I SAID WE'LL DO IT LIVE.
If there were any remaining doubts that Fox News host Bill O'Reilly manufactured a story that he had witnessed a dramatic suicide related to the JFK assassination, the last reporter to interview George de Mohrenschildt dispels them in dramatic fashion. Bill O'Reilly was wrong about which house the suicide took place in—despite claiming to have been on the front porch at the time. There's the audiotape of O'Reilly telling an investigator he would travel to the city only
after hearing about the suicide. No one in the house saw Bill O'Reilly or anyone else in front of the house when the gunshot occurred. And even if you were to discount all other evidence, O'Reilly's claim still
wouldn't add up.
O'Reilly’s depiction of his phantom-like presence at the crime scene is odd for another reason. If he had heard the gunshot, as he claims, he must have realized that he was an ear-witness to a possible murder of an important figure in the JFK assassination. It would stretch credibility to believe that a reporter as earnest as O’Reilly would flee the crime scene without reporting what he had witnessed to anyone for 35 years.
More to the point, it stretches credibility to believe a reporter as
self-promoting as Bill O'Reilly would fail to mention his apparent brush with history for 35 years. The Bill O'Reilly we currently know would have printed t-shirts commemorating the occasion.
There's perhaps an even more bizarre problem with O'Reilly's claim, however, and that's where he may have gotten it from. He may not only have fabricated his role in these events, but even his fabrication seems to have been cribbed from someone else's work:
How could O’Reilly be in two places at the same time, one may ask? In his 2012 account, the inventive O’Reilly may have been emulating the time-traveling investigator Jake Epping, who went back in time to solve the JFK assassination in Stephen King’s 2011 best-selling book 11/22/63. Epping in that book used time travel to drop in on George de Mohrenschildt before he killed himself. But of course Epping’s feat was pure fiction.
Mind you, many of us have long believed television personality Bill O'Reilly was a character from a Stephen King novel, but we didn't mean it quite so literally.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—Keystone XL: Will the State Department's shameful dishonesty become Obama's climate legacy?:
Given the rigid planning of a president's schedule, it seemed but an unhappy coincidence that President Obama was playing golf with oil industry executives exactly when environmental activists were at the White House, protesting the possible approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline; but the symbolism could not have been more appropriate. With the State Department's release of its Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) on the pipeline, we now know that a shockingly fundamental dishonesty pervades its approach to Keystone. We must hope that the president who has most fully embraced the scientific consensus on climate change will not now embrace his State Department's fundamental dishonesty. More than anything else he does on climate change, President Obama's legacy on climate change will be defined by his decision on Keystone; but much more than his legacy is at stake.
If it seemed that the State Department's Keystone SEIS was such a deliberate whitewash to green light the pipeline that it could have been written by industry insiders, that's only because it actually was.
Tweet of the Day
The fact that the Cotton letter is backfiring so spectacularly strongly suggests that the idea originated with Bill Kristol.
— @mattduss
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, backlash against Tom Cotton's glorified Facebook post dominates the day. The guy who said ISIS was infiltrating Arkansas now runs Republican foreign policy.
Greg Dworkin notes the lack of eGhazi impact. Cotton doesn't know what he's talking about, and his foolishness will have a cost. Netanyahu campaign hits perfect storm, recalling more than a few American parallels. Boehner not going anywhere. More hits on Cotton, and a discussion of Senate treaty consideration process. Aaron Schock is caught bilking taxpayers again, and conservatives are calling for his resignation.
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