O'Reilly recalled when "everybody in the country is behind [Iraq war], except the kooks"
During a discussion with former CIA director George Tenet about his recently released book, At the Center of the Storm (HarperCollins), on the May 2 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly claimed that at the beginning of the war in Iraq, "everybody in the country [was] behind it, except the kooks." However, 23 senators and 133 members of the House of Representatives -- including a majority of House Democrats -- voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq. Media Matters for America has provided a list of these "kooks" below. Additionally, in a speech at the Commonwealth Club of California on September 23, 2002 -- six months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq -- former Vice President Al Gore denounced President Bush's Iraq policy, saying, "I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century."
Tenet responded to O'Reilly's assertion that only the "kooks" were against the war by saying: "I don't know about kooks, Bill."
Also, O'Reilly again claimed: "I saw, the night the statue went down, Iraqis looting the armories with nobody stopping that. And I went, 'Whoa! What's that all about?' And it doesn't seem that there was any kind of plan to secure the country after you got him." In fact, as Media Matters noted, on the April 9, 2003, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, on the night U.S. Marines assisted in tearing down a statue of Saddam in central Baghdad, O'Reilly made no mention of looting or the difficulty of reconstructing Iraq, though he did ask a guest to comment on plans to "stabilize Baghdad." Rather, during his April 9, 2003, show, O'Reilly hosted several segments listing the "winners" and "losers" of the Iraq war and praised President Bush for "prov[ing] he is a disciplined leader who does what he says he will do" and for "rid[ding] the world of an evil dictator." O'Reilly attacked many opponents of the invasion, such as "Saddam enablers" Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac, and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, plus "newspapers who wrongly predicted doom" and "the hysterical Hollywood celebrities who voiced strident protest, [and] obviously, have lost much credibility."
Nay votes in the Senate (21 Democrats, 1 Republican, and 1 Independent):
Daniel Akaka (D-HI)
Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Robert Byrd (D-WV)
Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
Jon Corzine (D-NJ)
Mark Dayton (D-MN)
Richard Durbin (D-IL)
Russ Feingold (D-WI)
Bob Graham (D-FL)
Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
James Jeffords (I-VT)
Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
Carl Levin (D-MI)
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
Patty Murray (D-WA)
Jack Reed (D-RI)
Paul Sarbanes (D-MD)
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Paul Wellstone (D-MN)
Ron Wyden (D-OR)
Nay votes in the House of Representatives (126 Democrats, 6 Republicans, and 1 Independent):
Neil Abercrombie (D-HI)
Thomas Allen (D-ME)
Joe Baca (D-CA)
Brian Baird (D-WA)
John Baldacci (D-ME)
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
Gresham Barrett (R-SC)
Xavier Becerra (D-CA)
Earl Blumenauer (D-OR)
David Bonior (D-MI)
Robert Brady (D-PA)
Corinne Brown (D-FL)
Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
Lois Capps (D-CA)
Michael Capuano (D-MA)
Benjamin Cardin (D-MD)
Julia Carson (D-IN)
William Clay Jr. (D-MO)
Eva Clayton (D-NC)
James Clyburn (D-SC)
Gary Condit (D-CA)
John Conyers Jr. (D-MI)
Jerry Costello (D-IL)
William Coyne (D-PA)
Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
Susan Davis (D-CA)
Danny Davis (D-IL)
Peter DeFazio (D-OR)
Diana DeGette (D-CO)
Bill Delahunt (D-MA)
Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)
John Dingell (D-MI)
Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)
Mike Doyle (D-PA)
John Duncan, Jr. (R-TN)
Anna Eshoo (D-CA)
Lane Evans (D-IL)
Sam Farr (D-CA)
Chaka Fattah (D-PA)
Bob Filner (D-CA)
Barney Frank (D-MA)
Charles Gonzalez (D-TX)
Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)
Alcee Hastings (D-FL)
Earl Hilliard (D-AL)
Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)
Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX)
Rush Holt (D-NJ)
Mike Honda (D-CA)
Darlene Hooley (D-OR)
John Hostettler (R-IN)
Amo Houghton (R-NY)
Jay Inslee (D-WA)
Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL)
Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX)
Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)
Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH)
Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
Dale Kildee (D-MI)
Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-MI)
Jerry Kleczka (D-WI)
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
John LaFalce (D-NY)
James Langevin (D-RI)
Rick Larsen (D-WA)
John Larson (D-CT)
Jim Leach (R-IA)
Barbara Lee (D-CA)
Sandy Levin (D-MI)
John Lewis (D-GA)
Bill Lipinski (D-IL)
Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
James Maloney (D-CT)
Robert Matsui (D-CA)
Karen McCarthy (D-MO)
Betty McCollum (D-MN)
Jim McDermott-D-WA)
Jim McGovern (D-MA)
Cynthia McKinney (D-GA)
Carrie Meek (D-FL)
Gregory Meeks (D-NY)
Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA)
George Miller (D-CA)
Alan Mollohan (D-WV)
Jim Moran (D-VA)
Connie Morella (R-MD)*
Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)
Grace Napolitano (D-CA)
Richard Neal (D-MA)
Jim Oberstar (D-MN)
David Obey (D-WI)
John Olver (D-MA)
Major Owens (D-NY)
Frank Pallone Jr.(D-NJ)
Ed Pastor (D-AZ)
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Donald Payne (D-NJ)
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
David Price (D-NC)
Nick Rahall (D-WV)
Charles Rangel (D-NY)
Silvestre Reyes (D-TX)
Lynn Rivers (D-MI)
Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX)
Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA)
Bobby Rush (D-IL)
Martin Olav Sabo (D-MN)
Loretta Sanchez (D-CA)
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Thomas Sawyer (D-OH)
Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
Bobby Scott (D-Virginia)
Jose Serrano (D-NY)
Louise Slaughter (D-NY)
Vic Snyder (D-AR)
Hilda Solis (D-CA)
Pete Stark (D-CA)
Ted Strickland (D-OH)
Burt Stupak (D-MI)
Mike Thompson (D-CA)
Bennie Thompson (D-MS)
John Tierney (D-MA)
Edolphus Towns (D-NY)
Mark Udall (D-CO)
Tom Udall (D-NM)
Nydia Velaquez (D-NY)
Pete Visclosky (D-IN)
Maxine Waters (D-CA)
Diane Watson (D-CA)
Melvin Watt (D-NC)
Lynn Woolsey (D-CA)
David Wu (D-OR)
From the May 2 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:
O'REILLY: In our final segment tonight with former CIA director George Tenet, we take a look at the mess in Iraq.
I still believe it was a noble effort to try to bring the Iraqis freedom. I still believe the U.S. military has performed magnificently. But, like you, I just don't understand why things were not better planned out. George Tenet explains some of this in his book, At the Center of the Storm, but not enough. So I called him on it.
[begin video clip]
O'REILLY: We go in, all right, everybody in the country is behind it, except the kooks.
TENET: I don't know about kooks, Bill.
O'REILLY: Believe me, at that point, it was running 80-85 percent --
TENET: OK. Anyway --
O'REILLY: -- in the polls.
TENET: Go ahead.
O'REILLY: OK. Now, we overthrow him. The military campaign goes well -- you didn't run the military campaign, the Pentagon did -- and he's done. And he's out. But you know what I saw? I saw, the night the statue went down, Iraqis looting the armories with nobody stopping that. And I went, "Whoa! What's that all about?" And it doesn't seem that there was any kind of plan to secure the country after you got him.
Hey O’Reilly, Doris and the next President of the United States, Obama, were never behind the war. O’Reilly, what a war monger.
Count me among the "kooks"...
Or, maybe he meant "coots" - y'know, like mud hens and/or old folks.
Or, maybe he meant "cooks" spoken with a Cuban accent.
I'm sure BO will clear it up for us soon.
Seems to me that by appearing on the Factor, Tenet was merely disposing of a messy obligation en route to increased book sales. What a spineless, opportunistic weasel.
Hey, Tent is a great American.
Not going there...
I love Tent. And Lamp.
I'm pitching my tent.
It's not that exciting of a thread, Pete.
Are you just looking around the office for things, or do you really love the lamp?
Would kooks include people who were following the UN inspections and reading that 100 of 600 suspected WMD sites had come up dry, those 100 sites being the ones most liable to have WMD, and that soon after Bush told the inspectors to vacate Iraq so he could start dropping the bombs, so he could start a war BEFORE the very thing that was instigating the war, suspected WMD, could be thoroughly investigated, which tends to make one wonder WHY Bush was so anxious to use the "last resort" before all other resorts had been exhausted, which therefore make one wonder if there was any reason to invade Iraq in the first place?
