Wednesday, July 28, 2004

More on Moore/O’Reilly

Thanks to commenter, Larry for the link to the Drudge Report transcript of the Michael Moore interview with Bill O’Reilly. From a quick perusal, it looks pretty accurate. Some snippets:

[O:] ...you’ve been calling Bush a liar on weapons of mass destruction, the senate intelligence committee, Lord Butler’s investigation in Britain, and now the 911 Commission have all come out and said there was no lying on the part of President Bush.  Plus, Gladimir Putin has said his intelligence told Bush there were weapons of mass destruction.  Wanna apologize to the president now or later?

M: He didn’t tell the truth, he said there were weapons of mass destruction.

O: Yeah, but he didn’t lie, he was misinformed by - all of those investigations come to the same conclusion, that’s not a lie.

M: uh huh, so in other words if I told you right now that nothing was going on down here on the stage…

O: That would be a lie because we could see that wasn’t the truth

M: Well, I’d have to turn around to see it, and then I would realize, oh, Bill, I just told you something that wasn’t true… actually it’s president Bush that needs to apologize to the nation for telling an entire country that there were weapons of mass destruction, that they had evidence of this, and that there was some sort of connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11th, and he used that as a –

O: Ok, He never said that, but back to the other thing, if you, if Michael Moore is president –

[...]

O: Just the issues.  You’ve got three separate investigations plus the president of Russia all saying… British intelligence, US intelligence, Russian intelligence, told the president there were weapons of mass destruction, you say, “he lied.” This is not a lie if you believe it to be true, now he may have made a mistake, which is obvious –

M: Well, that’s almost pathological – I mean, many criminals believe what they say is true, they could pass a lie detector test –

O: Alright, now you’re dancing around a question –

M: No I’m not, there’s no dancing

O: He didn’t lie

M: He said something that wasn’t true

O: Based upon bad information given to him by legitimate sources

M: Now you know that they went to the CIA, Cheney went to the CIA, they wanted that information, they wouldn’t listen to anybody

O: They wouldn’t go by Russian intelligence and Blair’s intelligence too

M: His own people told him, I mean he went to Richard Clarke the day after September 11th and said “What you got on Iraq?” and Richard Clarke’s going “Oh well this wasn’t Iraq that did this sir, this was Al Qaeda.”

O: You’re diverting the issue…did you read Woodward’s book?

M: No, I haven’t read his book.

O: Woodward’s a good reporter, right?  Good guy, you know who he is right?

M: I know who he is.

O: Ok, he says in his book George Tenet looked the president in the eye, like how I am looking you in the eye right now and said “President, weapons of mass destruction are a quote, end quote, “slam dunk” if you’re the president, you ignore all that?

M: Yeah, I would say that the CIA had done a pretty poor job.

O: I agree.  The lieutenant was fired.

M: Yeah, but not before they took us to war based on his intelligence.  This is a man who ran the CIA, a CIA that was so poorly organized and run that it wouldn’t communicate with the FBI before September 11th and as a result in part we didn’t have a very good intelligence system set up before September 11th

O: Nobody disputes that

M: Ok, so he screws up September 11th.  Why would you then listen to him, he says this is a “slam dunk” and your going to go to war.

O: You’ve got MI-6 and Russian intelligence because they’re all saying the same thing that’s why.  You’re not going to apologize to Bush, you are going to continue to call him a liar.

M: Oh, he lied to the nation, Bill, I can’t think of a worse thing to do for a president to lie to a country to take them to war, I mean, I don’t know a worse –

O: It wasn’t a lie

M: He did not tell the truth, what do you call that?

O: I call that bad information, acting on bad information – not a lie

M: A seven year old can get away with that –

Like I said in my post last night, Moore is so blinded by his hatred of the Bush Administration that he won’t even admit to the difference between an outright lie and an inadvertent lie. Not that I’m saying that the President lied - he didn’t. He may have been misinformed, but there have been WMD found in Iraq, although not the huge stockpiles that were expected.

The Hitler stuff:

O: Any government? Hitler, in Germany, not a threat to us the beginning but over there executing people all day long—you would have let him go?

