Billy the Bully

Scott Swenson on my old friend Bill Donohue and the 43-page report released by Catholics for Choice on Monday, which "documents a pattern of media and political manipulation by Donohue, his organization, and his supporters":

Donohue claims to protect Catholics from anti-Catholic bigotry. In reality, he manufactures controversies, bullies political opponents, and insults people with a world view different from his. This "defender of religious and civil rights" routinely defames Jews, Muslims, gays, and women -- all in the name of Jesus, and believing that he is protecting American values.

…Far from protecting Catholics from bigotry, Donohue plays the victim card to advance a narrow, socially conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal political view.

"Bill Donohue is a punk and a bully," says Jon O'Brien, President of Catholics for Choice. "His style is more suited to being in the ring of the World Wrestling Federation than a television studio. Donohue is hiding a political and social agenda that has nothing to do with anti-defamation, and nothing to do with Catholicism."

It's an interesting piece, if totally unsurprising to anyone with the misfortune of having a passing acquaintance with Donohue. It's more enlightening about how completely FUBAR-ed our national media is—how easily manipulated, how derelict in their duty, how keenly disinterested in reality when a not-even-particularly-reasonable facsimile thereof catches their fancy. Depressing stuff.

As a bemused aside, I wasn't interviewed for the piece, so I don't know from whence this came: "One Donohue devotee went so far as to pound violently on McEwan's front door for ten minutes." Someone did pound on my door, after blocking the driveway (I don't know if it was for ten minutes); in fact, we had a couple people come to the door, and someone dumped trash on the lawn, and someone smashed a phone outside my office window—other weird things. I've no evidence that any of them were Donohue devotees, though; all of that happened only after Bill O'Reilly picked up the story. Wev.