Perhaps you were sitting home yesterday or today, wondering, "How in the world will Fox 'news' be able to discuss the shooting of Walter Scott by Officer Michael Slager? How could it possibly spin an obvious murder by a cop? Surely, even Fox will have to admit we have a problem here."
Oh, dear wonderer, you don't know Fox.
Last night, on Bill O'Reilly's Slaughterhouse of Fuckery and Lies, O'Reilly showed how it's done: You deny it's anything other than a one-time incident. Here's how he starts the conversation with Some Asshole on there to agree with him: "What struck me is, when we were doing research for this story, police
shootings have fallen 70 percent -- police shootings of black Americans
70 percent in the last 40 or 50 years. So they are way, way down. In 2012, last stats available, 123 blacks were killed by police; 326
whites were killed. So there doesn't seem to be as some people would
have you believe, that police are trying to hunt down young black men
and take their lives."
Then, no shit, he followed up with "However, there is no excuse for what that officer in South Carolina did." See? He cares.
After briefly talking to Some Asshole, O'Reilly opined, "You have to chalk it up to the man, the police officer you are
seeing, allegedly -- and I believe he will be convicted -- committed a
crime and let the system play out. He is being held without bail as I
mentioned. But there are people who are not going to let the system play out. They're going to condemn the system." And that's just wrong. You can't condemn a system for the actions of a few bad actors. "You take each crime and you put it into whatever context this justice system can provide," O'Reilly says.
You got that? O'Reilly, a master of taking an incident and proclaiming a "War" on something or other, thinks that you can't do that in this case. He regularly says that Muslims need to do something about Islamic terrorism, even if the vast, vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. Benghazi means the entire State Department and the Obama Administration are corrupt. But a white cop shooting an unarmed black man? Like so many other shootings of unarmed black men? Each done in a motherfuckin' vacuum, according to O'Reilly.
That's the spin you're gonna hear from Fox. This one incident was isolated. This one doesn't tell us anything. Let's get upset about this one and forget about the others that have even the smallest amount of doubt in them. Let's absolve ourselves of any complicity. The issue, as O'Reilly tells us, is that we hate to feel bad about America: "It besmirches a country -- a country that you have prospered in and I have prospered in."
Yeah. It fucking well does.
