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Mockery as a Civil Rights Violation

August 9th, 2002 · No Comments

Pugnacious halfwit Bill O’Reilly loves dishing out the verbal lashings on the parade of banalities he calls a cable show, but apparently, a little criticism that’s not on turf he controls is a bit too much for Bill to handle. Fox has sent this legal nastygram to an anti-Bill website called O’Reilly-Sucks. The letter accuses them of exploiting O’Reilly’s reputation for commercial purposes — which as far as I can tell the site doesn’t — and claims, hilariously, that the use of a public figure’s name in the title of a website mocking him violates his “civil rights.” Ironically, the site is just like O’Reilly’s show: full of dogmatic pabulum, just on the other side of the fence. It has a list of “REAL no-spin” links, which includes such objective news sources as The Nation and Common Dreams. Apparently, folks in both camps think “spin” just means “viewpoint I disagree with.” Anyway, the most amusing part is that this amateurish site’s going to get a ton more traffic as a result of this absurd legal threat than it ever would have achieved otherwise. Someone needs to sit Fox’s legal department down with their PR department.

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