O’Reilly: Scotty & “The Vast Left Wing Media Conspiracy”

Contrary to Bill O’Reilly’s bald assertion that “the far left loves that Scott McClellan… is trashing President Bush in a new book” it seems there’s actually a considerable amount of hostility and resentment coming from most liberal commenters about what Bill O calls McClellan’s “Judas Move”. Arianna Huffington’s reaction is fairly typical:

It’s George Tenet déjà vu all over again. How many times are we going to have a key Bush administration official try to wash the blood off his hands — and add a chunk of change to his bank account — by writing a come-clean book years after the fact, pointing the finger at everyone else while painting himself as an innocent bystander to history who saw all the horrible things that were happening but, somehow, had no choice but to go along?

Of course, that doesn’t quite fit with Bill O’s hoary narrative about the “vast left wing media conspiracy” and how the “far left” (an ever-growing list of outlets that now includes the NYT, Newsweek, NBC News and “hate sites” like Daily Kos) is simply overjoyed about McClellan’s transformation from, as Huffington puts it, a “lie-spouting sock puppet” to somebody who sounds “like a left wing blogger” according to Karl Rove. Also conveniently overlooked by O’Reilly is the fact that McClellan’s assessment of the mainstream press in his new book is apparently less than flattering — he refers to the media as “enablers” that abdicated their responsibility in the selling of the war by the Bush administration. Well, perhaps that was before they all went “crazy” after “Iraq went south” as Bill’s fable would have us believe.

As for the other assertions Bill O makes about the media being in bag for Obama and there being no sympathy whatsoever for John McCain… they’re laughable beyond words. Maybe Bill is unaware that last month the Associated Press’s Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, hosted a friendly interview with McCain, greeting him first with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. “We spend quite a bit of time with you on the back of the Straight Talk Express asking you questions, and what we’ve decided to do today was invite everyone else along on the ride,” Sidoti sweetly explained. “We even brought you your favorite treat.” And maybe Bill forgot about McCain’s chummy little “thank you” cookout for over 40 reporters from a wide variety of news outlets — including the New York Times — at his vacation home in Arizona last March. The love affair of the beltway “villagers” with “maverick” John McCain is well known and easily documented, making O’Reilly’s crackpot media conspiracy theory seem even loonier than is normally the case.