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Once again, Sarah Palin made Barbara Walters' list of the year's 10 most fascinating people, and in the little preview Walters gave us today of the accompanying interview (set to run in full this weekend), it looks like it went a little less than smoothly for the Wasilla Wonder:

BARBARA WALTERS: And Sarah Palin, for the third year, we have had Sarah Palin. Because every year, she does something fascinating. And you know, the Katie Couric question that caused her so much trouble? What do you read?

ROBIN ROBERTS: Sure.

WALTERS: Okay. I gave her another chance. And here's the answer.

[Cut to interview]

WALTERS: Well, you know, governor, many people find the thought of you as president a little scary. You hear, 'Oh, she's very charming, but she's uninformed.' Would you like to tell us what newspapers, magazines or books you are reading right now?

SARAH PALIN: I read a lot of C.S. Lewis when I want some divine inspiration. I read Newsmax and Wall Street Journal. I read all of our local papers, of course, in Alaska because that's where my heart is. I read anything and everything that I can get my hands on, as I have since I was a little girl. And that's one of those things, Barbara, where that issue that I don't read or I'm not informed, it's one of those questions where I like to turn that around and ask the reporters, why would it be that there is that perception that I don't read?

Ummmm ... I dunno ... how about the fact that you don't even seem to realize that this sort of question is a stock interview item for politicians?

Palin has a journalism degree and would know this if she had bothered to pay attention while attending class. (I certainly know it, and I attended the same school as Palin. Her appeal to claims of supposed media elitism here don't exactly wash.)

Perhaps even more to the point, the fact that Palin was caught flat-footed with such an obvious, stock question when Katie Couric asked it demonstrated to millions of discerning viewers that she is in fact horribly uninformed -- not to mention incurious and intellectually rigid and limited. Not the kind of person you want occupying the White House.

Of course, the wingnuts have their shorts in bunch over Walters' questions, which were actually rather neutral and matter of fact. Reality alert: The idea of Palin as president DOES scare the crap out of a lot of people. Deal with it, dudes.

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Bill O'Reilly was in prime "We'll do it live!" form this morning on ABC's The View -- launching into a bigoted tirade, claiming that "Muslims killed us on 9/11!" It so infuriated co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar -- who just a little earlier had been given the O'Reilly "shut up and listen you stupid bimbo" treatment -- that they walked off the stage together.

It was entertaining, if nothing else:

The Fox commentator was a guest on ABC's talk show Thursday to promote his new "Pinheads and Patriots" book. The discussion got increasingly heated over the "Ground Zero Mosque" debate and he later went on to say "Muslims killed us On 9/11."

Co-Host Whoopi Goldberg disputed O'Reilly's claims that the mosque was inappropriate. "There were 70 families who are muslim who also died in that building," she said.

"Seventy percent of Americans don't want that mosque down there, so don't give me the 'we' business," said O'Reilly to co-host Joy Behar; the studio audience applauded.

Afterward, when pressed by Goldberg and Behar to explain why the "Ground Zero mosque" was somehow "inappropriate," O'Reilly leaned over and pointed at Goldberg saying, "Muslims killed us on 9/11."

Goldberg exclaimed , "That is such bullsh*t," in the midst of a cacophony of back-and-forth yelling. Goldberg shouted that "Timothy McVeigh [the convicted American-born terrorist who blew up the Oklahoma City Building in 1995] was Christian" before she and Behar walked off the set in protest. They later came back to finish the show.

Barbara Walters criticized her co-hosts for walking off stage during the live show. But she said O'Reilly should make the distinction that extremists committed the terrorist act.

Behar and Goldberg returned after O'Reilly said that "if anyone felt that I was demeaning all Muslims, I apologize."

"If anyone felt that"? Gee, I couldn't imagine why they would "feel" something as plain on the nose on your face, Bill.

O'Reilly simply can't escape a simple fact: His position on the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy is innately bigoted, because it is founded on conflating all Muslims with a tiny fringe of violent radicals.

Incidentally, I'm not so sure Tim McVeigh is the best comparison to make to the 9/11 fanatics when it comes to domestic terrorists, other than that he was such a successful mass murderer -- mainly because McVeigh was only nominally a Christian and really was not motivated by religion so much as ideology. A better comparison, frankly, would be with Eric Rudolph, who was decidedly Christian and decidedly motivated by religion.

