One of these men is a professional comedian. The other is Stephen Colbert.
Bill O’Reilly can kiss my liberal Democratic ass. The king of all that he surveys on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bill is nothing more than a neighborhood bully who is brash, obtrusive, and unpleasant to all who come to his show to offer a differing point of view. And he’s got an ego the size of China.
None of this is news, of course; O’Reilly has been riding roughshod over American journalism for well over two or three decades now. A former anchor of the ultra-tabloid “Inside Edition,” Bill at some point decided that he was a legit journalist and thus entitled to hawk designer crap emblazoned with his name on his cable access show. “Factor Gear” is tackier than the usual crap you find on QVC, and his books have contributed to the deaths of more innocent trees than I have time to document. And blue-collar conservatives love him.
O’Reilly has risen to the role that Rush Limbaugh once had, that of the ultra-right wing nutjob who sticks a thorn into the overarching liberal media. The damn thing is, though, he came along at exactly the wrong time; everywhere you look, the media has turned more to the right since Bush came into office. The attack journalism of the Clinton years laid the groundwork for it. But with the ascendancy of Dubya in ’00, suddenly the radical Republican minority became the majority. And their representatives in the media seemed a little lost.
Bill’s just the most vocal of the odious “right wing commentators” that many networks and cable outlets enlist today to pander to a perceived “We Love Bush” contingent of the audience. Sean Hannity is a more ridiculous version in that he’s never even pretended to be a journalist; I think Fox News hired him for his hairpiece. Ann Coulter seems like she should be battling Sigourney Weaver, considering all the acid that drips from her fangs. And Rush, the grand old man himself, is a druggie.
If the previous paragraphs seemed harsh, that is my point; those are exactly the same kind of tactics that O’Reilly and his ilk use to attack anyone who smacks of opposition to them. O’Reilly makes everything about himself, and he bellows from his bully pulpit every night on Fox News because he feels like a “victim” of the mainstream media (I once did a satirical piece for a humor website in which O’Reilly interviewed Jesus and called him a dirty hippy. I strongly suspect that I might not have been far off). He’s nasty, he’s spiteful, and he’s just like a lot of people I know who, when faced with the harsh realities of life, choose to retreat into a world of their own construction, one in which they are the big chiefs and determiners of their destiny. In other words, he’s an asshole, and I should know. I used to think just like him.
But take heart, dear readers of the liberal bent; Bill O’Reilly is a walking joke, only he’s not in on it yet. To quote another famous Bill, he’s full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
