Bang

Bill O'Reilly managed to get a little truth out the other night, when he admitted that he could care less about dying Americans.

...the Republicans’ network has been doing its best to downplay war-related news. Looking at the first quarter of 2007, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that during the day, FNC devoted 6% of its airtime to Iraq, and 17% to the death of pseudo-celebrity Anna Nicole Smith. What’s more, FNC’s competitors devoted triple the amount of time to covering the war for their viewers.

To hear O’Reilly tell it, this is all an intentional strategy [...]

O’Reilly: Now the reason that CNN and MSNBC do so much Iraq reporting is because they want to embarrass the Bush administration. Both do. And all their reporting consists of is here’s another explosion. Bang. Here’s more people dead. Bang. […]

They’re not doing it to inform anybody about anything. The terrorists are going to set off a bomb every day because they know CNN and MSNBC are going to put it on the air. That’s a strategy for the other side. The terrorist side. So I’m taking an argument that CNN and MSNBC are actually helping the terrorists by reporting useless explosions.

Useless explosions kill people. When people die their families are impacted for the rest of their lives. All of this, apparently, is "useless" and meaningless to Billo. Of course it is. He doesn't have a kid there.

What confounds me is this abject hatred from the right for those who wear the uniform, combined with a demonization of Democrats as hating the troops. This is a mouthpiece for the right saying that troops dying in Iraq doesn't matter. In fact, he's saying that the Iraqi security situation doesn't matter, which is in fact the only reason George Bush or any of his defenders give for us still being there.

I know that the only thing the right is managing in this war is expectations. But this is offensive, to suggest that anyone reporting on the war and not allowing it to happen in a complete news blackout is giving a victory to the terrorists. It's absolutely disgusting for Bill O'Reilly to still have a job after admitting that he doesn't care if American soldiers die in a war he supported.