Look, I know Bill O’Reilly is scum, but this stuff has got to stop:
After O’Reilly provided an “accountability moment” to the JetBlue CEO at his home, I decided to provide O’Reilly with his own accountability moment at his home.
I’ve just returned to home base.
I’ve got video of O’Reilly in his sleepwear (red shorts and a white t-shirt). I delivered the Andrea Mackris Court filings to all of his neighors – every home in his development got a copy. And I put a bunch of signs up along his street – “Bill O’Reilly: Andrea Mackris has your cash” directly across from his house; “Bill O’Reilly: PERVERT” in front of his home; “Bill O’Reilly: CHEATER” on the road he must take to exit his development and “Bill O’Reilly: Can’t be trusted with your daughters” at the landmark boulder marking the entrance to his development.
I know many of you are going to argue that the only way to make it stop is to do this to enough people like O’Reilly so they, themselves, quit behaving like this, but as far as I am concerned, the moral high ground is better than “winning” this sort of crap. This is the kind of thing that escalates and ends badly for all parties.
Did I mention Bill O’Reilly is scum?
And why the hell do they call him Falafel Bill?
*** Update ***
I have to agree with Wonkette:
We’d just like to congratulate DailyKos for making us sympathize with a disturbed fascist. Maybe they can make Giuliani’s mom cry or something next.
Although the problem with Wonkette is they, like Bill O’Reilly, can not seem to tell the difference between the DKOS and some wingnut at DKOS. To be clear, the DKOS did not do this- Mike Stark did.
Ted
Because of when Bill was sexually harassing his producer over the phone, he mis-identified a loofah as a ‘falafel’.
Dreggas
First, yeah what that guy did didn’t help and he is getting drubbed at kos for it.
As for Falafel Bill
Psycheout
How mature. This is harrassment, pure and simple. This hater is a stalker and should be detained.
Dreggas
ah hell, read the whole thing
I must warn you this comes with swimming rules, like don’t read it unless you haven’t eaten in half an hour.
Ted
Bill O’Reilly and his falafel
Kirk Spencer
re falafel, the relevant line from the Mackris law-suit is on this page at the smoking gun.
As to the rest… My first reaction matched yours. My second reaction, on chasing the links, was: hey, this is one of the guys O’Reilly threatened to do JUST THIS TO not so long ago. So…
As long as he was civil, the conversation and the delivery of the court document copies to the neighbors was probably legit. The signs are over the line, though. Period.
Now the part which I find interesting is reading all the comments to the Dkos post. The vast majority appear to agree with John. How much do you want to wager, however, that when Bill mentions this on his show, he fails to note the condemnation?
Ted
How much money did BIllo end up paying Makris to drop the suit and have the audio tapes destroyed? Something like $10 million?
Jake
On the one hand yes. We should be mature and well-behaved and not stoop to the level of the nasty little tapeworms who make big bucks spreading hate and venom.
On the other hand this is fucking funny.
We live in a country where two college sweetheats can’t get married without knuckle-draggers threatening to do them harm and I’m supposed to shake my head when someone gives a bigoted bully like O’Reilly a very light hassling?
Nah.
Gold Star for Robot Boy
I should be outraged and embarrassed over this, and I was… for about 10 seconds.
Zifnab
Bwhahahahahahaha~! /tears up/ /roflmao/ /pounds sofa/ /hacks for breath/
*weeze* *cough* *deep breath* I mean… tehe… that’s uh, horrible. Really, really uncalled for. I totally disapprove. /snicker/.
liberal
John Cole wrote,
That might be valid on tactical grounds—e.g., winning points by taking the high road—but in terms of “what is right,” alone, if you’re engaged in an iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma with someone and they repeatedly defect, you should also defect.
Or, in English: if someone keeps kicking you in the nuts, at some point you’ve got to start kicking back.
