The L.A. Times ran a profile of Bill O’Reilly this week, suggesting he’s becoming more mellow.
“In the last year, (Glenn) Beck has replaced O’Reilly as the network’s lightning rod,” the Times reported. “While Beck’s denunciations of big government have made him a hero of the Tea Party movement, he has drawn sharp criticism for his dark warnings about Obama, particularly his claim that the president is ‘racist,’ triggering an advertising boycott of his show organized by an African American advocacy group.”
For his part, O’Reilly told the Times: “I can destroy lives. And I’m not going to do that until I’m 100 percent convinced that the person deserves what they get.”
And as for our president, O’Reilly has declared that he did not believe Obama was a socialist after all. Gone are the days of the O’Reilly freakouts, Gawker reports. (See video below).
Gawker also raises this point about O’Reilly: “He still denies any responsibility for ramping up hatred against abortion doctor George Tiller (you know, the hatred that got him killed) saying he ‘reported the story accurately.’
“So we must have misheard when we thought he said ‘…if I could get my hands on Tiller — well, you know. Can’t be vigilantes. Can’t do that. It’s just a figure of speech,’ which is not, of course, suggestive in any way.”
It’s too bad the Times didn’t probe deeper on this issue — or a widely publicized sexual harassment lawsuit, which called O’Reilly’s judgment into question.
As for Beck: “I’m just a human meat shield for the guy,” he told the Times. Here’s the video of O’Reilly in less mellow days:
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O’Reilly is a “mellow moderate” only in the Faux News political spectrum, which ranges from right-wing (on the left) to extreme-right-wing (in the middle) to weird psychopathology (on the right).
John Dean, in his “Conservatives Without Conscience,” has written the definitive study of the whole authoritarian spectrum.
O’Reilly sees no connection between his year-long rampage branding “Dr. Tiller the Baby-Killer” and the doctor’s murder, even though the sane world sees it clearly enough.
Michael Savage, another of that ilk, called the poor kidnap victim, Elizabeth Smart, a “slut.”
I don’t know what to say about the weird psychopathology of Glenn Beck, but Jon Stewart nails him, here:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Morning-Vid-Jon-Stewarts-Epic-15-Minute-Glenn-Beck-Lampoon-2899
I will say they’re all vile, and — bottom line for me — none of them would be welcome in our home.
But then, I used to worry about what excuse I could make if Bush asked to drop by.