Bill O'Reilly's Holy War Against George Tiller
Bill O'Reilly has been harassing George Tiller, the Kansas abortion doctor murdered at the church where he served as a deacon earlier today, for some time now, both with incendiary rhetoric and by dispatching producers Jesse Watters and Porter Barry to ambush him, his lawyer, and the Governor of Kansas.
O'Reilly began his jihad against Tiller back in 2005 and, according to Salon, Tiller's been mentioned on 28 separate occasions on his show. In addition to dubbing him "Tiller the Baby-Killer," O'Reilly has referred to Tiller's clinic as a "death mill" and called his work "Nazi stuff" for which he has "blood on his hands."
On November 3, 2006, O'Reilly had women's rights activist Amy Richards as a guest on his show to discuss Dr. Tiller. Over the course of the interview, O'Reilly repeated the claim that he had "inside information" and "incontrovertible evidence" that Tiller had been "executing babies about to be born" because the mothers were suffering from depression, which led to rampant specualtion that someone had provided O'Reilly with Tiller's patient records. He also made a further quantum leap of logic by saying that because Tiller was performing abortions on young rape victims between the ages of 10-15 that he was, in effect, protecting and encouraging rape. Over the course of the interview Richards remained unflappable despite O'Reilly's constant badgering, and you can clearly see him growing more and more agitated by the second, eventually blasting Richards, "So you're okay with this man executing babies about to be born because the woman says she's depressed?" Richards remained remarkably unfazed throughout even after O'Reilly sarcastically remarked, "We'll let the audience decide who the noble person is here" and then got one last dig in about people like her not caring if babies were being murdered or not.
In July of last year O'Reilly dispatched ace buttboy Jesse Watters, who our John Cook is still hot on the trail of, to ambush Kansas Gov. Katheen Sebelius at a Governor's Conference in Philadelphia. The purpose of the "interview" was supposedly to get Sebelius' opinion of Tiller, noting at the end that Tiller had donated money to her campaign for governor.
In November of 2006 Watters confronted Tiller's attorney, Pedro Irigonegaray, outside of his law office in another ambush interview. Then in 2007, O'Reilly Factor producer Porter Barry caught up with Dr. Tiller himself on his way to work and carried out another ambush interview. We've spent a considerable amount of time tonight searching for these videos and have come up empty-handed. We're unsure if that's just a coincidence of if they've been scrubbed after Tiller's murder earlier today, but if any of you happen to run across is either of them, please send them along to us.
It will be very interesting to see how O'Reilly handles this whole situation on his show tomorrow. We're sure he'll denounce the violent act against Dr. Tiller and express sympathy for his family, but we doubt anything he says will be enough to pacify the many who will almost certainly claim that O'Reilly is now the one with "blood on his hands."