Gads, Bill O'Reilly...always with the suggestion of extrajudicial seizure! OK. Here's the story so far: this past Monday, Obama spokesman Bill Burton got into a heated exchange with Fox anchor Megyn Kelly after he criticized the news channel for its "agenda driven political programming."* This enraged Kelly, because despite the fact that Fox has delivered the proof-of-concept on whether people will watch "agenda driven political programming" (NEWS FLASH: They will, in droves, MSNBC is emulating it, and kicking CNN's ass in the ratings as a result), it is official diktat at Fox to zip up their petticoats and act affronted by the suggestion that anything of the sort is happening. So, Kelly and Burton tussled! And I'd bet that your Fox-aligned bloggers out there in the world all cheered at her spunk! And that the Obama-philes all thought Burton was great! And everyone ended up loving the person they were predisposed to love all the more, and an otherwise unremarkable exchange between Anchor and Strategist got a lot of attention.
So, naturally, Bill O'Reilly wants someone to place Bill Burton under arrest, for daring to be mean to Megyn Kelly.
Yeesh! That's O'Reilly's answer to everything! That's why it seems that there always has to be someone on hand at the Factor to talk O'Reilly down from his addle-brained "arrest everyone who crosses me" fantasia. In times past, this used to be Megyn Kelly's job!
*Part of Burton's complaint was Fox's daylong flogging of a 2001 radio appearance Obama made, in which he "disavowed the views" of the "more robust liberal jurists of yesteryear [who] believed in affirmative economic rights." Fox was among those who wrongly believed -- because listening and reading for COMPREHENSION is just too hard for some people -- that he was taking a point of view that was diametrically the opposite. To be fair, Fox was not the only news agency to cover this story incorrectly.