POSTSCRIPT:

    An hour or so later, the stretch limo dropped us at the corner (Hillside avenue is a dead-end, not built for limos, and the vehicle would have had to back up all the way to the beginning of  the street to get out.) Emails were pouring into the in-box.

Sic Transit Gloria

    Most were supportive. But a phone voicemail called me a "fat ineffective dumbass," and an email from Chicago declared: "I have lost all respect for your group and will no longer give you the benefit of the doubt in respect to you shirking your responsibility in supporting the country that has given you the platform to voice such dissent."

 Then there was an email from a Friend in New York, with the URL for the O'Reilly program's daily webpage, which has a lineup of the day's topics.

     On the page was this item:

<< Then, a Quaker institution in North Carolina is helping U.S. soldiers desert... We'll have a report. >>

    (Don't go looking for it, because it's been replaced. I did save the page onto my hard drive, tho.)

     Reflecting on this note, I finally, with a start, understood the underlying agenda of the interview. There was no real news "peg" for it, no new development in Jeremy's case. Instead, its point  was supposed to be: "outing" Quaker house as a den of unpatriotic treachery, a school for desertion.

     Such a slur could paint cross hairs on Quaker House. It fit quite well with the dynamic of his attack on universities that are willing to hear Ward Churchill and other ,

     But something had gone wrong. This "report" never got presented, and the "outing" didn't happen, except in the innuendo of their subtitles and the repeated video of Jeremy and the stroller. But that was not much.

    No doubt this outcome was in part due to the fact that they had not a shred of evidence for the promised "report." But lack of facts has not been known to stop Fox News and O'Reilly before.

     So what was it? My commanding spiritual presence? <joke> A stab of conscience on the part of a producer? (We can always hope.) A spiritual covering generated by the many Friends who wrote to say they were holding me in the Light? 

     I like this last. And I wonder if, given O'Reilly's own words, it also enabled that old Quaker chestnut, The Reputation of Truth, to succeed in standing up, not for me but for Itself. It managed to force from O'Reilly an expression of "respect," even if couched in the passive voice.

     Nonetheless, I fired off an email of protest about this seamy insinuation. One hardly expects that Fox & Co. will repent and change their ways; but at least it's in the record. It follows:

February 25, 2005
Email to: oreilly@foxnews.com

Subject: Objection

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