Take a look at this video from Brave New Films that blows away the ludicrous claim by Bill O’Reilly this week that there are no homeless veterans. He said this in response to a speech by John Edwards where the presidential candidate cited that there are 200K homeless vets out there on any given night in the U.S. He denied their existence again when interviewing progressive talk show host Ed Schultz.BNF found plenty of these invisible vets without batting an eye:
Considering how the Bush Administration has treated men and women serving while on his watch, added to all the Vietnam-era vets down on their luck, many with untreated PTSD and mental health issues, the number isn’t surprising. Billo’s on-air denial is wishful thinking on his part; it’s politically inconvenient.I went to U.S. Vets in Inglewood, California. US Vets is the largest non-profit organization in the US dedicated to helping homeless and at-risk veterans with temporary housing, counseling, and employment assistance. The facility currently houses up to 500 homeless veterans.
I talked to over a dozen homeless vets, some who had served as far back as the Korean War, and showed them the clips of BOR denying or dismissing their existence. The reactions to the clips were quite similar - a shaking of the head in disbelief, a derisive chuckle or snort, and a deep sigh when the videos were over. Some of the veterans couldn’t believe that anyone could be so clueless and naïve, while others wondered why BOR hadn’t bothered to do any research before making such a dubious claim. Twice.
38 Responses to “Bill O’Lielly: There aren’t any homeless vets in America”
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O’Reilly didn’t claim there were no homeless vets. His statement (”the only thing sleeping under a grate is this guy’s brain”) was simply rhetoric. Criticize him for that, or for his callousness towards homeless vets, by all means. Making wrong (and easily rebutted) claims about his statements just burns through your credibility.
Wow! First comment and some idiot is already defending King ‘O Falafels…
BillO is just another of the “We Support Our Brave Troops!” Ruthugs who talks a great game but wouldn’t spend a dime to actually DO anything for the men and women whose lives have been forever ruined by their participation in an illegal war of conquest fought purely to boost a small man’s ego.
No wonder so many Rethugs are abysmal judges of character - Reichwing “heros” like O’Lie-ly don’t have any…
Bill, this one’s for you.
I’m disappointed, Mike. You could have so easily slipped a “Chimperor” in there and gotten the rethug-reichwing-chimperor trifecta. That would have really established your bona fides as a serious political thinker.
Meanwhile, over here on Earth, pointing out that person A is lying about what person B said is not a defense of person B. It’s a defense of reality.
“It’s a defense of reality.”
A defender of BillO talking about Reality? A concept as abstract and imaginary to wingnuts as The Tooth Fairy?
“His statement (”the only thing sleeping under a grate is this guy’s brain”) was simply rhetoric.”
Dammit! I’m SO sorry! I was under the (apparently Leftwing) impression that words actually mean things.
So what you’re saying is whenever some idiot on the “right” says something wrong, incendiary, and ridiculous, those of us living in The Reality-Based World should just let it slide and pretend they never said it. Got it.
BTW, does that help explain how you wingnuts managed to get Worst President Ever (sorry - Chimperor Disgustus) selected - twice! - to rape this nation and turn America into into a Banana Republic?…
Here is a better video of O’Reilly making his points about homeless veterans and Edwards comments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXbuUhTREyM
Listen for when Edwards says “O’Reilly, who’s a talk show host, who’s heard that I had said this about hundreds of thousands of veterans who don’t have a place to live and were homeless and he challenged me as to whether that’s true or not. Whether in fact we have that many veterans who, who, ah, don’t have a place to live and some of them were sleeping under bridges…”
The key phrase from Edwards is “…hundreds of thousands…who don’t have a place to live… some of them were sleeping under bridges…” He’s back peddling. It went from 200,000 sleeping under bridges to some of them. How many is “some of them”. That can mean 1, 2, 2000, 200,000. He doesn’t know have a clue , but he wants you to think you do. What a fraud this trial layer is.
“Bill, this one’s for you.”
Great observation, Jeff, but please don’t limit it to just BillO. There are a whole lot of deserving people on the Reichwing side of the political spectrum.
By the way, now that we’ve established that words no longer have any meaning, you think I could write a book called “Conservative Communists: The Secret History of the American Right, From Karl Marx to the Politics of Making the World Our Bitch” and get people to treat it seriously?
