Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote a column called, "
Bill O'Reilly's Threats." I noticed the title and was wondering what threats O'Reilly had made. But once I read the column I found that the title is a deliberate lie. O'Reilly, who was apparently offended by something Milbank wrote about Fox News, made a bad joke about Milbank.
On Thursday night, the Fox News host asked, as part of a show that would be seen by 5.5 million people: "Does sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank?" He then added, "That was a joke."
Bill O'Reilly is a moron for making a joke like that on the air, but obviously he isn't actually calling for Milbank's death. Milbank knows this, of course, but in his column he chooses blatant intellectual dishonesty, comparing what O'Reilly said to the murder of Daniel Pearl, and characterizing O'Reilly's words as
O'Reilly's on-air fantasizing about violent ends for me ... violent fantasies [and] intimidation and violent imagery
What a pile of garbage. O'Reilly's stupid joke was not a threat, not intimidation and highly unlikely to represent actual fantasizing about Milbank's head being cut off by Islamic terrorists. But Milbank pretends that it is, purely in order to paint O'Reilly as an advocate of violence. He actually calls O'Reilly's word's "thuggish tactics." Milbank's column provides hard evidence of why he is an intellectually dishonest hack whose writings about pretty much any subject should be taken with a big grain of salt.
