Last night, they each called the other a liar.
Who is the liar? or are they both liars?
Is Bill Oreilly really from the working classes as he claims or does he have a middle-class background?
What difference does this make anyway?
Is Bill Oreilly turning into a demagogue, now that he has bumped off Jesse Jackson?
Or is he simply a breath of fresh air.
Kinsley’s take on O’Reilly’s unwarranted reverse snobbism seemed pretty convincing to me. Eye of the beholder, as always.
I saw the show a little differently.
There were three distinct issues they dealt with.
[1] Kinsley accussed O’Reilly of fabricating a story about some sort of social dinner where two people got up and left the table rather than sit with him. O’Reilly pulled out a letter from the person who invited him, and it seemed to support his story. Kinsley than tried to weasel his way out of what he said by trying to say that he was talking about their motivations for leaving, not whether or not they acutually left.
[2] Kinsley accused O’Reilly of understating his upbringing in his biography. I could see the isue from both sides, but the bottom line is that Kinsley was making flat out statements based on what he “felt” rather than on any facts about O’Reilly’s life. (ex: he had never even been to the town where O’Reilly was raised)
[3] O’Reilly called Kinsley a coward for dodging his show. I guess this will always be a case of he said she said, since they both had different stories, and ultimately Kinsley (obviously) did come on.
Ok. Those are the facts about what happened last night.
Carry on.
Call me ignorant, but I consider the “working class” to be part of the “middle class”. Maybe the two guys needed to better define their terms.
Having forced my self to suffer throught the entire book (“The O’Reilly Factor”) I have to admit that I came away with the exact same suspicions about Mr. Bill O’Reilly as those so succinctly summarized by Mr. Michael Kinsley in his column.
Mr. O’Reilly does delight in telling and re-telling about his personal brushes with the rich and famous celebs like Donald Trump. He seems to enjoy engratiating himself with his host(s). He eagerly partakes of their generocity. He breaks bread and drinks wine with them and then he writes a book ridiculing them and their excesses. The man is not only a painfully transparent in his reverse snobbery but is a hypocrite of the highest caliber. Feh!
Look, we all know O’Reilly makes a great deal of money. I think we all know he likes to “wear” working class for his show.
He’s an entertainer. Entertainers do that sort of thing. Granted his politics put him just to the right of Goebbels, but that seems to sell for him. Look at Father Devine and George Lincoln Rockwell. It worked for them as well.
Kinsley and O’Reilley are quite successful, which may explain why they’re so full of themselves. What a pleasure it was to hear these two arrogant a******s screaming at each other. Each of them was getting what he deserved.
Having said that, I thought Kinsley came off a bit worse, because he started the battle by publishing an insufficiently researched article in the LA Times calling O’R a liar. This sounds like a smear.
But, O’Relley is so overbearing that I can’t say I feel sorry for him.