Yesterday, “[a] 23-year-old man upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan opened fire from his truck at two soldiers standing outside a military recruiting station here on Monday morning, killing one private and wounding another.” In response, conservative talker Laura Ingraham suggested that websites and news outlets that have been critical of the war in Iraq were responsible for the obviously horrible attack. Her guest Bill O’Reilly seemed to agree with her tongue-in-cheek reasoning:
INGRAHAM: Are we now going to look at the websites that he frequented to see if he was on some of the crazy left-wing anti-war websites, Win Without War, George Soros-funded websites, DailyKos, all the crazies. … The way they are reporting on the George Tiller murder, all of talk radio was responsible for that. … Did he frequent MSNBC, did he like to watch it? [...]
O’REILLY: Since they have been unrelenting in describing their country as a torture nation, I’m sure that set this muslim guy off to kill one and wound another of our military and I’m sure that’s NBC’s fault. Look, the absurdity of this is beyond the pale.
Listen to a compilation here:
These commentators weren’t criticizing O’Reilly and groups like Operation Rescue simply because they are opposed to abortion. Many right-wing activists used words like “murderer” and “killer” when they criticized Tiller’s abortion practices. O’Reilly, in particular, sent his producers to ambush Tiller and said that anyone who didn’t “stop” Tiller would have “blood on their hands.”
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