I, then, am card carrying kook.
Randy
HA!!!
So you ADMIT to your kookosity! You've fallen right into O'Reilly's clever trap!
When did you get your card? They said they sent me one, but I never received it. Is there a loco - I mean "local" - office where I can just go down and pick one up? My temporary permit is almost expired, so I'm going to need a card soon.
I want a card! I sent in my kook membership fee!
Ah, the good ole days...when lives and money were being wasted in Iraq, but nobody cared!
Makes me wish for the good ole days of TV and radio...before O'Reilly, Rush, etc...and tabloid trash was something you found only in the supermarket check-out.
Actually it looks more like everybody but the kooks were against the war.
How about the good old days when Bill O'Reilly had a REAL job and engaged in actual honest to goodness JOURNALISM?????
And Bill - in case you or someone on your staff is reading what's posted on MMFA - you suck, and so does everyone else at Faux News.
How about the good old days when Bill O'Reilly had a REAL job and engaged in actual honest to goodness JOURNALISM?????
You mean, back when he got his Peabody?
When exactly was this? Before his current incarnation, wasn't he on a tabloid show?
Well, like all awards, the Peabody is overrated. Now they just give out awards to be giving them out.
As to his incarnation, he is the embodiment of certain qualities and concepts, such as racism, sexism, demagogery, radicalism(the far,far, right of the Republican Party), idea theft, and outright stupidity!!
Bill O'Reilly used to brag about his Peabody award. Turns out that "Inside Edition" received its Peabody AFTER he left the show.....
If Deborah Norville does a better job than you, you're not a very good journalist.
How can you be so cruel to Sweet William when he speaks so highly of you?
Before he was on "Inside Edition", he was a regular TV news reporter. Here's what Wikipedia has about his career as a legitimate journalist:
Whenever O'Reilly says "Believe me..........", there is just cause to become suspicious of all his subsequent claims. How sad is that?
The fact is that very reasonable people, not kooks, were against the invasion of Iraq. Why O'Reilly has to haul out these egregious, childish slurs against those he disagrees with, is increasingly tiring......why can't he leave the invective out of it and make his point?
And then he wonders and whines about the stones thrown at him by those who have grown tired of his rhetoric.......amazing.
were you against it, tommy?
"I still believe it was a noble effort to try to bring Iraqis freedom"
My what selective memory you have Bill.
Remember the original reason for invading Iraq was "wmd's, mushroom cloud, get them there so they can attack us here".
Junior only used the "freedom" card after he was caught in lies about wmd's, mushroom clouds.
Pearline, I remember vividly how the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I heard Bush say in his State of the Union address that Iraq had been attempting to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger. "They got the bomb when we were distracted" I thought to myself. I heard the "mushroom cloud" comments, too. I thought we went to war to prevent a pre-emptive nuclear strike from Iraq. Was I the only one who misunderstood that our real purpose was "Frredom!" (spoken in an irritating, high-pitched, expressive Texas twang)? Maybe only self-anointed higher intellects like O'Reilly were capable of comprehending the complexities of Bush-speak.
Irony, I must admit that since I'm 72 I thought that my hearing was going, But then I checked out the cable news captions that went from wmd's to freedom and I thought I needed glasses. Now maybe I'm just not smart enough to follow the dots from wmd's to freedom to whatever the new caption is.
Pearline, if you weren't smart enough to follow those dots then neither was I. When I connected the dots all I kept seeing was &z^&nt%$#l:#@...
Hey, watch this neat Youtube video of O'Reilly. [link to www.youtube.com]
Yeah, but..... Olbermann did a Nazi salute!
You're a kook.
LOL
Waitaminnit! K.O.O.K. - Keith -Olberman- Olberman- Keith-- he's involuntarily venting while observing his policy of not saying KO's name. Sorta like when that little girl in the Exorcist spelled out "help" on her skin.
BilldO does actually say 80-85% in the polls, so he may have been talking about public surveys rather than the votes.I don't know where he got the number if that's the case. Around the Faux Nooz water cooler maybe.
Bill says 80-85% in every single poll he cites if it's favoring a position he is pimping......he is nothing if not predictable.