ConservativelyLiberal
I have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, I think it was stupid and in some wierd way it makes BillO look like the victim, which he is not. He has endorsed similar tactics against others using what I call ‘hitman journalism’. For example, nailing the JetBlue CEO at his home. Granted, he did not post signs around the CEO’s home but he did not need to as they have the power of the Faux Noise Machine behind him. While this was the action of Mike Stark alone (well, with one friend of his), he did crow about it at DK, which if I was him I would not have done. Now Stark will be thought by the right to be a representative of DK, which he most certainly is not.
In that sense, it was not helpful.
On the other hand…
Part of me likes to see people like BillO, who portray themselves as pillars of truth and honesty while being nothing of the sort, get a little payback sent their way. BillO’s bloviating does not fool most people, but it fools enough that it makes trouble where I think there should not be any.
I am sure that as much as Mike Stark loves DK, he felt that BillO’s latest bloviating was an unwarranted attack, so he decided to take action on his own. That is not right, but in a way I can understand it. It does not excuse it, but I can understand in a way.
In the end, I look at it this way. I have no stake in Faux or DK, and I really do not care other than I think that BillO has gone off the deep end over nothing at DK. He started the fight, and I am going to sit back, munch lots of smores and maybe some popcorn, and enjoy the show…
;)
Tim F.
Ridiculous overkill, and amateurish. O’Reilly may be a near-fascist shit who abuses anyone who won’t fight back, but you don’t hit him back in a way that makes him look good by comparison. Stark showed especially poor class by imposing on the neighbors.
Andrew
This is the real question: would you let bill’o falafel you for 10 million dollars?
myiq2xu
The point of the exercise was to show Awful Falafel that he is not the one on the moral high ground.
The entire format of O’Reilly’s show is to allow him to present himself as some paragon of virtue and to confront others without ever being confronted himself.
Mike Stark did this to expose O’Reilly’s hypocrisy – not to scare or intimidate him.
As my Grandpa would say, “He can dish it out, but he can’t take it.”
Zifnab
This could play out two ways. A) People could suddenly develop a groundswell of support for the poor, injuried Bill’O and DKos’s inevitable rise to triumph on the back of the beached whale that is the Factor will be tabled indefinitely. Or B) Bill’O will retaliate in the most infantile and counterproductive method possible, raising the pot yet again on the title of “World’s Biggest Jackhole” and we get to have yet another belly full of laughs.
Honestly, I question whether Bill will be able to contain himself.
Dave
Yeah but did he accomplish that? From what I see no.
Nobody is going to see this stunt as it is outside of the Falafel’s neighbors and people who read Kos. BillO on the other hand gets just got handed a ton f ammo to fire at DKos as some liberal hate attack website….”see they are stalking me now!”
Very poor.
Dreggas
Actually I changed my mind, this was nothing more than a fraternity prank, as the pictures clearly demonstrate this is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin kossacks’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our GOTV effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.
– Rush Limdick
Tim F.
You don’t claim the moral high ground by giving it up. Look at what O’Reilly did in this episode – he answered the door in shorts, had a short conversation and went back inside. Mike Stark, meanwhile, hung abusive signs around the neighborhood and imposed on apparently every other resident of O’Reilly’s street.
Taken in isolation, that makes Stark look like a jackass. Most people aren’t bloggers and don’t like in Daily Kos land were the context and history are immediately obvious so for the most part the stunt will be taken in isolation. Unless I’m wrong this one move will do more to hurt advertising at DK and sponsorship at YK than O’Reilly ever could. Honestly, good damage control suggests that Kos should ban Stark today, before it looks like he was pressured into doing it.
He will. Stark gave him an opportunity to sieze the high ground that O’Reilly’s high-paid image consultants won’t let him pass up.
Gold Star for Robot Boy
Oh, come on. If O’Reilly has such advisors, wouldn’t they have dissuaded him from filing a lawsuit against Al Franken that didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell?
Doug
I can buy that Stark didn’t do the right thing here. But, I don’t think I can go along with the moral high ground theory of why he was wrong because of what liberal said about the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Someone whacks you on the head, at some point, you gotta whack back and keep doing it until the other guy stops. Stark just wasn’t real handy with his whacking stick is all.
demkat620
Unacceptable. You do not go to somebody’s house and do this. It. Is. Wrong. End of conversation. Mike Stark was wrong to do this.
caustics
That whole Falafel Bill thing has been done to death, virtually. I don’t think we need Freepers escalating it to actual death literally.