I mean, after all, I have all the qualifications of the average wingnut-welfare recipient (I’m an asshole with an opinion). Isn’t that all it takes to succeed in America v2.0?…
Mike, I’m a Democrat. I’ve been a Democrat for longer than you’ve had the ability to produce sperm. I was voting for Democrats when you WERE a sperm.
The cause of Democrats is not advanced when we lie about what Republicans say. This is not 1930. The voters do not passively sit there and listen to media outlets; they check shit.
Bill O’Reilly didn’t say what Ms. Spaulding is claiming him to have said. That doesn’t make Bill O’Reilly look bad, it makes Ms. Spaulding look bad. O’Reilly employed a rhetorical device. If you say “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, you are employing rhetorical language. You are not claiming that there is literally nothing in the world worth fearing. Similarly, O’Reilly is not saying that literally nobody lives under a bridge. He’s saying that John Edward is an idiot for making that a focus of his campaign speech.
If you’re too stupid to understand that, I wash my hands of you.
It’s been apparent for a while, but Billy O may be edging closer and closer to the point where even his hardcore fans are going to realize what a blowhard he is. I know a lot of Bill O’Reily/Fox In General fans, and they generally come from the kinds of Red State, Heartland backgrounds Bill likes to pretend he came from. Which is fine for bloviating against liberal elites or the PC police, but not so great for saying things like ‘no homeless vets.’ Alot of these people know plenty of military and ex military and homeless, they’re more aware than Bill will ever be about exactly what hoops you need to jump through to get veterans benefits or how these systems work.
Only the hardcore koolaid drinkers will be able to dismiss what he’s saying from what their neighbors and families experience.
Great observation, Jeff, but please don’t limit it to just BillO. There are a whole lot of deserving people on the Reichwing side of the political spectrum.
Oh, yes. It’s a dedication that even fits for trolls like cookie.
“Mike, I’m a Democrat. I’ve been a Democrat for longer than you’ve had the ability to produce sperm. I was voting for Democrats when you WERE a sperm.”
Claiming to be a Democrat while defending BillO - not helping the cause…
(and what the hell do YOU know about my life as a sperm or producer of sperm?)
“The cause of Democrats is not advanced when we lie about what Republicans say.”
…and being overly Concerned about tone and twisting what Pam said in an attempt to derail the thread away from the truth of our poor treatment of veterans is REALLY not helping the cause…
“This is not 1930.”
…and pretending that Bill O’Reilly isn’t one of several good candidates as “Father Coughlin” of our age is another way to sabotage the cause…
“The voters do not passively sit there and listen to media outlets; they check shit.”
Oh really? Is that why there are so many mindless supporters of the Reichwing Agenda in this country? The kind of people who would go back and have themselves a second glass of the poisoned Koolaid just to prove how dedicated they are?
Let’s face it, if a large segment of voters didn’t “passively sit there”, the Cheney/Bush administration wouldn’t have had its first term in office, let alone a second…
His statement (”the only thing sleeping under a grate is this guy’s brain”) was simply rhetoric.
Rhetoric means things. In this case, it meant that there were no homeless vets sleeping under a grate.
It was hard to listen to Bill O’Liely (doesn’t anyone do transcripts that can be linked to as well as/instead of videos) but I listened to it.
Quiet Truths, BillyFelafel said, in response to Edwards’ factual point about 200 000 homeless veterans, first that the only thing sleeping on a grate is that guy’s brain - a denial so sweeping that Bill claims not only that there are no homeless veterans, but that there are no homeless. He follows up this imprudent claim by referencing the million “illegals” who are sending money home each month as further evidence that Edwards is brainless to claim that “nobody has any money”.
Why Pam didn’t want to quote what Bill O’Lielly said, who knows? But that’s what he said, from the video she linked to, and claiming that he wasn’t saying there were no homeless veterans is as false as the claim that Limbaugh was referring to a literal dog when he made the infamous Chelsea Clinton “joke”.
OK, I’m a mental health researcher at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and can personally attest to the idiocy of O’Lielly’s assertions. There is even a special division funded by a VA grant set up specifically for homeless vets to get help, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, with its own hotline: 1-800-VET-HELP.
