Revisit

It's time for me to say something that it's hard for me to say... I was wrong.

If you'll recall, a couple of months ago, I posted a blog taking Bill O'Reilly to task for going after the daily Kos web site. While I was correct in saying that not everyone that posts blogs there is a lunatic, I was wrong when I said that Bill shouldn't be attacking them for the bad stuff on the site.

What I have come to realize is that the Daily Kos is not an open forum like blogger. Anyone can open a blogger (AKA Blogspot) account and start their own blog, and, within certain reasonable, and fairly broad, limits, blog about anything they want. So, you could easily find a far left liberal blog right here next to my Conservative and rational blog. Not so on sites like the Daily Kos. If you're not a liberal Democrat, you are not welcome in their club.

Basically, when you join a very specific forum, warped and controlled toward a specific agenda, and post your blog there, you are endorsing what is posted there. Maybe not by the rank and file of regular folks like you and me, but certainly what is posted by the administrators, and the site's featured content. So, if you choose to surround yourself with lunatics, liars, and angry, spiteful spinsters, you paint yourself with the same brush. That is to say that the otherwise regular folk who make the daily Kos their blog home are complicit in the vile filth and flat out lies that the web site spews forth on a daily basis.

One example of this involves Bill O'Reilly himself, the man that I am apologizing to here today. On a recent episode of his daily radio program Mr. O tackled the ever precarious issue of racism. It's very rare to find a white person who will speak honestly about race, but Bill O'Reilly is one of those people, and the press has skewered him for it.

My summary of the program goes like this (the actual conversation is a full hour long and can be heard at www.billoreilly.com): Bill was making the point that racism is stupid. It is based on fear. He was saying that a portion of white people are afraid of black people, primarily because of the images that they see in rap video's and on the news, and entertainment programs, when the truth of the matter is that a vast majority of black people are just normal people. He wasn't saying that he was surprised by this, he was just explaining it to anyone who might not have understood. He then gave an example of this from his personal life. He told the story of going to dinner with Al Sharpton at a black restaurant in Harlem (Sylvia's I think the name was) and that there was none of the stereotypical black behavior to be seen there, but just regular folks leading regular lives. Again, he was not surprised by this, he was just making a point. Oh, and by the way, the person on his radio program that he had the conversation with, is a black man (Juan Williams).

CNN, NBC, and of course, the daily Kos chose to take what he said, turn it around, twist it, and use it to claim that O'Reilly is a racist. They took his quotes completely out of context, which is par for the course to these people, and flat out lied about the whole situation.

So, when you associate with these people, you say to the world, "I'm one of them, and I agree with and support what they say!" Something I can't believe so many are willing to do.