But gosh, who’da thunk it. Some of those Krazy KosKids actually laid the smack on Mike Stark. Not bad for a bunch of Blame America First Traitors.
Doug H.
I’m with Gold Star. All the high-paid image consultants in the world won’t help when BillO starts acting like Bob DeNiro in The Untouchables.
Tim in SF
Since when is receiving literature an imposition? By that logic I should take my postal carrier to task for all the junk mail he delivers.
Fledermaus
This option get my vote. He is one of those guys that sees slights everywhere and goes overboard in attacking back. He also it really big on making threats his ass, presumably, can’t cash i.e. “You don’t know how much pull I have with Roger Ales, so you’d better watch it, pal!” kind of thing. Everyone wants to see people like that put up or shut up.
Ted
Only if I get to make him the Gimp.
Warren Terra
I agree that it is harrasment and not constructive. I guarantee O’Reilly will work up his high dudgeon and get mileage out of this.
Two points, though:
(1) I scanned some of the comments near the top an hour or two ago, and even on DKOS the comments are about even pro- and anti-Stark. And this stunt was the work of Stark, not of any member of the Kos front page.
(2) Stark says in his Diary that O’Reilly recently did something similar to the CEO of JetBlue and threatened to do it to someone else. If true, O’Reilly objecting might seem a bit hypocritical. Still, I don’t see why O’Reilly himself was necessary: a clever Youtube spoof, filmed in some other housing development and starring an O’Reilly imitator in their pajamas, could have made the point as effectively without invading anyone’s privacy.
jrg
I cannot think of a better way to play into Billo’s scheme than this. He paints DKOS like some sort of elite club, now he gets to pretend that this elite club is harassing his neighbors. Then DKOS plays to the narrative by kicking this user out of the elite club?
If this (L)user is banned from DKOS, Billo would start saying that boards on the internet are not the wild west. We all know that internet message boards are generally not edited, unlike newspapers or T.V, but Billo knows his audience can not tell the difference.
I don’t like this stunt any more than you do, but banning this user would do more harm than good.
The right way would have been to go to Billo’s sponsors, either in person (like Billo did to instigate this), or using the USPS and ask them about the huge number of hateful comments stated on the show – then spread those responses far and wide.
Joshua
I was gonna hope you were wrong about this, but sadly you weren’t.
People, it’s really simple. Harassment is wrong. Always. Even when the harassee is someone you don’t like. Forget whether it helps O’Reilly or not. It’s wrong. It’s just not done.
Second, the way to get back at O’Reilly is to do this, not to pull some stupid prank. The pranks don’t hurt them. Lost advertising dollars do.
Joshua
Also, for the record, life is not the bloody Prisoner’s Dilemma. PD is a model for certain kinds of decision making processes. A model. A simplified version of reality to be used as a tool to study some phenomenon.
You certainly can and should refer to models when making decisions. However, you should always remember to account for the factors that you subtracted to create the model.
In this case, it’s not at all clear that we have a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. PD relies on a certain distribution of rewards for different choices; most importantly, it assumes that the Defect/Cooperate reward is greater than the Coop/Coop reward is greater than the Defect/Defect reward.
May I remind you that we do not know what the reward values are in the O’Reilly situation. If you think you do, you’re wrong, because those values are not and cannot be determined a priori, because (see above) this is actual life and not a simplified game theory model of life. So there is absolutely no justification for claiming that Prisoner’s Dilemma applies here.
Joshua
Actually, I’d go even farther and point out that there are not only two options here, making this look even less like the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
If you want a simple game theory model, you’d have to have at least three options for each player: Cooperate (simply not respond), Defect (apparently, harass people at their homes?), Claim High Ground. In reality, of course, the CHG option is something that can be played in combination with the others, but we’ll stick with the simplified version.
