Haiku 061209

lurking
in the damp backyard...
mushrooms

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Recently, we read the following:

Huffington Post: "O'Reilly Unrepentant, Tones Back 'Tiller the Killer' Rhetoric on First Show Since Murder" by Brad Friedman

“After years of demonizing Kansas physician Dr. George Tiller who was assassinated in his Wichita church on Sunday, Fox ‘News’ host Bill O'Reilly toned back his inflammatory rhetoric on his first show back since yesterday's murder.

“Where he had previously, and repeatedly, described Tiller as ‘Tiller the Baby Killer’, compared him to a Nazi, described him repeatedly as ‘executing babies’ and ‘operating a death mill’, tonight O'Reilly characterized himself as the victim of a ‘left-wing’ cabal of ‘Fox News haters’ trying to ‘exploit’ the tragedy to ‘shut guys like me down’. He did not, however, use the same strident rhetoric that had characterized his ‘reportage’ of Tiller in the past….

“In response to a Huffington Post editorial which claimed O'Reilly would ‘back-pedal’ on tonight's show following the murder, he told viewers ‘No back-pedaling here...Every single thing we said about Tiller was true.’

“He then went on to back-pedal on largely everything, at least the most outrageous allegations, that he'd previously reported.

" ‘We based our analysis on the facts,’ O'Reilly said in his own defense tonight. Though his previous ‘analysis’ including the repeated allegation that Tiller was a mass-murderer was nowhere to be heard this evening. He did not use the term ‘murder’ to describe what Tiller did, as he had so frequently in the past. He used carefully selected, non-libelous phrases such as ‘destroyed fetuses’ instead.

“And where he had previously charged Tiller with ‘operating a death mill,’ the closest he came to that tonight was the carefully worded use of ‘this mill’ when he admitted that Tiller hadn't been found guilty of breaking any laws. ‘The people of Kansas allowed this mill to take place’ for thirty five years, he said….

“Though his reportage is still as misleading and inaccurate as ever, we're happy to see O'Reilly's new, more responsible approach to his hateful, libelous and dangerous rhetoric. “In the toning back of his own rhetoric, Bill O'Reilly acknowledges the irresponsibility of his own previous behavior….

“Everything O'Reilly said was not true, despite his claims to the contrary tonight. A man is dead in Kansas, in no small part, thanks to the type of irresponsible "reporting" and incessant, outrageous hatred, that O'Reilly helped to inflame.”

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And we thought:

.....Unfortunately, a section of O'Reilly's viewers are wired to take his venomous rhetoric as code to kill. How many more Americans is O'Reilly going to send to their deaths?...