I was curious... so I looked up the polls BEFORE the Iraq war. Looks like Billo LIES AGAIN:
Looks like the American people actually wanted to give the UN inspectors more time to do their job. If the inspectors didn't find WMD's then we shouldn't invade.
Most people were convinced that there was WMDs.
Most people wanted to invade Iraq with the UN than without.
A STUNNING majority didn't think OIL was enough reason to invade for.
Opinion was evenly divided on whether or not Saddam had something to do with 9/11.
A solid majority thought we should gain more world support first.
Most people thought we should try to achieve our goals without war.
[link to www.pollingreport.com]
There you go again, with a typical kook ploy: letting the facts get in the way of a good diatribe.
The Nazi Salute he did (while holding up an O'Reilly mask) would be appropriate for when Bill O'Reilly defended the Nazis by wrongly claiming that American soldiers executed some German soldiers (by putting them on their knees in an open field and shooting them in the back of the head), when in fact it was the other way around.
Yeah, O'Reilly repeated the Americans killing the Nazi at Malmedy error the following night too.
O'Really doesn't have to say "Believe Me." I brace myself for a new lie or propaganda when his lips begin to start moving.
I'm sure that Bill uses the term "kooks" in a complementary way because it is widely known (as wide as the breadth of Bill's broad forehead) that Bill O'Reilly does not smear people.
I hereby annoit Bill an Esquire.
Now he's BORE.
It always confused me how one of these "Big Guns" could simultaneously have such an immense bore and yet have such small caliber.
He's right about one thing..., there was no plan to secure anything. Bush and Co. needed the chaos that was to follow to forward their neo-nazi nightmare of world domination. Read PNAC, it's all there in black and white. And this was developed in 1997. It's a shame no one took them seroiusly then since so much has been wasted on this bogus idea that we can control the worlds economy, media and energy resourses to name a few.
I Can't Wait for 2008! Stick it to 'em boys!
I`m Bill O`reilly and I dont do personal attacks and call people names you kooks!
sad to see lincoln chafee's name as the only republican against the war. he lost because he would have kept republicans in control of the senate.
You're right. I manned the phones for MoveOn.org in the get-out-the-vote drive, and I always regretted it when my numbers were in Rhode Island, because Chafee's a good man. I don't feel so bad about it since the Judicial Committee hearings, because Senator Whitehouse has made me proud.
There was a time when conservative pundits talked about meritocracy, before it became clear(er) that their ideas lacked merit.
In a meritocracy wouldn't we have "The Michael Moore Factor"?
Kooks? You mean like anyone who listens to Bill-O??? Now THAT'S kookie!!
If Murdoch was smart, he wouldn't renew O'Reilly's contract on Fox News Channel. O'Reilly show is wasted air time.
Do "Chicken Hawks" like Bill O, Paul Bremmer, Paul Wolfowitz, and all that rush to war crowd go KOOK A DOODLE DO when they role out of bed each day? However I have found a fitting answer to their incessant crowing.
http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/rooster.html
The last paragraph may just be the answer to Bill O’s problem. Does anyone think that it’s really to drastic?
I'll be sure and tell my 73-year old mother that Bill O'Reilly called her a 'kook' because she had a hand-made anti-war sign in the front of her house in Salt Lake City in early 2003.
This makes perfect sense, as long as you replace the word "kooks" with the phrase "people that knew the actual facts."
Generally speaking, these were people that listened to programs like NPR and read news sites like the BBC.
watching b.o. is like a head on collision between a fully loaded passenger plane and a fully loaded passenger plane. it is terrible but you just gota see it (over and over again) and thankfully the only thing that gets hurt is the truth. b.o. has his sycophants (right wingers on a cool-aid iv drip feed just like their idol b.o.). b.o. has bush-brown-ring-around-the collar. The vast majority of faux-news channel viewers don't believe in dinosaurs, science or evolution. g. bush has created a true kakistocracy. there are surely some right wingers that believe we can go dumber. he is a white knuckler when it comes to sobriety. He never got treatment. bush is an alcoholic that just stopped. he still has all the symptoms as to why he sucked back the booze in the first place. At 58, I never thought I would see the day when loser like gw would lead a country. if his dad had not been president, gw would be selling peanuts (still) at the Tx. rangers stadium. He is an embarassment beyond comprehension. d.j.