurds of Iraq's northern provinces.  Bill, that genocide was occurring during the period when Donald Rumsfeld, the same Rumsfeld who cited the acute need for removing Saddam long after those genocide attacks, sat smiling in the dictator's office as a new swap was made -- oil for killing machine technology.

It's funny, Bill O'Reilly, about you telling Jon Stewart about getting out into the world and seeing more.  Well, Bill, I was standing in Grosvenor Square while Kurds were demonstrating in front of the U.S. Embassy in London, begging America to stop fueling Saddam and stopping the genocide.

Yes, I was there, Bill, but I never saw you.  Why don't you get out and see more of what's really going on in the world, Bill?

Incidentally, don't try and change international law and history, Lars Larson and Bill O'Reilly.  The reason why George Bush and Condoleezza Rice warned about that "giant mushroom cloud" in the form of a nuclear attack was that this was necessary justification for attacking Iraq.

Bill and Lars, how you hope we will forget that, as the international community told us loud and clear, and as even the Bush-Cheney administration realized based on a deceitful claim of America facing  imminent attack, regime change was no basis for attacking a nation that posed no imminent threat to the U.S.