O’Reilly: Progressive blog readers = ‚Äö√Ñ√≤devil worshippers.’
On Fox News yesterday, Bill O’Reilly let loose on “far-left websites” like DailyKos, stating, “If you read these far-left websites, you’re a devil worshipper. You are.” O’Reilly’s ombudsman responded, “As a journalist, you know better than that.” O’Reilly shot back: “Satan is running the DailyKos. Yes, he is!”…. At the end of the segment, O’Reilly said, “That was a little satire there‚Äö√Ѭ∂don’t get too upset about it.” But he then added, “I still think they are satanists.”
You know, you might think that a man as successful and ostensibly intelligent as Bill O’Reilly could be expected to have a tighter grip on reality. Then again, what else could you reasonably do with a man who equates Liberals with Satanists but give him yet another DUMB@$$ AWARD? Few have proven themselves more deserving of this (dis)honor over the years than O’Reilly, whose entire career has been built on bloviating, propaganda, and mean-spirited immature intolerance and fear-mongering.
It would be easy to pass O’Reilly off as just another authoritarian, “my-way-or-the-highway” Conservative, but the reality is that he’s much more dangerous than that. O’Reilly may be just another authoritarian, “my-way-or-the-highway” Conservative, but he’s one with a sizable audience of drooling sycophants who would sooner question the Word of God than the word of Bill O’Reilly. His bosses at Faux News Channel seem to have concerned themselves only with the size of O’Reilly’s audience. His pomposity and his penchant for playing fast and loose with the truth seems not to be an issue in the slightest, because advertising rates for O’Reilly’s show are still healthy and advertisers are still plentiful.
The problem from where I sit is that Bill O’Reilly represents everything that’s wrong with American democracy: the triumph of ignorance, reaction, fear-mongering, intolerance, xenophobia, and aggressive anti-intellectualism. Because the American Sheeple are loathe to look around them to see what’s being done in their name, because they’re loathe to think critically about anything outside of what impacts them directly, authoritarian blowhards like O’Reilly rule the airwaves. Bill O’Reilly is as much about plurlalism and diversity as Jeffrey Dahmer was about vegetarianism. O’Reilly really is just another authoritarian, “my-way-or-the-highway” Conservative. The problem, though, is that he has a sizable audience, one who hangs on his every word as if every utterance is the living incarnation of the Gospel.
I could go on, but I have to go. I’ve been called up and I’ll be mobilized to help fight the War on Christmas. I understand that O’Reilly will be on the opposing front lines, where he’ll no doubt be prominently be displaying his DUMB@$$ AWARD.
