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Published May 21, 2015
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Hi. I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight.
Right-wing spin. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo.
Last evening, we told you the anti-Bush left had only one issue left, weapons of mass destruction. And lo and behold today, the two most anti-Bush newspaper columnists around, [Robert] Scheer of The Los Angeles Times and [Paul] Krugman of The New York Times, wrote almost identical columns bemoaning the lies and deceit about weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, this is no accident. Scheer and Krugman are part of the far left Talking Points crowd. Seems political opinion these days is indeed mass marketed.
And that holds true on the right as well. Listen to Hazel Edwards, who lives in Houston, Texas. "It is absolutely immaterial and irrelevant whether or not any weapons of mass destruction are ever found. Just the threat that Saddam had them was a danger. If it turns out Saddam was bluffing, the world should be thankful that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had to guts to remove him."
That is the conservative spin. And that point of view is just as fallacious as demanding the Bush administration produce the weapons on the spot.
Here is the No Spin truth: Saddam Hussein was effective at hiding stuff, so a fair-minded person is going to give the Bush administration some time to track the weapons down. In fact, the CBS News poll today said 68 percent of Americans aren't surprised weapons are hard to find.
However, a fair-minded person is also going to want the President to explain the situation because the war was partially sold on the danger of Saddam's weaponry. This is a matter of trust.
Most Americans believed Mr. Bush and Colin Powell when they said Saddam had deadly weapons. If he did not, we need to know who screwed up. To be fair, President Bush didn't do the analysis. The CIA, the NSA, and the military intelligence did.
But the leaders of those organizations have to be held accountable. If no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, President Bush must fire the men and women who misled him. There's no spinning this. Americans have a right to know exactly why we went to war and the entire WMD scenario. Talking Points believes the President should address the issue in the next few weeks and lay it all on the line.
And that's The Memo.
The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day
Time now for "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day"...
As you may know, some in TV newsland have gone nuts covering the Laci Peterson case, spending literally hours on speculation about it.
So, on billoreilly.com, we have posted this poll question: Is it wrong -- morally wrong--for the media to speculate about the Laci Peterson case?
So far, 69 percent say, yes, it's wrong. Twenty-eight percent say it's fine, and 3 percent don't know what "speculate" means.
We are keeping the poll open until tomorrow, on billoreilly.com. It's anything but ridiculous.
--You can watch Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo and "Most Ridiculous Item" weeknights at 8 & 11p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel. Send your comments to: oreilly@foxnews.com
https://www.foxnews.com/story/right-wing-spin