"Battlespace Preparation"

Remember last week's "phony soldiers" fraud that the uberleft outfit Media Matters tried to perpetrate off of Rush Limbaugh? Looks like CNN was taking notes, because they teamed up to twist recent utterances of Bill O'Reilly to smear him as a racist - and Juan Williams (who, if you'll recall, PBS just got through snubbing as the White House-requested interviewer of President Bush on race topics) has had alls he can stands, and he can't stands no more:

It started with Bill O'Reilly's grandmother. And it blew up into charges of O'Reilly being called a racist and me being attacked as a "Happy Negro" (read that as a lackey or Uncle Tom). ...

So, O'Reilly says to me that the reality to black life is very different from the lowlife behavior glorified by the rappers. He told me he was at a restaurant in Harlem recently and there was no one shouting profanity, no one threatening people. Then he mentioned going to an Anita Baker concert with an audience that was half black, and in sharp contrast to the corrosive images on TV, well dressed and well behaved.

I joked with O'Reilly that for him, a guy from Long Island, a visit to Harlem was like a "foreign trip." That's when he brought up his grandma. He said she was prejudiced against black people because she knew no flesh-and-blood black folks but only the one-dimensional TV coverage of black criminals shooting each other and the rappers and comedians glorifying "gangsta" life and thug cool. He criticized his grandmother as irrational for being afraid of people she really did not know.

How that could even be cherry-picked into a racist comment frankly baffles me. The Admiral guesses the charge as either (1) O'Reilly was criticizing "official" black spokespeople (rappers, I guess) and their "official" take on what constitutes "authentic" black lifestyles and behaviors (i.e. he approved of "Uncle Tom"-like conduct of the black people he observed); or (2) he was expressing shock that there are black people who don't "shoot each other and glorify 'gangsta' life and thug cool".

Either way, it says something about how disgusting this relentless left-wing character assassination has become when a black liberal like Juan Williams is rising to such levels of angry, righteous indignation. Then again, I guess to the Media Matters folks, Williams doesn't count since they consider him Rupert Murdoch's "happy negro".

Glen Reynolds, however, dissents from the view that the assaults on Limbaugh and O'Reilly are smears, and puts it in a larger, more sinister context:

[I]t's better understood as "battlespace preparation." And the target is the traditional media; the intent is to limit the ability of people like Limbaugh or O'Reilly to drive stories in the mainstream news as we get closer to the election. Expect more of this, with more targets.

It's all, in other words, about Hillary. Though MM, CNN, and the rest of the baying jackal pack would be doing it anyway, just because. The Jokeress is kind of like ketracell-white-toting Vorta to the Jem'Haddar - her drive for power channels their guttersniping in a useful direction.

Will the libs' frantic attempts to fabricate a right-wing "Betray-Us" moment work? Not if they can't do any better than this. CNN's condemnation of O'Reilly for refusing to come on their network and "apologize" for what he never said wasn't getting over with the people in the airport terminal in which Mr. Morrissey was watching it. If the Enemy Media keeps it up with no diminution of lameness and pathos, it may work as a kind of "Boy Who Cried Wolf" in reverse - if Rush or Hannity or somebody on Fox does trip over their bottom lip, the Media Matters brigade may become a "source" that listeners "consider" before giving the story the full credence lefties will be desperately seeking.

Will the "battlespace," IOW, be "prepared" by Hillary's artillery shooting a fusillade of blanks?