Does Bill O'Reilly Have Blood On His Hands?

From the Los Angeles Times:

Dr. George Tiller, one of the few American physicians who performed late-term abortions, was shot to death in the lobby of his church today in Wichita, Kan., according to his attorneys.
A 51-year-old suspect was arrested three hours after the shooting at 10 a.m. Central time in a Kansas City suburb about 170 miles from Wichita, police said. They did not release his name, but said he would probably be charged Monday with one count of murder and two counts of aggravated assault.

For years, Tiller, 67, was a lightning rod in the struggle over legalized abortion.
He had previously been the victim of violence. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion protester as he drove away from his clinic. In 1986, his Women's Health Care Services clinic was severely damaged in a bomb blast. In 1991, the clinic was blockaded for six weeks by anti-abortion protesters.
And this month, Tiller's attorneys told the Associated Press, the doctor had asked the FBI to investigate an incident where vandals cut wires to security cameras, cut holes in the roof and plugged downspouts, resulting in thousands of dollars in damage to the clinic.

I'll be interested to learn if the suspect was a follower of FOX News's "The O'Reilly Factor."

From Salon.com:

When his show airs tomorrow, Bill O'Reilly will most certainly decry the death of Kansas doctor George Tiller, who was killed Sunday while attending church services with his wife. Tiller, O'Reilly will say, was a man who was guilty of barbaric acts, but a civilized society does not resort to lawless murder, even against its worst members. And O'Reilly, we can assume, will genuinely mean this.

But there's no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists. Tiller's name first appeared on "The Factor" on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O'Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as "Tiller the Baby Killer."

Tiller, O'Reilly likes to say, "destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000." He's guilty of "Nazi stuff," said O'Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. "This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union," said O'Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

On June 15, 2007, O'Reilly added:

"No question Dr. Tiller has blood on his hands. But now so does Governor Sebelius. She is not fit to serve. Nor is any Kansas politician who supports Tiller's business of destruction. I wouldn't want to be these people if there is a Judgment Day. I just -- you know ... Kansas is a great state, but this is a disgrace upon everyone who lives in Kansas. Is it not?"

And an inflammatory demagogue such as Bill O'Reilly is a disgrace upon everyone within the sound of his voice. Is he not?

To Your Health.

     Matt Drudge--in his usual breathless, bold-faced hyperbole (in red this time!)--had this headline on his website tonight:

'NATIONAL COORDINATOR OF HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY' SLIPPED IN TO STIMULUS... 

     Oh, horrors!

     The link took me to a Bloomberg piece written by Betsy McCaughey. In it, she slams President Obama's health care provisions in the stimulus bill as "dangerous to your health."

     Doesn't she fit right in with the rest of the GOP Confederacy? 

     I thought her name sounded vaguely familiar, so I did a little research. Betsy McCaughey is the attack dog also (once? still?) known as Elizabeth McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York under Republican George Pataki.

     More to the point, Betsy (Elizabeth?) was a harsh critic of the Clinton health care plan, and many of her claims were proven false. McCaughey wrote a widely discredited article for The New Republic eviscerating the Clinton plan. She was--and is--well known in Republican circles, where talk of any government investment for health care equals a new Red Scare. 

     From that era, here's James Fallows in The Atlantic, January 1995.

Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February.   The article's working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was "No Exit," and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."

George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that "it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem 'necessary.'" The "doctors in jail" concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year.

These claims, McCaughey's and Will's, were simply false. McCaughey's pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for "necessary" and "appropriate" treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today's insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one's own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said,"Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services." 

It didn't matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck.

     From Andrew Sullivan, that era's editor of The New Republic, who acknowledges that much of McCaughey's article was B.S.:

My sin was to publish a major article by Elizabeth McCaughey called "No Exit" that posited that Hillarycare 2.0 would inevitably lead to the extinction of much private medicine. 

I don't think it's fair to expose the internal editing of a piece but there was a struggle and it's fair to say I didn't win every skirmish. I was aware of the piece's flaws but nonetheless was comfortable running it as a provocation to debate. It sure was. The magazine fully aired subsequent criticism of the piece.

     So, to recap, Betsy (Elizabeth?) is back. Her latest health care hit piece in Bloomberg is linked on brother-in-arms Matt Drudge's site, a right-wing favorite. Drudge, of course, is a GOP tool, and he has Monica Lewinsky to forever thank for making him a household name. 

     Matt Drudge is hopeless. But back to Betsy (Elizabeth?): it's been 15 years since she butchered that article in The New Republic. Do you think she's learned how to finally get her facts straight yet?