Amazing that the VA would spend all that money and effort on a problem that supposedly doesn’t even exist, huh?
Bill O’Reilly’s America must lie just kitty-corner and down the street from Charlie Gibson’s America, in which two married academics living and working in New Hampshire can make a quarter million dollars per year between them. IOW, it’s not the nation with which many of us are familiar.
If the absence of down-and-out vets is a birthmark of Bill O’Reilly’s America, western Washington must not be part of Bill O’Reilly’s America, because we’ve sure got ‘em here. I do not exaggerate when I say that many a morning’s drive, walk, or bus ride is enlivened by the site of some poor soul at a freeway intersection equipped with a milk crate and a sign describing his (more rarely her) service record. I realize that not all of these guys are necessarily vets, but I’m certain that many of them are, since I’ve personally known more that one vet who’s spent the last few years in fairly severe straits.
(Quiet Truths would no doubt claim that since the guys I’ve known and the guys at the freeway intersections are not after all the same identical men, I am not entitled to induce anything about the present-day status of vets from my experiences, but it’s been many, many moons since I quit listening to people like him.)
I think the headline is poorly chosen. Watching the clip, O’Reilly is clearly saying that Edwards’s claim is ridiculous, but he’s not really asserting there are no homeless people. Now, since Edwards’s statement is true, O’Reilly is still indicted by that clip as a horrible excuse for a political commentator.
My nasty headline for this post would be something like “O’Reilly thinks the guy he’s tempted to kick every morning is the only homeless vet in America.”
By the way, now that we’ve established that words no longer have any meaning, you think I could write a book called “Conservative Communists: The Secret History of the American Right, From Karl Marx to the Politics of Making the World Our Bitch” and get people to treat it seriously?
John Ralston Saul, _The Doubters Companion_.
The entry on “Marxist” starts off with:
“The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior management of large, usually transnational corporations. The only serious Marxist thinkers are NEO-CONSERVATIVE.”
He then goes on to explain. The money shot is teh sentence “the only disagreement betwen the Neo-conservatives and Marx is over who wins the battle in the end.”
Quite Truths, if what you are telling us is that nothing O’Reilly says ought to be taken seriously-that it’s all just babble devoid of content, then I am constrained to agree that you may have a point. If you look at what the man actually said, however, and assume that it might mean something, then “the only thing sleeping under a grate is this guy’s brain” is pretty clearly a statement that there are no homeless people . . .
For those who think that statement wasn’t O’Reilly claiming that Edwards was wrong about the number of homeless vets, you can see video of him here saying the following things:
“They may be out there, but there aren’t many of them.”
“If you know where there’s a veteran sleeping under a bridge, you call me, and we’ll make sure that guy is not there.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if he got 200,000 phone calls now? Problem solved!
And after all that, he still can’t leave well enough alone. Someone must have tipped him off to the fact that the statistic came from the VA, not some wacky liberals, so then hefinally acknowledges that homeless veterans exist, but says it’s because of addiction and mental illness, not the economy — and for some reason, now “John Edwards owes us an apology.” For, uh, saying that there are 200,000 homeless veterans, which is, um, true.
There is no controversy about what he meant, or how clueless he is. None.
I watched the clip, and several follow up clips. It seems that BillO is trying to emphasise not that homeless veterans don’t exist, but that they don’t MATTER, that they are a non-issue.
what a tool
Who sleeps under grates anyway? Don’t homeless people tend to sleep on top of them? Just sayin’… if it’s just rhetoric, it’s pretty damned stupid rhetoric.
“Who sleeps under grates anyway? Don’t homeless people tend to sleep on top of them?”
It depends on what the meaning of “grates” is…
:)
…and BTW, J*nah G*ldberg’s definition of “grate” is:
“A solid metal cover that goes over a hole so nothing can go in or come out…”
This is part of what Bill O’Reilly said:
“Certainly there are homeless veterans, but it’s not because of the economy. It’s mostly because of addiction and mental illness, something politicians can do little about”
If you want to read the whole thing go to the Foxnews website and read Bill O’Reilly’s Talking Points.
It’s time to question the premise.
Some of the people with “homeless veteran” signs aren’t really veterans. Some aren’t homeless.