Now you have a 3×3 grid of options, to be contrasted with the 2×2 grid in Prisoner’s Dilemma. Oh, and by the way, we still don’t know what the relative payoff weights for all the combinations are.
Stick that in your blanket statement and smoke it.
David
When the loathsome Wonkette (“Chief Justice John Roberts has died in his summer home in Maine. No, not really, but we know you have your fingers crossed.”) chides you, you KNOW a line’s been crossed… although how SHE would know about line-crossing is anyone’s guess.
Xanthippas
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Steve
Give me a fucking break.
Where was the condemnation of O’Reilly when he did the same stunt to the CEO of JetBlue? Where was the outrage? Where were the angry blog posts denouncing O’Reilly for doing it?
When Bill O’Reilly, television personality, does it, nothing happens whatsoever. When Mike Stark, total nobody, does the same thing, OMG it’s so horrible and he’s hurting his cause and so on. Yeah, right.
Sure, Mike Stark’s reputation, if he even has one, might be hurt by this, if people go on pretending that he was the guy who invented the concept.
Since O’Reilly seems to love the idea of harassing people at their home over political issues, maybe we should call that sort of stunt “pulling an O’Reilly.” And then when we say “wow, Mike Stark pulled an O’Reilly on O’Reilly,” maybe then it will be blatantly obvious that it’s nothing more than poetic justice.
Again, if you look at what Mike Stark did in a vacuum, obviously it’s inappropriate. Mind you, it didn’t happen in a vacuum, but if you like pretending that it did, then sure, I guess he was inappropriate.
Tim F.
We already had a long conversation about this.
Andrew
Geez, people, Wonkette is not a she.
The Other Steve
I remember back in 1988 or so, the Republican party had similar discussions. Was what Rush Limbaugh doing wrong? Shouldn’t they be more high minded like William F. Buckley Jr. displayed in the National Review.
Rush won. The GOP descended into the equivalent of the Red Army following the murder of the Czar. But they won elections, and pushed the debate.
Same with Gingrich impeaching Clinton. He lost, but the party won big time.
I don’t know what is the right answer. Does the end justify the means? I don’t think so.
But in Chicago, you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
AnonE.Mouse
Just $10 million to destroy The Falafel Monologue? Where the hell was Soros and his billions?
The Other Steve
I’m quite sure Larry Flynt would be the more appropriate venue.
CaseyL
Stark has a history of pointless confrontation.
He got a lot of attention and kudos when he caused a ruckus at one of Lieberman’s campaign stops during the Connecticutt primary. Either it went to his head, or he was always an asshole in search of a forum where he’d get more attention and praise for being a ‘politically correct’ asshole.
He’s now an attention whore, and puts up his diaries at dKos because he knows there are enough fanboy and fangirl types to give him the atta-boy! feedback he craves – and he can troll-rate anyone who doesn’t.
Any activist environment is going to attract assholes who’ll use the activism as an excuse for behavior that wouldn’t be tolerated otherwise. They’re a plague throughout the political spectrum.
jake
I hope his HPICs have a gallon of phenobarbital and a shark net on hand, they’re going to need them to keep that raving shit beast in check.
The idea that I should worry that loofah-man will somehow use this to make the libruls look bad blows my mind. He’s already called all the non-Bush worshipers every name in the book. Where is he gonna go next? And if, as a result of this incident, anyone watches this hate-mongering puke stain and thinks “Gee, he isn’t that bad,” they are welcome to pucker up and kiss my shiny metal ass.
Here’s my prediction: A few new viewers will turn to the show, watch a few minutes of Shrill waving his little hate-on and wonder why Stark didn’t pull the flaming bag of dookie trick on the man.
Steve
Lots of people disagreed with Mike Stark’s tactics in that latest diary. How many of them did he troll-rate?
Sure looks to me like Mike Stark has troll-rated one person, at most, ever.
Sorry to let facts come in the way of your righteous comment.
Steve
Yeah, that would be a totally awesome point if anyone were accusing you of supporting Bill O’Reilly, but everyone knows that’s not the case.
