Book Review of "The Betrayal of America"

The Betrayal of America by Vincent Bugliosi

Most Americans have forgotten, but in November 2000, we did not know who our President was after the election. There were issues with the ballots in Florida, and with the electoral college so close, the winner of Florida would become the winner of the election. The Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount of the ballots in question, so that a clear winner could be decided.

At the start of the recount, Bush held a slim lead over Gore. As the days went on, Gore gained ground. Either Gore was going to overtake Bush, or Bush's claim to the presidency would be validated. Either way, it seemed logical to wait and have it play out. The US is, after all, a democracy, and one of the foundations of a democracy is that the people decide. Of course, Bush predictably sued to have this recount stopped, on the basis that he would suffer "irreparable harm" should the process continue. Incredibly, the Supreme Court overruled the Florida court and agreed.

This book is about the Supreme Court decision on December 12, 2000 to stop the recount, and the author's outrage over the decision he argues was not based on any legal precedence or foundation in law or ethics. Bugliosi, who was a DA in LA in his previous life (and is most known for the conviction of Charles Manson), pulls no punches in his claims that the five members of the Supreme Court who authored the decision (no one knows for sure which justice authored it, as amazingly none put his or her name on it) did so out of pure selfish interests in wanting Bush to get the presidency over Gore.

The books is a disturbing look into how fragile the whole process is that we rely on for justice in America, even though most Americans think highly of judges and think a Supreme Court justice is above such petty motivesm, which may be misplaced. Most people have very negative opinions of lawyers and politicians. "Conventional logic would seem to dictate that since a judge is normally both a politician and a lawyer, people would have an opinion of them lower than a grasshopper’s belly," he said.

In the book, Bugliosi goes into great detail explaining the flaws with the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision from a moral, legal, and political perspective, to paint a very compelling picture to anyone looking at it objectively that the election was given to Bush by the Supreme Court.

I personally don't blame Bush nor would say he is an illegitimate President (the Supreme Court says he is legit, and they are the ones who decide legitimacy in this country), but there is little doubt that the Supreme Court undermined the Constitution, the will of the people, and acted in purely selfish interests. "That an election for an American president can be stolen by the highest court in the land under the deliberate pretext of an inapplicable constitutional provision has got to be one of the most frightening and dangerous events ever to have occurred in this country," Bugliosi wrote.

And for those of you who want to dismiss Bugliosi as a die-hard liberal who is just sour that Bush is President, he addresses those thoughts directly in the book as well, and Bugliosi is equally critical of the lawyers who represented Al Gore and argued to the Supreme Court, saying they "simply could not have been any worse."

This book is a reminder that even in the greatest democracy the world has ever seen, a few powerful people in well-placed positions can undermine everything right in front of our noses. Shockingly, most Americans supported the decision and have no problems with it, because their guy Bush got in, and that is all that matters (Bugliosi has some interesting comments about human nature being corrupted by personal self-interests).

Given the mess we are currently in with Iraq, one has to wonder what the course of history would have been if the state of Florida had been allowed to count every vote, as it legally and logically should have been allowed to do.

The book is based on an article Bugliosi wrote for The Nation in 2001. After this article, says Bugliosi, "came an unwelcome confirmation of something I had already concluded about the vast majority (not all) of human beings: They simply do not have sufficient character to rise above their own self-interests."

I completely agree.

http://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-America-Undermined-Constitution-President/dp/156025355X

Why I stopped listening to Bill O'Reilly

I know what all of you are thinking: Why did you bother to listen to him to begin with? What did you expect? But that line of questioning, particularly from someone who has never bothered to listen to Bill O’Reilly on the radio, is exactly why I did. My seven-year-old won’t try food he has never tasted because it is different and thus must be bad. It would be good advice to an adult to use better logic than a seven-year-old. Whether you like him or not, O’Reilly is dominating cable news and the radio talk circuit, and has multiple best selling books. You can either ignore him, as CNN did, you can check it out and decide for yourself.

For $50 and a 12-month subscription to an archive of commercial-free MP3 files of his shows, I decided it would be more productive to listen to O’Reilly talk about current events during my workouts than listen to the same music.

