Y’know, lay off O’Reilly, folks.

I’ve avoided writing on this one, and I’m sure a few of you wondered why I didn’t leap at an opportunity to jump on the “kick O’Reilly’s ass” bandwagon. The reason is simple: this one’s unfair. We all love slamming Bill-O, but in this case I think we shot ourselves in the foot. Look at his entire comment:

You know, I have a lot of sympathy for Michelle Obama, for Bill Clinton, for all of these people. Bill Clinton, I have sympathy for him, because they’re thrown into a hopper where everybody is waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can just go and bludgeon them. And, you know, Bill Clinton and I don’t agree on a lot of things, and I think I’ve made that clear over the years, but he’s trying to stick up for his wife, and every time the guy turns around, there’s another demagogue or another ideologue in his face trying to humiliate him because they’re rooting for Obama.

That’s wrong. And I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that’s how she really feels — that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever — then that’s legit. We’ll track it down.

Read it. Then read it again. Notice that William O’Reilly, noted right-wing pundit who goes after anyone for any reason, is coming to Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama’s defense because he sympathizes with their plight. He’s saying “listen, people aren’t always going to phrase things well, they’ll say something a little off, so don’t jump on them over it.”

That was his message. Then, in a case of self-destructive ultra-irony, the left proceeded to pounce on O’Reilly, ignoring his message of “it’s unfair to seek out verbal missteps in order to humiliate people” and instead sought out his verbal misstep and used it to humiliate the guy.

I have no doubt that O’Reilly used the word “lynching” intentionally, probably referring to the right’s crusade against her. Though poorly-contrived, it’s a perfectly legitimate way of phrasing it. It was just stupid to use it. But so many people have so much anti-O’Reilly zeal that they tossed out the one defender on the right that Michelle Obama has in this phony “scandal”. Good work, folks.

How to screw up “analysis”, by MSNBC.

Now that Obama is the Democratic frontrunner it’s time for the mainstream media to start launching against him. That font of liberal goodness, MSNBC, has added to the fray with a bogglingly dumb article attempting to explain how Barack Obama is partisan, by looking at his voting record.

Obama’s roll call votes in 2005, 2006 and 2007 have been analyzed by the non-partisan journal Congressional Quarterly which found him to be a Democratic Party loyalist.

CQ didn’t use every single roll call vote to make this determination, instead it analyzed votes where a majority of Democratic senators opposed a majority of Republican senators.

In 2007, Obama voted with his fellow Democrats 97 percent of the time. In 2006, his score was 96, and in 2005, he again netted a 97 percent rating.

Well… yeah. He’s a Democrat, and got elected because he represents Democratic ideals. It’s a little dumb to think he’d step vote with the Republicans just to “step across the aisle” and show a willingness to work with the other side. Actually that’s an extremely stupid metric because it doesn’t show how partisan he is, just where his political stance is.