Bill O'Reilly Hates America, and I love Keith Olbermann

I have just seen a video clip from MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann from June 2006. Maybe some of you in The Amerika already know all about this, but it was new to me.

In the clip, Olbermann blasted Bill O’Reilly so beautifully that it nearly brought tears to my eyes. I stumbled upon the clip at www.ifilm.com, where it was titled Bill O’Reilly Hates America.

Olbermann was exposing O’Reilly, not for the first time, as a liar and an idiot. I love this sort of stuff. The topic was O’Reilly’s fictional account of what had happened in the Belgian village of Malmedy in December 1944.

On two different occasions, October 2005 and May 2006, O’Reilly had presented a shockingly twisted version of what had transpired in Malmedy. O’Reilly claimed that the massacre in Malmedy had been perpetrated by American troops on German troops that had surrendered. In fact, the massacre happened exactly the other way round.

O’Reilly’s version was his lame attempt at defending Abu Ghraib (the October 2005 broadcast) and Haditha (the May 2006 broadcast), by claiming that atrocities were a time-honoured tradition for American troops in overseas wars.

Olbermann said he would be prepared to accept O’Reilly’s story, if it had been told only once, as the mistake of an ignorant man. But the second telling of the warped narrative had infuriated him.

The Countdown researchers made sure they got the facts straight for Olbermann. This is what really happened.

It was during the Battle of the Bulge, one week before Christmas 1944. Near Malmedy, in Liège, a French area of Belgium, Battery B of the 285^th Field Artillery Observation Battalion encountered a German Panzer-SS division. The Americans were in jeeps and trucks, the Germans in tanks.

The battle was short. 11 Americans were killed in the battle, 2 were killed fleeing and 7 escaped. 6 Americans were taken as POWs. Another 113 Americans surrendered, and within 15 minutes, the SS had shot them all.

In January 1945, when the Allies took control of the site of the massacre, 84 bodies were recovered. Many of them had been shot in the head at close range, some of them still had their hands held up above their heads.

When O’Reilly was called on his glaring and disgusting error, even by some of his own viewers, he claimed that he had been referring to American reprisals for Malmedy, which are alleged to have indeed taken place. Fox News, in the meantime, doctored their transcripts of the programmes so that they read “Normandy” instead of “Malmedy”. Pathetic attempts at covering filthy tracks.

It’s a good clip if you enjoy seeing Bill O’Reilly taken down by a man of substantially greater integrity and intelligence.

Additional source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre