The piece is perfectly nice and laudatory. It’s not really political – it’s more about praising him for how he became President than anything about political ideology – but it’s surprisingly decent for Bill O’Reilly.
He’s also been very disparaging of the Birthers lately, calling the whole issue “nonsense,” and dressing down Birther guests about it.
What’s going on with Billo? Did somebody slip some Ecstasy into his motherfucking iced tea?
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Glenn Beck has reportedly lost several major sponsors after calling Obama a racist. O’Reilly has never been as thoroughly a GOP shill as Hannity or Beck (or as dumb), so maybe he’s realizing that the conservative media wingnuts are teetering on the edge right now, and he’s trying to pull it back a little to preserve some kind of credibility and commercial viability.
Anyway – it’s a nice little piece. Props to Papa Bear for this one.
I also don’t think that O’Rielly is quite as bad as he’s been depicted sometimes. Oh, sure, he has plenty of blowhard moments, but the level of vilification he’s received from some I always thought a little over the top.
What sometimes gets lost with these commentators, when people take them seriously and jump all over them for their most outlandish and partisan statements, is that they don’t just parrot talking points. Their individual personae make people interested in the selling of the talking points. O’Reilly cultivates that straight-talking thing, the No-Spin Zone and so forth. He’s a no-nonsense guy who’ll tell it to you like it is and not sugarcoat it. I don’t believe it for a second, but that’s his angle, and he wouldn’t be where he is if he was not good at it. Sean Hannity’s thing is that he loves America more than anybody, and Glenn Beck’s thing is that he’s terrified of impending doom, to the point that he’s bug-eyed, batshit crazy and nearly incoherent. The list goes on.
Most of what O’Reily writes here is on-target, although the thing about computers comes off as old-man grumpiness. Given who he is, you wonder if he calls Obama “Barry” as a dig, but I’ll cut O’Reilly a break and assume he’s just trying to humanize him for younger readers. Yeah, in a sense he’s just trying to gain some credibility by showing he’s not a knee-jerk Obama critic. But for the most part what he says is true and he seems to be earnest when he says these are positive qualities.
No way. He’s got a high-profile, high-paying job where he has essentially no responsibility. Why give that up to run for office and all the gruntwork involved in politics?
I think the Andrea Mackris thing probably killed any political potential he might have had, but I don’t get the impression it’s ever been anything he’s aspired to anyway.
It’s only shocking if you assumed all along that Bill O’Reilly was something he isn’t.
I didn’t vote for Obama, and never would. That said, it would be silly for me to deny that…
He’s one of the few truly eloquent orators in modern American politics
He’s a smart, personable guy- someone I’d probably like if I knew him (we passed through Columbia University at the same time, incidentally, though I don’t THINK I ever met him)
He seems like a genuinely devoted husband, father and all around family man.
If he inspires black kids to aim higher and study harder and achieve more, that can only be a GOOD thing for America.
I can see that, and so can Bill O’Reilly.
It will be a REAL surprise when I see you (or Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow) give comparable credit to ANY major conservative.
I guess I will say that I think Bill O’Reilly has more intellectual honesty by far than Hannity, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or Lou Dobbs, but he is often a real dick to his guests.
Dont put Rachel Maddow into the same level of partisan bickering that Olbermann engages in. Maddow is critical, but often against Dems too.
If I may be cynical here, I doubt Bill’s intentions were anything less than calculating. More like he saw the writing on the wall and that the birthers are dragging down the party and he had to somehow make a play for future credibility’s sake. By tomorrow he’ll be back to his old shilling ways for the GOP, only this time he’ll be able to cite a recent example in which he praised a Dem
Seriously? Maddow considers Pat Bucannan a personal friend, calling him her “Fake Uncle Pat” and used to have a segment on her show called “It’s Pat” to debate politics with him. Keith would never do so, but Rachel is very dedicated to the traditional liberal concept that we can talk anything over and acheive, if not understanding of the other side’s position, even if we’ll never agree. Hell, her guest last night was the smarmy corporate dick organizing the shout down campaign.
O’Reilly was never as much of a soulless, vapid cheerleader for far-right ideology as the people who seem to have completely taken over, i.e. Glenn Beck and Michael Savage. O’Reilly seems like he is actually an intelligent man and I used to watch his TV show frequently. O’Reilly did once try to seduce a woman who worked for him by having long phone conversations with her about vibrators, even saying that he owned a vibrator himself (in his words, “a little cock with a battery in it”) and that he was using it on himself while he was talking to her; he tried to have phone sex with her numerous times. He told her strange tales of his sexual adventures, such as a woman at a sex show in Thailand who “showed him things that blew his mind” - he even said to this female employee that he wanted to rub her boobs with a “falafel,” when he meant to say “loofah.” Because of this, I can never read anything involving O’Reilly without chuckling to myself.
But the truth is, I think as political commentators go, he’s a decent one, especially on the conservative side. He’s an asshole, but the other talking heads on the right wing are really much more pathetic and ridiculous. O’Reilly at least has some credibility from his work on Inside Edition and the fact that he was a foreign correspondent for CBS in the 80s. I think as a newsman he’s fairly legitimate. I also think a lot of stuff that he’s been attacked for was unwarranted. The whole incident where he was talking about the black restaurant in Harlem and was shouted down as a racist by a billion people - ridiculous. He was trying to say something positive, but it got all turned around on him. It’s ridiculous to expect an “open” “honest” “dialog” about race in America when any white person who says anything about black people gets drawn and quartered at the slightest perception of racism.
He got shouted down because his comments revealed he was carrying some pretty stupid stereotypes about black people being rude and uncivilized. Not as nasty as thinking they’re thieves who rape white women, but still, quite stupid and derogatory. It’s not surprising people got on his case for it.