Or how about Scott Roeder? That's a comparison O'Reilly knows all about. And it just might sting a bit harder.

Wouldn't you like to see a host who really knows the topics take a shot at running ABC's THIS WEEK for once? ABC is using a former Bushie Matthew Dowd as a host this Sunday:

Matthew Dowd, who worked as chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, is getting a shot behind the anchor desk on ABC's “This Week."

Since news broke that George Stephanopoulos was heading to “Good Morning America” in December, the network has had five different fill-in hosts while deciding who’ll get the job permanently: Jake Tapper, Terry Moran, Barbara Walters, Jonathan Karl and Elizabeth Vargas.

Still, Dowd—who has been an ABC political contributor since 2007, and regular on the Sunday roundtable—will be the first non-journalist to have a chance asking the questions. Dowd's just scheduled for this week, as the network continues looking for a permanent host.

Pretty soon they'll be trying out right-wing talk show hosts. I think it's time Stewart gets a shot to host the Sunday show. Hey, he may not want to do it, but he's not afraid to step into the political arena and duke it out, so why not give this one a try? I bet you'll see somebody that would have a clear understanding of the issues and not be worried about protecting his Villager image with the rest of the Beltway elites.

It would be a ratings bonanza for ABC as well.

We want Jon Stewart to host ABC's THIS WEEK.

You can email ABC here.

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Glenn Beck seems to be increasingly rattled by having been designated by the ADL as the nation's "Fearmonger in Chief" -- though he continues, on his Fox News show at least, to avoid tackling his critics by name. (He's pushed back at the ADL on his radio show, but only briefly.)

Yesterday he went on his show and denounced the unnamed "they" who say he is encouraging violence with his extremist rhetoric (which would decidedly include us). Keying off his softball interview with Barbara Walters -- who never did bring up his serial falsehoods about Walters and her colleagues at The View, oddly enough -- Beck gets all worked up about the toughest point raised in the whole conversation:

Beck: Barbara Walters even played into this nonsense during her interview with me last night on her annual 'Fascinating People' show. Here it is:

[CLIP] Walters: Glenn Beck is somebody who incites people to violence --

Beck: Oh, I've heard a lot --

Walters: -- He is inflammatory, he makes us scared.

Beck: Yeah. People say Glenn Beck is someone who incites people to violence. Yeah, a lot of people are saying that, but what's the evidence?

She also mentioned that I called Barack Obama a fascist. I don't know -- I, I don't think so. Maybe -- I don't think so, I do realize that Media Matters and MoveOn.org now just got an extra grant from Soros and they're moving into hyper-scramble to find, you know, an example. But I don't know if I ever even called him a fascist. I know I've said 'fascistic tendencies' -- sure, the administration is going in this direction.

Actually, what Walters said was this:

Walters: OK, you have said the Obama administration is fascist.

And in fact, that is exactly what he has done -- on multiple occasions, but most notably back on April 1:

Beck: Like it or not, fascism is on the rise. And that doesn't mean the Adolf Hitler kind of fascism. It's fascism with a happy face. I'll explain the exact definition of fascism in a second, and it will boggle your mind.

--

Beck: I looked up the definition of fascism yesterday, and I want to break it down. The first part is: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners." Wouldn't you say this is what's happening with GM right now?

As we noted then, this even included a segment with a time-traveling dime:

How far out to lunch was Beck here? Well, one of the goofier moments in this whole charade came when Beck trotted out the back of an old American dime -- first minted, as Beck says, in 1916 -- which has a fasces, the fascist symbol, on its reverse side:

This is the famed "Mercury dime", which was designed by sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who won a 1915 competition: "The reverse design, a fasces juxtaposed with an olive branch, was intended to symbolize America's readiness for war, combined with its desire for peace."

Now, the fasces has a long history of inclusion in various parts of American symbology besides just this dime. You can find it in the Oval Office, on National Guard Bureau insignia, on the American flag that flies in the U.S. House, in the Mace of the House of Representatives; on the seal of the U.S. Senate, on the Statue of Freedom atop the United States Capitol building, and on a frieze on the facade of the United States Supreme Court building. Fasces are incorporated into the Lincoln Memorial.

