When I heard Bill Reilly's opening rant last night, I couldn't help but think about the thread...
Thursday, March 07, 2002
By Bill O'Reilly
Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight.
Well, the vote in California's over, and the loathsome Gary Condit has been booted out of office, but he did get 37 percent of the vote. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo.
In California's Democratic primary, Condit lost to Dennis Cardoza, who used to work for him, 55 to 37, a landslide. But what were the people who voted for Condit thinking?
The answer to that question is, they were not thinking, they were reacting emotionally to the situation. Same thing happened with Richard Nixon, O.J. Simpson, and Bill Clinton, emotions overrode logic in the minds of some Americans.
By my calculation, 20 percent of the adult population in America is fanatically right-wing, and about the same percentage is devoted to the left. Nothing you say or do can get those people away from their ideology. Facts don't matter, reasonable arguments don't matter. They're going to find a way to support their ingrained beliefs no matter what.
Thus when President Nixon resigned after Watergate, 30 percent of Americans were unhappy he left. And thousands of Democrats in the Central Valley of California still wanted Gary Condit to represent them, despite his very questionable character.
Even after the overwhelming evidence against O.J. Simpson, millions of Americans would not accept his guilt, including the jury, which voted largely on racial lines. Interviews after the trial demonstrated that.
The sad fact is that some Americans are blind and will not ever see. But most of us can see. So Gary Condit is out, O.J. Simpson is a pariah, and Bill Clinton will never command respect in the history books.
Thank God the majority of Americans can keep an open mind about most things and make decisions based upon facts, not emotion.
To those who did vote for Gary Condit, I can't respect your vote. The man simply has brought too much pain to the Levy family. He continues to say he did nothing wrong, and that is a sad state of affairs.
So now Condit will disappear into the fabric of America. A few years from now, he'll just be a joke. But the pain of the Levy family will remain, and their memories of how Condit would not help them will still be clear. Gary Condit should look up O.J. Simpson. They have much to talk about.
And that's the memo. |
