Wait a minute

That whacky Bill O'Reilly is continuing to defend his comments that terrorists should have carte blanche on San Francisco, and should start by blowing up the Coit Tower. I take this issue very personally.

I was born and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, still have friends there, and consider it my home. In a nutty, writer way I even take it personally because my characters Keitha, Annabel & Colley all live there.

Other bloggers have pointed out the brilliance of O'Reilly's having named as his preferred target a building that just happens to have been built as a tribute to firefighters. Good call. But what made me want to put my hand back in about it is this little toxic spill I'd previously missed:

"I'm from New York,” O’Reilly said on the radio Friday. “There are dozens of people in my neighborhood, on Long Island, who are dead because of 9/11, and you people are telling me you're not going to allow military recruiting out there. Hey, it's serious, and I think you guys need a wake-up call."

So. Bill O'Reilly is wrapping himself in 9/11, and claiming moral authority to make potentially dangerous statements about my hometown because he happens to be from New York. Really. That's funny, because in an often-retold 2003 exchange, he berated a man whose father died in the 9/11 attacks (and that, my friends, is moral authority).

O'Reilly shouted repeatedly at him to "Shut up!" cut off his mike and, off-air, threatened to "tear him to fucking pieces." Because the man didn't support the military action in Afghanistan and thought that O'Reilly and others like him "evoke 9/11 to rationalize everything from domestic plunder to imperialistic aggression worldwide."

I know it's hard to believe now that anyone in 2003 could have thought that conservatives would evoke 9/11 to rationalize their separate agendas. Especially since, as we are assured, Bush did not mislead anyone on the Iraq war.

(ETA: Although, as Laura comments in War and Piece,

If the White House has nothing to hide, why are they trying so hard to prevent an investigation of how the policymakers used the intelligence they received? Why don't they welcome such an investigation?

But I digress.)

I know I've probably wasted more space on this than it deserves, considering that it doesn't tell you anything that any informed person doesn't already know: Bill O'Reilly is a liar. But like I say, I take the issue very personally. I don't want anybody messing with my Golden Gate city or any of its surrounding lands. And if anything Bill O'Reilly has said has made it even one percent more dangerous...

I just find it exceedingly slimy, even for a conservative, even for O'Reilly, to posture yourself as the mouthpiece for the dead when you wouldn't even let a man's son speak for himself.