The World Can’t Wait–Drive Out the Bush Regime
www.worldcantwait.org
December 13, 2005
For Immediate Release
Contact: Stan Rogouski at 866-973-4463, ext 4,
press@worldcantwait.org
“O’Reilly Factor” Takes Aim at New York Times Ad Calling for Bush to Step Down
Monday night’s top story on “The O’Reilly Factor” was the organization
The World Can’t Wait–Drive Out the Bush Regime, which published its
Call as a full-page ad in the New York Times that day. Bill O’Reilly’s
guests were extreme rightwing point man, David Horowitz, and NY State
Senator Tom Duane, a signer of the World Can’t Wait ad.
Duane took a serious approach, repeatedly pointing to the content of
World Can’t Wait Call, such as the fact that the Bush regime is waging
an illegal war in Iraq based on claims of WMDs which never
materialized, and that the torture and mistreatment of prisoners is now
being openly conducted by the US government (a policy O’Reilly
acknowledged and upheld: “The [Bush government] believe[s] that
coercive, coerced interrogations can save us.”)
O’Reilly and Horowitz charged that groups like World Can’t Wait
threaten the free speech of right wing extremists like themselves; then
O’Reilly attacked the New York Times for running World Can’t Wait’s
paid ad, calling for new “standards for advertising.” No mention was
made of Horowitz’s own long career of threatening and harassing college
professors and students who exercise their first amendment rights and
criticize U.S. government.
O’Reilly was particularly incensed that The World Can’t Wait would
compare Bush to Hitler, claiming any such comparison was “hate speech,”
but then proceeded to compare the ad’s organizers with Nazi
Brownshirts. A World Can’t Wait spokesperson, Sunsara Taylor, defended,
saying, “The Bush regime is openly torturing people, rounding people up
and holding them without lawyers, moving to deny women’s right to
abortion, attacking science. All this, together with the kind of
atmosphere being whipped up by O’Reilly that seeks to equate political
opposition with terrorism only reinforces the real similarities between
today and the period when the Nazis rose to power in Germany.”
The World Can’t Wait Call’s list of thousands of signers includes Gore
Vidal, Harold Pinter, Cindy Sheehan, Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Kozol,
Jane Fonda, and Cornel West. The ad, headlined “Bush Step Down”, calls
for a nationwide action intended to “drown out” Bush’s State of the
Union address in late January. This will consist of local actions as
well as a national demonstration in Washington D.C. on the Saturday
following the State of the Union Address.
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