For those who only know him from the cable show on Fox, which is nothing special and an array of topics that are short and sensational enough to capture the attention of the American who doesn't want to think about a topic longer than two minutes, the radio program is a better format for critical thought. The radio program is two hours long, devoting one topic to each hour, allowing ample time to discuss a topic in pretty good detail from several angles. O’Reilly’s method of operation is to start the discussion with his take on a topic, go to a commercial, come back with a guest who may or may not disagree with him, then come back and answer phone calls the rest of the hour. He takes about 8-12 calls an hour, and often includes about 3-5 people who completely disagree with him and think he is nuts. Granted, he has the last word and never concedes the big point, but he will acknowledge the occasional caller who makes a good counterpoint, which alone differentiates him from his peers.

But O’Reilly has several flaws as a journalist and a person that are cause for dislike, and his viewpoints on issues can be, in my opinion, intelligently countered via the same logic he uses and thinks is foolproof, but the irony is that criticism of O’Reilly is not about that but on reputation.

David Letterman told him that “60% of what he says is crap,” then later admitted in the same show that he never watches O’Reilly. Genius. Which person is worst? That one spouting “crap” or the one who hates someone he knows nothing about? I argue the latter. Letterman has been told that O’Reilly was evil and ran with it, and it is hard to find nobility in that approach through life. But when it comes to people’s view of O’Reilly, Letterman’s thoughts are very much the norm. I would guess 99% of the people who hate O’Reilly have never bothered to listen to him.

Many people hold the belief he is another Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, a guy who loves all things Republican and hates all things Democrat. But this is a lazy argument and simply not true. You don’t have to listen to more than a week of his radio show to come up with several examples of where he contradicts the Republican party line. For example:

- He is against the death penalty
- He is a libertarian when it comes to your personal life… be gay, watch porn… O’Reilly doesn’t care, as long as you don’t hurt anyone or break the
- Thinks the war in Iraq is a mess and horribly managed by the Bush administration
- Is very anti-oil companies and wants them regulated
- Has said repeatedly that Clinton had a successful presidency and doesn’t care about the Lewinski stuff (other than it took place in the Oval Office and that he lied about it)
- He is for gay rights in terms of economic equality, hospital visitation, inheritance, etc.

There are several more examples, but these alone are enough to demonstrate he is not Rush or Sean Hannity. Yet he is often referred to as a conservative columnist, which I think is lazy journalism. There is no doubt that the majority of his beliefs align with Republicans, but this is not because he is pro-Republican by default but because O’Reilly is a traditionalist, and a traditionalist is aligned with the Republican platform on most issues. He no doubt votes for mostly Republicans (although he says Democrats JFK and Robert Kennedy were great Americans), but that doesn’t make him one, and it is wrong to identify him as such. Some of his ideals are clearly not aligned with Bush.

With this premise, I started working out listening to Bill O’Reilly. I listened to about 80% of O’Reilly’s daily two-hour radio shows for an entire year as part of a premium membership. I found him different than the preacher types of Hannity, Limbaugh, and Air America, who do nothing but support their guy (the one with the “D” or “R” next to the name). As such, they are predictable. And being predictable, they are boring.

I initially found O’Reilly very refreshing, because while I didn’t always agree with him, I didn’t find him predictable, and that made him tolerable to listen to, even when I disagreed with his thesis. I also appreciated how he took phone calls from people who disagreed with him, and had some guests from the opposite viewpoint. Rush and Hannity would never do that.

After a year, however, I am not renewing my membership. The main reason? It took me several months to get to the core of his agenda, but I did eventually find it, and once known, I find O’Reilly is predictable, and thus boring. I can tell you what O’Reilly will say on any issue you can come up with.

On the positive, O’Reilly has a breadth of topics on his show, and it took me several months to start hearing the same responses (compared to about 20 minutes of listening to Hannity). However, because he is more agenda-driven and “spins” much more than he will ever admit, his viewpoints never wane and he is easy to predict, once you take get to that point, just like any other radio talk show host, regardless of political leaning.

