March 30, 2006 by s.z.

Blowhard Gossip

1.  Sean Hannity Stalks Alec Baldwin

Hannity apparently doesn't get enough chances to bully people on his radio show and Fox News TV program, so he called into a local radio show in order to attack Alec Baldwin. 

 New York Daily News has the story:

Since Sean Hannity broadcasts every afternoon on WABC (770 AM) and every night on the Fox News Channel, you'd think he might spend Sunday night, say, relaxing with "The Sopranos." You'd think wrong.

He actually does Mafia hits on Sunday nights as a way of relaxing.

When Hannity's sometime nemesis Alec Baldwin came on Brian Whitman's WABC show as a guest Sunday, there was Hannity - along with fellow WABC host Mark Levin - to mix it up with him.

"Sean didn't have to be there," said WABC program director Phil Boyce. "But that's what he does.

He's even obnoxious on his own time!  What a guy!

He's never 'off.' He felt Baldwin needed to be challenged, and since Baldwin wouldn't come on his show, this was the place to do it."

Yeah, he's a tough guy -- except when a 52-year-old woman sends him a letter in which she begs "Please write back to me," or approaches him at a public speaking event and says "I need to speak with you now."  Then he fears for his life.

Anyway, here's more about his encounter with Baldwin from the New York Post.

Hannity, furious that Baldwin allegedly broke a promise to appear on his show before Whitman's, wasted no time ripping into the liberal activist.

"Welcome to WABC, considering you were supposed to come on my program last week and you didn't show. What happened?" Hannity demanded.

"Why would I want to come on with a no-talent, former-construction-worker hack like you?" Baldwin answered.

[...]

"You won't talk to Sean?" Whitman pleaded.

"What's the point? What's there to say? Let's do to Sean what Sean would do to a caller. Sean, are you done, honey? Best of luck, Sean, you no-talent whore," Baldwin taunted.

"Coward," Hannity responded.

Sean, one of the things that makes this country great is that people don't have to appear on your show if they don't want to.  Just deal with it.  And Alec, you shouldn't malign no-talent whores this way.

2.  Bill O'Reilly Featured in The New Yorker

I guess they ran out of high-brow literary stuff to discuss.

In any case, here are my favorite bits from the article:

O’Reilly is the most popular host on cable news; his average nightly audience is about two million people, while Larry King, on CNN, has an audience about half that size. O’Reilly is most successful in attracting attention when he feuds with other media figures, which happens, in part, because they attack him and he is not one to turn the other cheek. He has started a petition campaign calling on MSNBC to replace Keith Olbermann, one of its prime-time hosts, with, oddly, the paleo-liberal Phil Donahue; he recently threatened a caller to his radio show—someone who mentioned Olbermann’s name—with “a little visit” from “Fox security.” Olbermann has repeatedly conferred on O’Reilly the top place in a “Worst Person in the World” competition, and, probably more to the point, when discussing O’Reilly he often finds ways to work in the word “falafel.” That is a reference to a sexual-harassment suit that a former Fox News producer named Andrea Mackris filed against O’Reilly a couple of years ago. (The case was settled out of court, but not before it got extensive press attention.) Mackris produced what she said were quotes of O’Reilly on the phone discussing things that he imagined they might enjoy doing together. The most notorious of these was a scenario in which they would be in the shower and he would massage her with a loofah, a scrubby sponge—but then, as he went on talking, he slipped up and referred to it as “the falafel thing,” which is funny not only because the picture of smearing wet mashed chickpeas on someone’s body is profoundly unerotic but also because the mistake seems to be a peculiar by-product of O’Reilly’s suspicion of things non-American. That’s why, for O’Reilly, “falafel” is a fighting word.

Poor Bill -- his delightful erotic fantasy sabotaged up by his xenophobia.  Again.

In 1998, after the launch of “The O’Reilly Factor,” but before superstardom, he published a thriller called “Those Who Trespass,” which is his most ambitious and deeply felt piece of writing. “Those Who Trespass” is a revenge fantasy, and it displays extraordinarily violent impulses. A tall, b.s.-intolerant television journalist named Shannon Michaels, the “product of two Celtic parents,” is pushed out by Global News Network after an incident during the Falkland Islands War, and then by a local station, and he systematically murders the people who ruined his career. He starts with Ron Costello, the veteran correspondent who stole his Falkland story:

The assailant’s right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello’s mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.

Michaels stalks the woman who forced his resignation from the network and throws her off a balcony. He next murders a television research consultant who had advised the local station to dismiss him: he buries the guy in beach sand up to his neck and lets him slowly drown. Finally, during a break in the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention, he slits the throat of the station manager. O’Reilly describes each of these killings—the careful planning, the suffering of the victim, the act itself—in loving detail.

Maybe those bodyguards whom Bill was forced to hire are there to protect the world from Bill . .

3. Ann Coulter Attempts to Incite Violence at Loyola 

 . 

The Loyola Phoenix has the story:

When the crowd booed her comments on the Democratic message, she replied, "Well, that's what the American people think of their message."

At one point, Coulter asked the "Republican, heterosexual males" to "take [the protestors] out." Roughly a dozen College Republicans rose from their seats to heed her advice, only to be stopped by security officers who advised them to return to their seats.

"I think it was wrong for Coulter to attempt to incite what seemed to me was violence," Senior Sean Murphy, vice president of the College Republicans, said. "I don't feel it was her place to call on students to kick out members of the student body. There were people assigned to do that."

Yeah, but Ann really likes it when "Republican men" give "bloody noses and broken bones" to her critics.  (And since she has such a hard time getting virgin blood to bathe in at her campus appearances these days, she has to get her fun where she can.)

1:32:37 AM