TWO FROM ESCHATON

First, Atrios links to a nice little recounting of a liberal Canadian columnist's appearance on Fox's O'Reilly show. From the Globe and Mail:

My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly

We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.

I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.

I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."

"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. Mr. Doyle would have been shrieking.

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk. He then went into a mad rant about lefties like Mr. Doyle and how I was a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

Leave it to those insufferably polite Canadians to tell it like it is. Click here for more.

Second, Atrios hits the keyboard and personally dissects a strongly biased NPR report on the weird and nearly incomprehensible thing about Democratic presidential contender John Kerry's Catholic faith:

NPR

Here we get the punchline - those who are moral vote Republican. Those who are not vote Democrat. Kerry is immoral, simply because he doesn't believe all of his personal religious beliefs should be legislated.

Hagerty doesn't bother to consider all of the pro-choice Catholic Republicans. She doesn't bother to find out why all Catholic Politicians aren't clamoring to outlaw birth control, and why the figures within the Church are silent on that. Ditto the death penalty.

Hagerty is a menace. She is NPR's religion reporter and always writes about the hot-button social issues. She's careful - very careful - to not let her reporting appear to be obviously slanted, but it's hideously slanted in a subtle manipulative fashion. The good guys and bad guys are always clear in her stories, even as she seeks to provide "balance."

Click here for the rest.

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