M: That’s not true. Hitler with Japan, attacked the United States.

O: Before—from 33-until 41 he wasn’t an imminent threat to the United States.

M: There’s a lot of things we should have done.

O: You wouldn’t have removed him.

M: I wouldn’t have even allowed him to come to power.

O: That was a preemption from Michael Moore—you would have invaded.

M: If we’d done our job, you want to get into to talking about what happened before WWI, woah, I’m trying to stop this war right now.

And then we get to the “sending children into war” argument:

M: So you would sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah? I want to hear you say that.

O: I would sacrifice myself—

M: Your child—Its Bush sending the children there.

O: I would sacrifice myself.

M: You and I don’t go to war, because we’re too old—

O: Because if we back down, there will be more deaths and you know it.

M: Say ‘I Bill O’Reilly would sacrifice my child to secure Fallujah’

O: I’m not going to say what you say, you’re a, that’s ridiculous

M: You don’t believe that. Why should Bush sacrifice the children of people across America for this?

I don’t like his constant use of the word “children” because it’s misleading. Yes, the adults that are sent are somebody’s children, but they’re not children. And, with very few exceptions they’re happy to serve and are happy to have been a part of liberating the oppressed Iraqi people.

The discussion then moved to how a democracy starts:

M: Look let me tell you something in the 1990s look at all the brutal dictators that were removed. Things were done, you take any of a number of countries whether its Eastern Europe, the people rose up. South Africa the whole world boycotted---

O: When Reagan was building up the arms, you were against that.

M: And the dictators were gone. Building up the arms did not cause the fall of Eastern Europe.

O: Of course it did, it bankrupted the Soviet Union and then it collapsed.

M: The people rose up.

O: why? Because they went bankrupt.

M: the same way we did in our country, the way we had our revolution. People rose up—

O: Alright alright.

M:--that’s how you, let me ask you this question.

O: One more.

M: How do you deliver democracy to a country? You don’t do it down the barrel of a gun. That’s not how you deliver it.

O: You give the people some kind of self-determination, which they never would have had under Saddam—

M: Why didn’t they rise up?

O: Because they couldn’t, it was a Gestapo-led place where they got their heads cut off—

M: well that’s true in many countries throughout the world__

O: It is, it’s a shame—

M:--and you know what people have done, they’ve risen up.  You can do it in a number of ways . You can do it our way through a violent revolution, which we won, the French did it that way. You can do it by boycotting South Africa, they overthrew the dictator there. There’s many ways—

O: I’m glad we’ve had this discussion because it just shows you that I see the world my way, you see the world your way, alright—and the audience is watching us here and they can decide who is right and who is wrong and that’s the fair way to do it. Right?

M: Right, I would not sacrifice my child to secure Fallujah and you would?

O: I would sacrifice myself.

M: You wouldn’t send another child, another parents child to Fallujah, would you? You would sacrifice your life to secure Fallujah?

O: I would.

You can’t fight a revolution without some bloodshed and lost lives. Our own revolution was possible because the people had guns with which to fight. The fact that ordinary people had weapons was the only reason they were able to “rise up” effectively. Civil disobedience will only get you so far against a brutal dictator, and it’s usually to your death. The Iraqi people were so oppressed that if they had attempted to “rise up” they would have been killed. In fact, many were killed for the smallest real or perceived resistance to Saddam. It’s idiotic to think that the people of Iraqi could have had a revolution without some assistance - it’s why they were under Saddam’s rule for 35 years.

And he just wouldn’t let go of his question about Bill sending his child to save Fallujah. I’ll answer your question, Mr. Moore - with no hesitation I would gladly send any family member who wears the uniform of the US military to protect and defend and liberate where our President deems it necessary for him/her to go. It doesn’t mean I don’t love them or wouldn’t fear for them. But some things are worth sacrifice and there’s no greater or nobler sacrifice than to give your life for someone else. The proud folks in our military understand that and were prepared to do just that when they signed on the dotted line at their enlistment.

Posted by at 12:37 PM
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