They're All Going to Laugh at You

Just how much does Bill O'Reilly suck? Well, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is opening a banana and having the peel tear off kind of awkwardly and incompletely, exposing a sort of starchy, under-ripe banana that tastes a little sour, and 10 being nuclear winter, Bill is at most a seven.

Ah, but how crazy and megalomaniacal is Bill O'Reilly? On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is George W. Bush and 10 is Caligula near the end of a six-day palace bender, Bill is about a 48.

Honest to God, we didn't want to do this. In our inaugural Media Drunk Tank column, we led with a nice bit about Bill's insanity. But we hoped to mix it up a little--maybe lead off this time with something about Neil Cavuto's on-air virtual dry-humping or John Stossel's latest effort to make whiny incomprehensibility the lingua franca of the gay-porn-mustache-wearing pundit community.

But just as we were cobbling our second installment together, O'Reilly hit another one out of the park. Damn.

Yes, it turns out O'Reilly is none too happy these days about chief nemesis Keith Olbermann's surging ratings:

Our numbers are stronger than ever, but as we told you last week there are problems with the Nielsen Ratings system.

Yeah, and apparently Fox News has asked Susan Whiting, Nielsen executive VP, to explain this latest setback to Western civilization. But is Bill O'Reilly really blaming Keith Olbermann's ratings gains on the scorekeeper? Has O'Reilly at long last become the John McEnroe of cable news?

Not one simply to make an entirely random statement that betrays unfathomable insecurity and deep-seated paranoia and move on, O'Reilly delved further into the conspiracy against him: "By the way, Whiting and 25 other Nielsen people have donated money to the Democrats, two...two Nielsen employees are on record as donating to the Republicans."

Just so we're clear. What Bill is implying is that The Nielsen Company, which has more than 40,000 employees, conducts business in more than 100 countries worldwide and has gross revenues of about $5 billion a year is ... well, they're out to get him.

When O'Reilly finally does don his tin foil hat, we really hope it has Viking horns on it.

Neil Cavuto Perv Watch

As a public service to readers who don't regularly tune in to Fox News but are nevertheless interested in how today's complex business environment affects network financial guru Neil Cavuto's erections, we present our first installment of the Neil Cavuto Perv Watch.

You see, Fox News business maven Neil Cavuto has, well, a knack for working smut into business stories that, at least on the face of it, have little or nothing to do with hot chicks. So here he was last week, helping us sift through the minutiae of the frustratingly Byzantine government economic bailout bill:

Okay, it is not exactly Girls Gone Wild, but bailouts gone wild? I know it doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but some say every bit the debauchery. The White House today saying that it's working as quickly as possible ...

Blah, blah, blah, finance story.

Okay, so this is just Cavuto's cheeky attempt at wordplay, right? Here's the thing, though: During this entire intro the screen was split, with Cavuto appearing on the left third and the other two thirds showing...wait for it...a Girls Gone Wild video.

No, we are not f*&cking kidding.

Now some of you may be asking, "What does a cheap blonde in a pink, skintight tank top dancing for a crowd of screaming guys have to do with quasi-socialistic federal monetary policy? We were asking ourselves the same thing. But is anyone at Fox saying, "Neil, that video you want to show has nothing to do with...you know...it's just a girl dancing around...we're talking about a bailout and...oh, never mind."

Then again, perhaps Fox should just take that muzzle off Neil and let him roam free. Why not let him be even more graphic? Maybe an intro like, "Okay, it is not exactly fisting, but federal bailouts could feel like the government has its entire forearm up your ass." Run appropriate video.

Now, to be fair to Neil, it wasn't all smutty video clips. At the point where the blonde took some Mardi Gras beads from some guy and then kissed him, a little screen popped up showing the current Dow Jones industrial average.

To reiterate: No, we are not f*&cking kidding.

Apparently, John Stossel Has a High-Pitched Whine Only Conservatives Can Hear

John Stossel's latest ABC News special, Maybe It's Your Civic Duty Not to Vote, questioned the wisdom of registering so many new, young voters. What ensued was basically a bad knockoff of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments. Young people were asked general knowledge questions such as how many U.S. senators there are and what the significance of Roe v. Wade is. Few knew the answers.

Now, everyone knows that John Stossel specials would be far more palatable if he wasn't such a dick about everything. Indeed, Stossel combines the whiny, femmy superciliousness of Rex Reed with the whiny, femmy superciliousness of Mr. Blackwell. His specials are usually an uneasy combination of boilerplate libertarianism, cornpone philosophy, and a moderately stoned Gallagher making droll observations from astride his hilarious flying rainbow bicycle. Seriously, we're waiting for the 20/20 segment where John finally asks, "Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? Give me a break!"

But the simpleton logic that's the hallmark of any J. Stossel joint seemed particularly flawed this time around. How does knowing facts about the government necessarily make your vote more valuable? If you're an old white supremacist who can name all the Supreme Court justices, does that make your opinion somehow more valid than that of a racially tolerant 18-year-old who thinks Thomas Paine is an Ultimate Fighting champ?

And Speaking of Gay Porn 'Stache...

Sometimes we all need a reminder that Michael Medved is not just a crypto-theocratic reactionary radio commentator but also a crypto-theocratic movie reviewer who doesn't really like or understand or think about movies all that much.

From Medved's recent review of Bill Maher's Religulous:

Some of the movie is undeniably laugh-out-loud funny, and Bill Maher does raise some provocative questions, but the film's edited in such a way that he wins every single argument. Worst of all, the movie gives radical Islam something of a free pass, suggesting that murderous extremists are no worse than sincere Christians who run a Bible theme park in Florida.

Really, Michael? Is that what he's suggesting? It seems to us that Maher was casting a satirical eye on religion in America, not trying to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a noogie.

Your criticism makes about as much sense as saying Beverly Hills Chihuahua was conspicuously silent on the morally urgent issue of feline leukemia.