So what? They’re obviously down and out or they wouldn’t be standing in the streets begging for money. Begging isn’t a glamorous or easy job. Urban legends aside, no one’s getting rich that way.
That someone has to “prove” they deserve some consideration from society, by of all things having served in a fucking war, is truly vile. “Did you kill people for us long ago? Okay, then, we’ll give you soup, but no bitching about the new war.”
(BTW, Phoenician, on your recommendation, I got that book. It’s been quite a read! Thanks.)
“It’s mostly because of addiction and mental illness, something politicians can do little about”
…except, you know, things like don’t send them to fight wars of aggression and conquest, give them the proper equipment to ensure their safety, make sure that the goals of the war are straightforward and achievable, pay them adequately, support their families while they are away, and most importantly: Treat Them With Respect, Because They Are Being Asked To Make The Ultimate Sacrifice…
Their deaths are much more than an embarrassing fact to be minimized and swept under the rug. And if they come back alive, they need whatever it takes to live out the rest of their lives in a way that indicates the thanks and respect of the America people.
To treat them like a disposable cup - to be used and then discarded - is offensive in the extreme.
The fact that Commander Codpiece has still not attended the funeral of any soldier HE SENT TO DIE, says volumes about him and the rest of the people currently in charge…
“It’s mostly because of addiction and mental illness, something politicians can do little about”
Except, you know, fucking fund psychiatry and therapy programs. I mean, MikeEss, we are totally on the same side here, but there’s plenty who’ve been fucked up who won’t be helped by not starting new wars. We’ve also got to fix all the people we’ve broken.
God, the lack of access to mental health care in this country makes me furious pretty much every single day.
Meredith, I was quoting DWill and disagreeing with their premise. I think we’re on the same page.
I completely agree that psychiatry and therapy programs must be fully funded. After all, we broke them, and we need to make them better…
So, to summarize: the VA said there were 200k homeless veterans. Edwards said there were 200k homeless veterans. O’Reilly said Edwards was crazy and a liar.
Meanwhile, 200,000 homeless veterans, many of them drug-addicted or suffering from other untreated mental illnesses, many of them homeless because Bush drove the economy into a ditch, sleep on grates and under bridges.
Bekabot, of course Washington isn’t part of O’Reilly’s America. None of the Pacific Northwest is, any more than is California, Louisiana, New York, New England or the Great Lakes states.
Bill O’Reilly’s America consists of the Deep South and the Great Plains states. Except for the metropolitan areas.
I completely agree that psychiatry and therapy programs must be fully funded.
NO! Psychiatry is the farthest thing from what they need. This is what they really need.
@ MAJeff:LOL!
(BTW, Phoenician, on your recommendation, I got that book. It’s been quite a read! Thanks.)
Give _On Equilibrium_ a go as well, then. _Voltaire’s Bastards_ is worth reading, but less coherent. He’s a hell of a good antidote to Randbot tripe.
For something quite different, but also worthwhile, try James Carse _Finite and Infinite Games_ - in my experience, about only 40% of those who try it “get it”, but those that do really like it.
Are Mike and Quiet really flexing their penises and playing the my-sperm’s-more-potent-than-your-sperm game on a feminist blog?
tinfoil hattie: Uh, only Quiet as far as I can read.
tinfoil, Quiet was the one who (for some reason I don’t understand) brought up sperm.
It made no sense when he said it, and it isn’t any more intelligent today…
MAJeff: Brilliant. I about cried with laughter the first time I saw it. And then stopped when I realized that yes, some people actually believe it.
And Mike, yeah, I know you were quoting him. I was just adding more things to your list.
Nah, nobody sleeps under bridges. Bridges go over water. They sleep under overpasses, in tunnels that pass through bridge footings, alongside roads that pass under bridge abutments, under elevated highways and railways, under pedestrian walkways, but never under bridges.
I also kinda wonder about the liar’s language — he says his people will make sure that any veteran currently sleeping under a bridge won’t be sleeping there after he hears of it, which is rather different from saying they’ll have a real place to sleep.
If you want to help some of these “non-existent” vets, a good place to start is Veterans Village of San Diego. I’m going to slip them a few bucks, and I strongly encourage others to consider doing so.