Hannity quotes Cardinal Martino, careful to doctor the quote (especially on screen) to remove Martino's statement about Hussein bearing blame for his predicament:
HANNITY [verbatim as if quoting Martino]: "I feel pity at seeing this destroyed man treated like a cow, having his teeth checked. I have seen this man in his tragedy. I have a sense of compassion." That's fine but where has he [Martino] been for the compassion [sic] of all the people that have been murdered all these years? I find this embarrassing as a Catholic.
BENNETT: ...the Vatican has missed some things in the last couple years, they've missed the moral significance of some things going on in their own church and they've missed the moral significance of this war.

[Of course there's no moral significance in a soi disant virtue czar gambling away half a million dollars at the Bellagio in one weekend while there are children starving in Iraq. Oh, that's right, Bennett quit his lavish gambling for some reason.]

Wednesday December 17
Fox and Friends (5:00 a.m. CT). More denouncing of the Pope for being anti-war. Host Brian Kilmeade celebrates the U.S.-appointed Iraq foreign minister's condemnation of the UN for hindering the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. [As if there's any significance to what a U.S. puppet minister thinks.] Then (7:10 CT) Kilmeade tells the Fox audience that what's so neat about Hussein being handed over to the CIA is that although they can't torture him, they can deprive him of sleep, food, and light as well as blast him with unpleasant music. [Kilmeade is a hilarious and psittacine disaster who shows what happens when a sports reporter crosses over to serious news analysis.]

Host Steve Doocy proudly shows the audience photos of his family socially cavorting with Don Rumsfeld and White House staff member Bradley Blakeman. [Now try to imagine how conservatives, Republicans, and latex-gloved friskers would have greeted say, CNN, for having a morning show with hosts that cheered the Clintons, openly showed themselves socially cavorting with their staff, while CNN claimed to be "Fair and Balanced."]

O'Reilly Factor (7:00 p.m. CT). O'Reilly's opening monologue is entitled "The Death of Shame in America." He cites "dishonest news analysis" as a symptom of the death of shame. [No irony there! His first guest is this odd ex-CIA guy who keeps referring to Hussein over and over as "the hard drive:" "We will not take a sledge hammer to the hard drive."]

O'REILLY: What about sodium pentathol, mind altering drugs, chemicals, things like that?
SIMMONS: Fair game, absolutely fair game.
[There are U.S. officials – especially ex-CIA types like the guest – who have almost, if not as much, information as Hussein has, since he was their on-again, off-again employee. Will they be tortured as well?]

(7:15 p.m. CT) O'Reilly tells Jessica Stern from Harvard's Kennedy School that Syria and Iran should be nervous if they've hidden Saddam's WMD. [Fox bashes Madeleine Albright for her nutty conspiracy theory that Bush has bin Laden hidden away, yet they employ a grown man who thinks it plausible that Syria or Iran has Saddam's non-existent WMD.]

O'Reilly (7:38 p.m. CT) is enraged that Drudge exposed his Today show lie that his new book is rivaling Hillary Clinton's in sales. [O'Reilly's book sales aren't even half of Clinton's and are quite a bit below those of his arch-enemy Al Franken. By the way, Matt, O'Reilly repeated the same lie on his own show on Monday.] O'Reilly states that "you can't believe a thing Matt Drudge says" yet doesn't correct Drudge and calls Internet journalism "a threat to democracy."

[Recall O'Reilly suggesting on June 16 of this year that the Internet should be federally regulated to prevent falsehoods from being told! Apparently the big government-media establishment is the only entity that should be able to lie with impunity. O'Reilly's two guests, Liz Trotta and Quentin Hardy of Forbes, start fighting over whether Internet free speech should be shut down because, God forbid, it's allowing citizen journalists to have their say and that, according to Trotta, has made the Internet "a garbage dump."]

HARDY: Are you telling me you want to shut down the Internet and keep people from finding out information?
TROTTA: No, I want to keep it responsible and safe for democracy instead of a garbage can for people's ridiculous fantasies.
O'REILLY: Shouldn't there be some standards of behavior, some kind of standard?
TROTTA: Exactly.
HARDY: I believe the viewers can judge for themselves.
O'REILLY: Do you?

Hannity and Colmes (8:40 p.m. CT). When Hannity brings up the subject of 270 mass graves under Hussein, actor Mike Farrell fights constant interruptions from Hannity to point out that the mass graves were mainly filled in during the Reagan and Bush I administrations. [Hannity's brilliant rebuttal: "Oh, it's Reagan's fault!"]


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Okay, enough of Fox. The last four days have been quite a re-education for me. Here's what I learned: that the history of Hussein's rule of Iraq is relevant, but only selectively. The dirty business that France, Russia, and Germany did with Hussein is an endless outrage but when it comes to the U.S., no discussion is allowed with offenders interrupted, shouted down, and called names. I learned that the Internet needs federal regulation ("standards") because the bad, bad people who write on it spin, distort, and propagandize. "We Report, You Decide" is appropriate for Fox, but for some reason I missed, not for the Internet.

I also learned that it's a respectable view (with no evidence provided) that Saddam's WMD could be hidden in Iran or Syria and that it couldn't possibly be a coincidence that those are the two nations that our beloved neocons want to invade next. Most important of all, I learned that George W. Bush and the U.S.A. are now Jesus, roaming the world with a whip to root out sin and iniquity. Poor Jesus. I guess He should feel so lucky to be compared to George W. Bush.