The point is that when everyone totally ignores O’Reilly pulling the same stunt on people who don’t deserve it, multiple times, but then unleash the fires of hell on Mike Stark for turning O’Reilly’s tactic back on him, you don’t end up with an accurate portrayal of what Stark did. He didn’t just randomly decide to harass some conservative at his home, he did this to O’Reilly because it’s the exact same thing he makes big bucks by doing to other people.
Imagine the sort of paparazzi photographers who make a living by hounding celebrities, lurking outside their front door all day and all night, hiding in the shrubbery to get a photograph. And let’s say someone decided to give them a taste of their own medicine by hiding out by the paparazzi’s house and photographing them in their underwear, or what have you.
Virtually everyone would see that as nothing but poetic justice. But hey, if you ignore the context that the victim was a paparazzi photographer who specialized in doing the exact same thing, and just acted like someone took a picture of this dude in his underwear out of the blue, then gosh, everyone would have a totally different reaction! In other words, you totally missed the point.
John Cole
Here is my point-
Being a total fucking douchebag is never cool or clever or useful, even when the target is amoral filth like Bill O’Reilly. Especially when it is going to get national attention from an audience too fucking stupid or partisan to care.
When Howard Kurtz picks up the story and spreads it- you think he is gonna get the story right?
demimondian
No.
So what? He doesn’t get far more important stories right, either. If the dems let Howie-the-lap-dog’s perceptive reportage — or lack thereof — dictate their strategies, then they spend forever not hitting back. What we’ve discovered over the past few months is that hitting back — not hitting first, but hitting back — is not only tolerated by the American people, but is actually applauded.
So hitting back it is. I’ll scream when (not if) Stark goes too far and attacks someone who hasn’t hit first; until then, though, it seems that rejecting the “what will they think” folks is right, not wrong, both morally and politically.
ConservativelyLiberal
With his track record? Need you even ask?
More importantly, does it even matter? As others have observed, how much further can they demonize the left? I think baby killing, give in to the enemy, atheist, deviant, commie loving and hedonistic librul DhimmecRat pretty much covers all of the bases already. There is not much room left.
The right framed the battle, and someone on the left has finally dived in. Get the popcorn ready, I am sure that it will only get worse…
Sirkowski
At this point, none of this really matters anymore.
Russ Carter
“We’d just like to congratulate DailyKos for making us sympathize with a disturbed fascist. Maybe they can make Giuliani’s mom cry or something next.” – Wonkette
So, just because someone says something declasse, even, gosh, rude, you’re willing to sympathize with the perverted fascist. So how deep really is your commitment to minimizing the number of perverted fascists and their disciples in the Public Square…?
It’s the same Red-State attitude that “I hates the fags so I’m a votin’ for Republicans even though it’s against my economic self-interest and they have repeatedly deceived me.” Or, “those Dems are mean to the President and he deserves our respect…”
If you’re not willing to be forceful with your blue-haired, evangelical (for instance) grandma and be willing to ruffle some feathers and weather some hurt feelings by explaining to her the error of her ways (first) and then excoriating her for being ignorant and useless, then you’ve placed the feelings of blue-haired grandma over your conscience and your ideas about how the State should be managed.
A quote (mangled) from Animal House: “Sometimes the useless and futile gesture is the right one.”
Until everyone is laughing and ridiculing the stupids, they will continue to be taken seriously…laugh, deride, point fingers – even at those you love…
Rome Again
I leave my bashing of Bill-O to Olbermann, he does it well and says exactly what I would want said.
Tax Analyst
A really good point. Sometimes it really is better to leave certain things in the hands of a competent Professional. The absolute last thing I would want to do would be to somehow paint a slime-ball like BillO as an “aggrieved party”. But if there were no Olbermann around, well, I DO believe one should be able to “hit back” at SOME POINT. I’m kinda tired of ass-hats like O’Reilly whacking people around with lies & misrepresentations.
But, ah…no, I wouldn’t post signs in his neighborhood – that was really pointless and stupid.