My sense watching O'Reilly last night was that BillO special pleaded this case for Kerry.
OReilly had Rassman on and sucked up to him real bad. BO keeps acting indignant that someone is saying Rassman is LYING....He doesn't get to the issue of Rassman BEING MISTAKEN. After all, if Rassman was in the water, then he couldn't have been aware of the course of the battle from that point on. Gardner is the one who says that Kerry's boat ran away and came back after the action in time to pick up Rassman. All stuff Rassman wouldn't have known being in the water.
With the Cambodia thing, OReilly was giving Kerry a pass as its being simply an inadvertent "mistake." Something like "Kerry thought he was there but wasn't" ???
I guess Kerry was map-challenged. But BillO was looking for a way out for Kerry on this one.
One other thing that really clued me in to how out of touch and party-line OReilly is on this issue: He thought RASSMAN was a crewman AND gunner on Kerry's boat. He repeated it a number of times until finally corrected by Rassman himself.
Consider that for a moment: He had Gardner on who was a gunner on Kerry's boat, and then he has Rassman on and thinks Rassman's also a gunner. He knows Rassman is Special Forces, Green Beret, but he thinks Rassman is a gunner on Kerry's boat....even though Rassman is ARMY!
That is so unbelievably ignorant of how the military works that it deserves an article all its own. OReilly is a military dunce.
But get this, HOW can O'Reilly pretend his vaunted, supposedly researched OPINION on the Swift Boats, when he has elementary stuff about how the military works SO SCREWED UP! What it indicates is a KNEE-JERK opinion on THIS SUBJECT by BillO for some reason.
In other words, O'Reilly had an INVESTMENT in countering the Swift Boats, so he shot from the hip. Why was BillO so intent on discrediting the SwiftBoats....why did he say to open the segment that "he's so glad this story is dying down????"
WHY was Rassman on one of the boats?
HOW did Rassman get there? (The Why is a short answer, I think, the How, I'd bet, is more interesting.)
WHEN did Rassman first meet Kerry?
WHERE did Rassman fisrt meet Kerry?
WHAT did they do together?
WHO ELSE was involved, with Rassman at the time? Contemporaneous witnesses as to what Rassman was all about then.
Same reason it offends McCain so much. They have bad consciences from the war years. The people who don't want to talk about what Kerry did in 1969 are the people who don't want to talk about what they did in 1969.
I am, especially in comparison to many here, a military dunce. (I am in no way defending O'Reilly who has no excuse for not preparing and reading the facts.) Anyway, I think you brought up a critical point. I have asked many people in recent days what they thought of this story and because of people like O'Reilly and their own lack of knowledge, they don't think it has merit. (They weren't on his boat, they weren't near his boat, all the people with him support him, etc.)
The message has to continue to be sharpened to stop the O'Reilly's of the world from blurring the facts and protecting Kerry.