Having wielded accusations of racism so effectively against Don Imus, the supercilious hall monitors at David Brock’s Media Matters have aimed the same weapon at their perennial nemesis, Bill O’Reilly. Of course, it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with Media Matters attempting to increase its own prestige while driving a hated enemy from the airwaves. To that end, Media Matters took a lengthy discussion about race between O’Reilly and liberal commentator Juan Williams, carved out several snippets, and presented them, out of context, in a way designed to make O’Reilly look like a clueless bigot. James Joyner explains here. Williams, who was there, defends O’Reilly here.
I can’t improve on the words of Saul Bellow, written 13 years ago after PC thugs launched a similar campaign against him:
In any reasonably open society, the absurdity of a petty thought-police campaign provoked by the inane magnification of “discriminatory” remarks about the Papuans and the Zulus would be laughed at. To be serious in this fanatical style is a sort of Stalinism — the Stalinist seriousness and fidelity to the party line that senior citizens like me remember all too well.