06-16-2009 STAR'S SANCHEZ SQUARES OFF WITH O'REILLY Kansas City Star columnist Mary Sanchez went toe-to-toe with Fox's Bill O'Reilly (6/15) over the recent killing of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller. Sanchez held her own--and maybe more---against O'Reilly. The tip-off that he did not win the debate was when non of his inflammatory debate tricks seemed to ruffle her one iota. He even ended the interview by referring to her as "Madam," which is his way of slapping her without enabling a response. The other tip-off that Sanchez held her own is that right-wing KCMO talk show host Chris Stigall claimed that O'Reilly was the clear-cut winner of the discussion. The national Web site Gawker.com agrees (LINK) that O'Reilly's tricks did not work on Sanchez: "In the segment (at right), O'Reilly starts out by noting that Sanchez is guilty of the crime of writing for a "liberal paper" that has dared to voice criticism of him in the past. Strike one. Then she had the audacity to express disdain for O'Reilly's fondness for "verbal confrontations," which provokes O'Reilly to dare her to cite just one example of his doing such a thing. Strike two. "Sanchez then goes even further and states that there's no room for people to be "screaming about killing" in the national debate on abortion, an assertion O'Reilly calls "disingenuous" before adding, "that's not what this is about." Strike three. "He then ends the interview by calling Mary Sanchez "madam," that thing he always does when he has a female guest on the show that he loathes, which just so happens to also be the code word for all of his crazies to send her hate-filled emails and threaten to blow up the newspaper's offices." Last week O'Reilly blasted fellow Star columnist Mike Hendricks on the air over remarks made in a column where many people felt Hendricks generalized that virtually anyone opposed to abortion helped kill Dr. Tiller.
06-16-2009
"I think you missed the point. Why was Sanchez the one debating O'Reilly? Where was Hendricks? He's the one who called O'Reilly out. Sanchez is one of the few at The Star who is remotely pro-life...
"Bottom lIne, Sanchez was nothing more than a smoke screen for the coward Mike Hendricks to hide behind. If anything her appearance in Hendrick's place made The Star's coverage of this issue even more disgraceful than it was before."
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