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Brook on O'Reilly 12/13

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Oakes

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For those who didn't get the email:

Dear Admirer of Ayn Rand,

Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, is scheduled to be interviewed on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor" on Monday, December 13, 2004. The topic will be Iraq. This program airs at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern Time. Please check your local listings for exact times in your area.

ARI Media

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I respect O'Reilly. He's a real American success story, and he achieved the success by himself. Yeah, he had a kinda tabloid-news past, but he was just doing what he could to get started. I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but I actually agree with most of it. The main issue where I disagree with him is separation of church and state.

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Bill O'Reilly takes pretty much every antithetical postition to Objectivism, but he's still a great host. Dr. Brook was on O'Reilly this summer and was given his say so I guess we cannot complain all that much.

I still watch O'Reilly and listen to his radio show for some reason. Perhaps for the entertainment value more than anything. He's probably the most wishy-washy guy on radio, at least. He takes traditionally conservative positions and then a couple "token" liberal positions (not to mention his slight anti-corparatism, ambivalence toward the death penalty and call for government involvement in the "flu vaccine crisis" which was no more than an election ploy from the Democrats) in an attempt to be "fair and balanced".

It's pathetic. There's nothing I can't stand more than a closet conservative (or authoritarian fascist, to be extreme about it) who is always bashing the "leftist media". Well, what the heck is he? He covers his agenda up with these "token" liberal issues so he can say to his detractors "hey, I agree with you on this one issue!" when they say he's a conservative.

The latest horrific use of Image Theory from the Right (connecting present issues to unrelated events, mostly in foreign policy) is calling for the tightening of immigration laws for terrorist-related issues. Every conservative on the radio has been calling for the tightening and using the 9/11 attacks to justify their position, using the death of 3000 Americans to push their agenda. But, I'm rambling and perhaps even wrong.

TB =)

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O'Reilly is intolerable. His propagation of the so called "Judeo-Christian" founding of the United States, which he expounds upon all the time is dangerous as well as counter-factual. And he never has any serious historians of the founding on to discuss his theory which tells me he knows it's bogus, or he is just that stupid.

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He is just that stupid. I detest him extremely. Some things he has said:

"I think that wealthy people in this country should be able to keep half their money." :santa:

(paraphrasing from memory) "If I'm sitting in a bar and Christina Aguilera or Brittany Spears walks in and says, 'Let's go," who's going to pass that up? I'm just being honest!" Basically admitting he would cheat on his wife if the woman were "hot" enough (and the girls he chose for his example tell you something about him, too). He said this in the context of how men are weak, they can't be expected to be loyal or faithful all the time, that's "just the way it is". He's fond of saying that, and chalking peoples' flaws up to "human nature".

I haven't written them down, so I can't cite them all, but I have heard him say scores of stupid, rotten things. He's despicable.

I heard someone say his ratings are beginning to slide since that recent scandal of his, which he managed to downplay pretty effectively by settling out of court and arranging a non-disclosure agreement. I hope it's true.

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I haven't written them down, so I can't cite them all, but I have heard him say scores of stupid, rotten things.  He's despicable. 

(We should probably start a new thread if this one goes on much longer.)

I understand that, when the Iraq war was about to begin, he found an obscure family memeber of a victim of 9/11, brought them on his show, and berated them because they were a pacifist and had signed a petition against the war in Iraq. Now, mind you, he didn't explain to them why the war in Iraq was justified. He just called them stupid that they wouldn't support the war in Iraq since their family member had died in 9/11. (Why people like him insist on making 9/11 and the war in Iraq a package deal I'll never understand.)

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O'Reilly and Fox News are good for that, scheduling an excellent speaker and then cancelling with some so-called "breaking news". Yeah, as if this Peterson crap couldn't have waited, or Fox couldn't have dealt with it as part of their regular newscast segment. O'Reilly was looking for an excuse to bump this speaker and he found it! I also made changes in my schedule in order to see it. Damn, just damn! :angry: :cuss:

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O'Reilly and Fox News are good for that, scheduling an excellent speaker and then cancelling with some so-called "breaking news".

WTF mates... I ended up watching Trading Spouses when I thought O'Reilly was supposed to be on. :D Fox News isn’t living up to the good things I said about them after the election.

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O'Reilly has his good and bad moments - the bad ones about America's founding, for example. That and he provides rationalizations in favor of Jesus as a "philosopher", even "the world's greatest philosopher" at that.

I hated how he rudely laughed Peikoff down about using nuclear weapons, and I think he tries extra hard to fit in with Middle America and to be liked by them. I think he began as a first-hander pundit with his own opinions and axes to grind, but has become a kind of second-hand puppet of the traditionalist Americans, saying to others what he assumes his audience would like him to say to them.

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