But then, fascism as a political movement was not born until 1919. So for sculptor Weinman to have intended the fasces on the Mercury dime to imply a "fascist" intent, he'd have had to have jumped in a time machine, traveled to the future, met Mussolini, and come back to 1915 with that nefarious design in his head. Somehow I doubt this.

Beck had made the charge even before then, in a February conversation with Laura Ingraham:

Continue reading »

I was flipping the channels last night and I came across an ad for one of those Barbara Walters "10 Most Fascinating People" specials, and this year she included Glenn Beck on her list.

What is ABC thinking? They only feed into his lunacy and make him go more insane by the minute. His nuttiness does hurt America. When did being a lunatic become interesting, Barbara? Sure, Bill O'Reilly is jealous, but who cares?

This is why our media are so screwed up. They take a far right-black helicopter extremist and tell Americans that he's interesting, No, he's dangerous. Just check out his role in Richard Poplawski's deadly outburst.

Shame on Barbara and shame on ABC.

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Sure, like Duncan says, Glenn Beck is a WATB. We knew that the first time he cried on-air for us.

He's also an evasive guy when confronted with his falsehoods. We saw that yesterday on The View. Whoopie Goldberg's epithet for Beck -- A Lying Sack of Dog Mess -- is a name that's going to stick, like something on the bottom of his shoe.

In fact, we now have a new acronym for him: the LSDM. We don't need to use his actual name anymore.

Oh, yeah, besides being a WATB -- check out his website's report in which he claims he was "ambushed" -- he's also seriously FOS. As when he called in sick for his own show that same afternoon, leaving us to the tender mercies of Judge Napolitano and Michelle Malkin.

Then, at the very end, he called in all plugged-up sounding and claimed he had "a case of the 24-hour swine flu". And then proceeded to once again prevaricate about the "ridiculous" interview we had all just watched that morning.

Beck: Apparently I was a liar because I said that -- which is true -- uh, that she -- I, I, Barbara Walters said hello to me, instead, it was I said hello to Barbara Walters. I walked up to her -- I guess that's we need to spend our time on for seven minutes.

In Beck's truncated version of what transpired at The View, the only reason to call him a liar was that he and Walters had different views on who said hello first. But that's BS On A Stick.

Roll the tape: You'll quickly note that the greeting disagreement started things off, but the main reason they called him a liar was that his whole story on the radio was a narrative about how you can't reserve a seat on an Amtrak train, and here these two media elites came and got reserved seats! The audacity!

But as both Walters and Goldberg explained to the LSDM, they hadn't gotten reserved seats at all. They had worked their ways back to that car after finding no seats in the front cars.

The LSDM, as is his wont, was just making stuff up. No wonder he kinda accidentally omitted that from his lamestain excuse -- it would have made it just that much lamer.

In any event, we remain indebted to Whoopie Goldberg for her masterful contribution to the Wingnut Lexicon.

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Now, this is a classic video:

A couple of weeks ago, Glenn Beck went on the air on his radio program and described an encounter he had on an Amtrak train with Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg. It was, like so much of Beck's schtick, a (ahem) highly exaggerated account intended to (a) make Beck look good, and (b) make a point about those awful librul media elites or something.

Actually, much of it was outright fabrication. And they called him on it when they hosted him on The View this morning. Beck keeps smiling and laughing, but his backside is nailed to the wall, and it's hilarious to see him squirm.

You really should watch it for yourselves. But suffice to say, "Glenn Beck" and "lying sack of dog mess" are now two phrases that will be permanently intertwined.

So maybe the next time they have Beck on, they should ask him about his bizarre fantasies about having sex with his sister. That might be even more fun.

Watch this for yourself and decide: Is Walters, like, checking out Obama during this interview? There's something odd about this ...

Barbara Walters interviewed Powell on Friday night. He talked about his role in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

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Powell: There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me."

Powell blamed his speech to the U.N. on intelligence that people in the Intel community withheld from him. Give me a break. FAIR has some analysis disputing that. Powell did offer up an intersting tidbit about loyalty. This administration values loyalty over leadership to such a fault that lives are held in the balance...

Presents the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2004

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The whipping boy of the conservatives talks with Barbara.