As stated previously, O’Reilly is not a conservative Republican preacher, like many in radio talk, but he is a self-proclaimed traditionalist “culture warrior”, and his new book (which he can’t go four minutes without plugging), defines what all of this means and how the secular progressives (SPs) are bad and destroying America with its “San Francisco values.”

Here is where I begin to tire of O’Reilly. I found his arguments, at first, to be logical and valid, even if I disagree with them, because they seemed to be thought through. The problem though, and you have to listen to him awhile to find the patterns, is he is inconsistent with how he applies his logic, and I belief that his agenda drives his conclusions more than logical critical thought, counter to what he says. Some examples:

- View that the world is black and white: O’Reilly basically says those who think the world is grey don’t get it. I couldn’t disagree more. One example: He says an SP is for income redistribution (taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor), such as the estate tax. I personally am against this tax, as I don’t think the government should be able to tax you on stuff you’ve already paid taxes on after you die. (But I also know the estate tax only applies to 2% of all Americans and kicks in only after you first million, so I am not that concerned about it because it will never apply to me). So, if income redistribution is defined as estate tax and a higher tax rate for rich people, I am against income redistribution. But that is not true. Income redistribution also takes place in the form of taking more in social security than you put in (a 7-year-old collecting SS checks when a parent dies, for example), college grants, Medicare, paying taxes into schools when you have no children attending school, etc. Most people are okay with that. So, I guess I am for some forms of income redistribution but not for others. Put another way, the world is not black and white.

But O’Reilly constantly mocks SPs as those who always see the world as grey and live in a “kool-aid world” that needs clear answers. Unfortunately, I don’t see the world as black and white, and as such, I can’t live in O’Reilly’s world.

· Iraq War: He says the war is mess. He says on Oprah that he probably wouldn’t support it knowing what he knows now. Yet, he is against pulling out. Why? Because it will be worse, as millions of people will die in civil war. This is likely true and what happened in Vietnam that most Americans don’t know about (about 3 million Vietnamese were slaughtered after the US left Vietnam), but what is the alternative? Stay in Iraq and continue to have people picked off daily and spend billions each month and have American soldiers kidnapped and tortured? I don’t know the answer, and I am very glad it isn’t my call, but the fact is O’Reilly doesn’t know it will be worse any more than I know it can be better, which is the problem with preemptive wars: their value can never fully be proven or even known. My issue? O’Reilly never admits that. He just says his way is right, and Democrats and others are insane to think otherwise.

· Endless self-promotion: Every entertainer, and O’Reilly is an entertainer (he calls himself a news analyst, which thus makes it okay for him to provide commentary and speculation), self-promotes to some degree, but my god: enough with the book you just wrote and its sales and place on the NY Times best seller list, and enough about your book signings, and enough about your appearances on TV shows, and enough with your name droppings of celebrities that you have met or know (why do I know that he lives next door to Happy Gilmore? Why do I need to know that?).

· Double-standards: He constantly rips people who don’t appear on his show, such as Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Stephen Colbert (why does he care if that guy comes on his show or not?), but meanwhile Dick Cheney has several times refused to appear on the show despite saying he will in the future, yet he never gets ripped. A caller once asked O’Reilly about that, but O’Reilly said he wasn’t ready to give up on the VP just yet (read: O’Reilly doesn’t want to tick off the Bush administration).

· Insecurities and vendettas: O’Reilly is a very insecure person. I know this, because he talks for a long time about things he says he doesn’t care about. He says he doesn’t care if no one reviews his books, because they will rip it anyway, then talks about how no one will review his books at some point in every show for two weeks straight after the book comes out. He also gets on people who don’t want to appear on his show, which of course is always because they are afraid of O’Reilly and have something to hide. But isn't it possible they don't want to appear on O'Reilly's show because they don't like him nor want to give his audience the story? Some people don’t like Letterman and only go on Leno, or Fox News but never CNN. It isn’t always about Bill O'Reilly. Get over it.

