Bill O'Reilly was really steamed.
Poooor baby.
What got the churlish O'Reilly mad were post-church-shooting statements by South Carolina Rep. Todd Rutherford that Fox News was regularly dispensing the kind of hate speech that led to the church shooting. Rutherford's comments deserved a lot more attention.
A whole lot more. Only the crying need for gun control has been more egregiously overlooked
since the Charleston tragedy.
Let us speak plainly here. Fox has been providing a megaphone for hatemongers for years.
It's made it OK to hold crackpot, hateful ideas.
Simply put, Fox dispenses poison, day after day.
Not because it's conservative is there a problem.
Having grown up in a military family that was solid Republican, I know about conservatives.
For years, I was one of them.
But traditional, rational conservative views are not what Fox airs.
It's poison, pure poison. I've been saying this in my TV columns for years now.
Poisonous people like Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter should be in a psychiatrist's office,
not on a television network.
Fox boss ("czar") Roger Ailes, who has a face like a clenched fist, is the Poisoner in Chief.
A few years ago, when I wrote a HuffPost piece calling Ailes and his creation a "cancer on
our body politic," he took offense and attacked Arianna about it on ABC's "This Week" Sunday
show.
But it's every bit as true today.
So I'd like to see at least some of the deserved attention being given banning the racist
Confederate flag and calling out its supporters being directed at Fox News, an enabler of
right-wing crackpots and hatemongers.
Let's put the odious Fox News on the defensive for a change.
Sure, to Jon Stewart, Larry Wilmore and others, Fox News' absurd programming is a comedy goldmine.
I wish no one took Fox seriously, but many drooling idiots and bigots do.
So, let's stop laughing at Fox and start attacking it, as Rep. Rutherford did.
It's long past time to put the odious cable channel on the defensive for a change.
It's done a lot more damage to the country, one could argue, than the Confederate flag.