Here's a sucker bet: A hundred bucks says it takes Bill O'Reilly all of a minute or so into his show tonight to condemn the murder of Dr. George Tiller.
By now you probably know that yesterday during a church service in Kansas which he was attending with his wife, George Tiller, a controversial provider of late-term abortions, was shot dead. The man who police say killed him is, needless to say, a walking cliché: He's a 51-year-old fundamentalist Christian named Scott Roeder who hails from an unremarkable suburb of Kansas City and who boasts a supposedly vivid history of mental illness. In other words, he's exactly the kind of person you'd expect to walk into a church and gun down an abortion doctor in front of his wife and a crowd of stunned parishoners -- a guy who was such a human time bomb that he probably had C-4 hardwired into his fucking DNA.
Roeder's now in police custody, and one would hope they're going to throw the proverbial book at him -- or possibly use it to hit him repeatedly in the head until his brains are coming out of his ears. He killed a man in what was
unequivocally an act of political and religious terrorism, and as such he deserves to suffer the full brunt of whatever harsh punishment our legal system decides to dole out to him.
But while Scott Roeder shouldn't be allowed to escape the blame for an act that, at face value, was committed solely by him -- the reality is that there's plenty of fault to go around on this.
Sure, Roeder pulled the trigger, but there were a hell of a lot of people standing behind him, indirectly encouraging him to do it.
People like Bill O'Reilly.
For years now, Dr. George Tiller has been one of O'Reilly's favorite cultural boogeymen -- providing a regular target for the talking head's pompous, self-righteous venom. O'Reilly glibly called him "Tiller the Baby Killer"; he painted him
(wrongly) as a Mengele-like monster, gleefully murdering babies right up to the moment of their births, all for a few grand a pop; he accused Tiller of having blood on his hands and warned that a "judgment day" was likely coming. Bill O'Reilly, and the unscrupulous, unethical assholes like him, laid the groundwork and set the wheels in motion that led to yesterday's almost inevitable violent conclusion.
But tonight, make no mistake, O'Reilly's going to put on his best reputable journalist and decent human being face and aloofly insist that he had nothing to do with Tiller's murder. That he never once advocated the shooting of someone he claimed over and over again was a one-man-holocaust -- a guy who went around killing kids with impunity thanks to the protection of a justice system corrupted by elitist liberal pussies. O'Reilly's going to deflect blame away from himself -- to wash his hands of the whole ugly tragedy.
He shouldn't be allowed to, though. Not for a second.
For years, groups like Operation Rescue have been permitted to terrorize abortion providers and, worse, their patients. They've never fully been taken to task for inciting and justifying criminal behavior through hateful rhetoric -- for creating wrath-of-God nightmares like Eric Rudolph and Paul Hill. They've been allowed to get away with being complicit in violence against people who, like it or not, are innocent citizens in the eyes of the law. It's always been sickening that the motto of some within the "pro-life" movement seems to be, "Life begins at conception -- and ends in cold blood at the moment of our choosing." But it's even more sickening that this kind of barbarism, while decried by most of the civilized world, is still held up as a merely extreme opinion within a legitimate political debate.
Operation Rescue and the religious right in general have helped to foment the special brand of righteous outrage that would make the most whack-job among their ranks kill or wound in the name of God -- but they've always needed media coverage to push their agenda.
O'Reilly actually
is the media. He has a forum that reaches millions of people, including an undeniably substantial number of highly-strung white guys nursing persecution fantasies. They're people just looking for a way to physically fight back against the encroaching secular liberal darkness that they've been warned about (by none other than O'Reilly himself), and all it takes is a little push from the face on the TV to motivate them to action. I've said this before, but it bears repeating over and over again: If you know that even a small part of your audience is susceptible to suggestions of violence -- that it can be easily moved to take the law into its own hands at the behest of the right kind of rhetoric -- then engaging in that kind of rhetoric without considering the potential consequences is like shouting fire in a crowded theater. It's the textbook definition of incitement. Likewise, to deny that there can be an equal and opposite reaction to your actions is intellectually dishonest -- which is a fancy way of saying that you're entirely full of shit if you try to pretend that you can spend years accusing someone of being a murderer among us, then blithely evade accountability when some psychopath takes what he feels is the logical step to correct this injustice.
Put yet another way: I think Bill O'Reilly's not just an arrogant windbag -- I think he and his rotten ilk are fast becoming an outright danger, that they're putting lives in jeopardy.
So does that mean someone should kill him?
Don't answer that.
Related:DXM: Revolutionary Goad/4.7.09The Huffington Post: "How I (and Other 'Pro-Life' Leaders) Contributed to Dr. Tiller's Murder/6.1.09