· Calling for boycotts: O’Reilly won’t go to France, won’t go to Vermont, won’t buy oil from one company, clothes from another, vacation here, won’t shop at that store there, this judge has to go, this senator can’t stay… a modern day J. Edgar Hoover. Enough with the lists. And what is the foundation of all these boycotts? Anecdotal evidence: O’Reilly is the master at using a random events (albeit true) to justify his viewpoints, but the fact 1% of a sample size is doing something doesn’t mean everyone is buying into it. I am willing to bet I can find people in the South who still want slavery, but I am not going to write a book talking about the threat of slavery returning to America, because the majority of people won’t tolerate that thought, and it will never happen. And just because one store says Happy Holidays isn’t going to keep me from saying Merry Christmas, and it doesn’t mean that Jesus will be boycotted from all churches across the land. Enough with the slippery slope arguments. We couldn't even make it to December before O'Reilly had to take an hour talking about a store not saying "Merry Christmas" (11/29, hour 2). Enough.

· Hates the media, but he is that which he hates: this is a whole article in of itself (is the media liberal?), but in short, he uses the fact that most newspaper editorial boards are liberal to extrapolate that all journalist can’t cover any news anymore, as if a kid out of j-school trying to be the next Bob Woodward is going to ignore the parking ticket scandal at city hall if the guy is a Democrat. The fact most journalists vote Democrat doesn’t mean they are giving a pass to Democrats (was he alive during the Clinton administration?), and the reason journalists attack the system is because journalists are supposed to be a watchdog of the other three estates, which is typically rich white males, who tend to be conservative Republicans. It isn’t personal. If suddenly Democrats owned all the wealth and power in the US and were the CEO of every big corporation, the Fourth Estate would be looking very closely into liberals as well. If you have no power or wealth, you can’t do much damage, and your scandal isn’t worth the media’s time.

· Hates the Internet: He admittedly knows nothing about computers, and they always say you fear that which you are ignorant of. I disagree with him on this topic, but I understand why he hates the Internet: Web sites list his mistakes (and I agree with him, when you talk 3-4 hours every day, you are going to say something stupid… I know I would), it takes power away from the central journalism core and allows people like me to publish ideas. I understand where his coming from. But he is wrong.

· Personal life choices: This is admittedly the weakest part of my whole critique of O’Reilly, but I just feel he did something he shouldn’t have, and it is hard for me to support him when I think he has some issues. I think this is why he is quick to forgive those who are caught publicly messing up (most recently Mel Gibson, which got a lot of air time on his show), because he has been there. Again, this is my opinion and not based on facts submitted into a court of a law, other than the lawsuit filed by the female who sued O’Reilly and is found here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1013043mackris1.html. Only those two and God know what really happened, but I do know the female claimed to have tapes, O’Reilly was going to counter sue to get the tapes, and then suddenly the case was settled out of court. If I didn’t do anything wrong, and the tapes would prove it, I know I wouldn’t have settled. You can say that the settlement saved O’Reilly money in the long-run, but the guy is loaded with more money than he can possibly spend (he is a self-admited frugal guy) and has a huge ego: You really think he would have forked over millions if he were innocent? I don’t.

Obviously I don’t know the man, but O’Reilly seems to me like someone who is very insecure and has an anger-management problem, especially when challenged, and he is not someone I would want watching my kid (which is the barometer I use to judge people). He admits that he gets very angry sometimes (I remember one time he spoke about how he killed a phone), and I just get the feeling that he would not be a lot of fun to hang out with or work with, unless you agreed with him. Again, I admit this is a weak thesis on my part because I don’t know him, but sometimes you have to go with your gut. And I don’t want to financially support his empire, if I believe there is something amiss here.

For the reasons above, I no longer am listening to Bill O’Reilly. Not because I hate him, or because I am a “left-wing idealog bomb-thrower”, or because I am a registered Democrat, a person with “San Francisco values”, anti-American, a “secular progressive” or a terrorist. I no longer listen to O’Reilly because he has nothing left to say I haven’t heard before, and he has been reduced to a preacher talking to his choir, and preachers are entertainers with agendas. And I don’t find him entertaining anymore.