Bill O'Reilly on Monday night's Kneejerk Roundup:
"But I can't allow this stuff [attacking the president] to go unchecked. I'm the only person on television that's going to hold these people accountable, the only one, because everybody fears them. But both of those men have led lives. And if they want to attack people personally, [Frank] Rich in print and [Bill] Keller allowing it, then we're going to have to just show everybody about their lives." Media Matters
Several weeks ago, O'Reilly said he'd expose the names and faces of "oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces" who denigrated Christmas. He said, "I will put their face and their name on television, and I will talk about them on the radio if they do it."
The next day, I announced that I would deliberately denigrate the word "Christmas" by farting on anything that displayed the words "Merry Christmas." So I farted* on "Merry Christmas" logos as often as I could muster some gas. I figured that the least I could do was to respond to a baseless, ridiculous threat (putting so-called "anti-Christmas" people on television) about a baseless, ridiculous cause ("War on Christmas") with an equally baseless and ridiculous gesture (me farting on Christmas). Hence the ultimate goal was to underscore and satirize how baseless and ridiculous Bill O'Reilly is as a pundit and as a human being.
A few token farts on "Merry Christmas" later -- nothing. O'Reilly neglected to make good on his threat. No picture of me on his show. No discussions of my personal life on his show. Zilch. Maybe it's because I had no real inclination to wage war on Christmas because it's actually a holiday which I quite enjoy. I even watched "It's a Wonderful Life" this year and recited the dialogue along with it. In fact, I can still be overheard punctuating every phrase with "hee-haw!"
So the latest threat from O'Reilly is that he plans to show (I think he meant "tell") everybody about the -- I guess -- sordid personal lives of Frank Rich and Bill Keller if they continue to do their jobs as members of the Fourth Estate by holding the president and the power players in government accountable for their actions.
O'Reilly doesn't like to describe it like that. He likes to say that Rich and Keller make personal attacks against the president. Questioning the president equals personal attacks in the O'Reilly vernacular. Personal attacks -- name-calling kidney punches, like repeatedly using the word pinheads to describe those with differing opinions. I read Frank Rich's column religiously and have never spotted anything resembling a personal attack. A personal attack is generally something like, "Bill O'Reilly is a splotchy-faced reactionary with a microphallus." That's a personal attack. Okay, so sure. It's an extremely rude and partially untrue personal attack (guess which part), but it's a personal attack nevertheless.
Maybe O'Reilly considers Rich's evaluation of Bush's performance as president to be outside the bounds of journalistic decency. You know all about Frank Rich's name calling attacks against the president: the out of bounds comments about the Iraq War being sold on cherry-picked intelligence; the out of bounds remarks about the administration's transparent condemnations of torture while endorsing its use; or the out of bounds personal attacks about how the president has to use a cork on his fork whilst eating apple sauce.
Wait. What? Rich never wrote about that last thing and I'm fairly certain it's from "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels." But let's say the president does, in fact, require a cork on his fork -- to prevent him from hurting himself... and others. Would writing about the fork cork constitute a personal attack? Nope. Neither would it be a personal attack to report that the president is so accident prone (the bike crashes, the bloody brush-clearing accidents, the pretzels) that he requires a cork on his fork.
Cork or no cork, O'Reilly has run out of ways to defend his benefactors so he's resorted to making threats against people who watchdog the people who control the nation and, by proxy, the world. I suppose the list of indefensible acts by the president and his Republican friends has grown too lengthy for O'Reilly to defend. After all he only has an hour a day -- 42 minutes without commercials -- in which to morph criminal actions into heroic patriotism. Oh wait. He has a radio show, so that's like an additional three hours a day. And the O'Reilly website. But that's mostly crap like widgets and "The Factor" poo-poo cushions or whatever.
Suffice to say, it's quite obvious now that he's got nothing. He just can't keep up. So it's come down to making empty threats against people with whom he disagrees. People who don't make laws or set policy. And I personally take this as a good sign. There's hope. O'Reilly's just lashing out at random people! He can no longer find (fabricate) ways to defend the president and the Republicans -- even with his fact-checker (a monkey named Mr. Spankypants) working overtime!
The downside is that even with complete control over everything, O'Reilly's beloved pals in Washington have been unable to succeed at anything except to accumulate a laundry list of Constitution-bending scandals which we'll be digging our way out of for years to come. But the light at the end of the tunnel is rapidly approaching and fortunately for the world, the light isn't the glare off O'Reilly's bulbous forehead. (Score! Now that's a personal attack, Bill.)
Meanwhile, O'Reilly had that sexual harassment thing last year didn't he? It involved a loofa and, for some reason, a falafel. So whatever he might dig up on Frank Rich via Mr. Spankpants’ fact-checking can’t possibly top that. A falafel? Bill, Bill, Bill. A man who has alleged phone sex with underlings involving discussions of soapy lunch foods... shouldn’t throw stones.
* Not really. I didn't actually fart on anything. On purpose.