I’ll jump on the O’Reilly-bashing bandwagon for a second. I’m mystified by anyone who would claim that O’Reilly is even remotely moderate. He is hopelessly polarized on issues of which he is depressingly ignorant. His viewpoints are knee-jerk, egocentric prejudices, not reasoned arguments. I’ll give him kudos for having the 'nads to stand up and admit when bludgeoned with enough contradictory evidence on Iraq that he was wrong, but that’s the exception rather than the rule when it comes to his behaviour.
Yeah, urging terrorists to attack an American city is straight down the middle, ainnit? :rolleyes:
I agree Letterman is a smart guy, but once he said that he was not as smart as O’Reilly I think he lost all credibility with people who watch O’Reilly. It is unlike when Jon Stewart goes after somebody, where you can’t reasonably claim that Steward is an average Joe comic and dismiss his opinion.
All Letterman really achieved here was letting some people who had previously hated O’Reilly, get to see the guy treated as a joke. It makes for great entertainment and O’Reilly really does deserve it, but I think some of the people who watched the show were really hoping Dave would trash O’Reilly on the facts.
Sweet.
And now, y’know, O’Reilly is not really “rightist” or “centrist” – he’s O’Reillyist. A hard-core, hard-line, Book of O’Reilly literalist-fundamentalist. O’Reillyism just so happens that is against virtually all things Liberal, so he’s a darling with many on the Right; but he’s not really “for” all the Right-Wing pet causes when you look at it closely. A lot of the hackles he raises are on style points – if he were not such an obnoxious ass about The Truth According To Bill, the friction would be less… but of course, then he would not be so “hot”.
… and that’s the problem, because it’s all about him. Rush has a running gag about “having to work with half his brain tied behind his back to make it fair”, Howard calls himself “The King of All Media”, but O’Reilly not only often sounds and acts like he really does live and believe it, and it’s all about himself… When Dave dismisses needing to debate O’Reilly to find him mostly full of crap, that’s exactly the way to diss Bill, who depends almost exclusively of rubbing his smug moral-superiority position on others’ faces while pretending to debate them.
You might be onto something, I noticed that the intro they played was the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
What? You’re talking about the credibility of David Letterman? I was unaware he had any.
You sure can. Stewart dismisses himself and his show all the time. Sometimes he does it when he arguably shouldn’t, just to make sure people view his show as comedy and not political commentary.
Why? It’s The Late Show. It’s not even a fake news show like The Daily Show, which has some measure of political influence. Letterman doesn’t pretend to be anything other than wacky comedy. Nobody is his right mind should have expected him to get into a point-by-point political debate with Bill O’Reilly.
The most infuriating thing about all this is that I want to not care about O’Reilly. I really do. And yet, here I am, reading this whole thread, listening to Letterman (for chissakes) just to watch him get verbally bitch-slapped. The man is an evil genius.
Letterman totally softballed it…only “60% is crap”…in reality it is about 90%
Actually prior to the interview being aired he smilingly encouraged his faithful to watch it as, if I recall correctly, “interesting.”
First of all, O’Reilly isn’t news, he’s an OPINION show. So, it showcases his opinions, which he backs up with facts (albeit facts slanted to support his position) but this is no worse than what happens with Al Franken (only Al can be funnier).
O’Reilly is a conservative moralist. He doesn’t fit neatly into the definitions of Liberal or Conservative (unlike Rushbo or Franken for that matter).
Here’s the thing about Letterman, he doesn’t do a lot that isn’t planned–he can wing it and loves to give the feel of winging it, but he likes to have control of his show (for the top ten lists alone, he requires a list of 20 items from each writer). Honestly, people on this board are taking the whole exchange much more seriously than either Letterman or O’Reilly. It was a pretty shallow debate, nothing particularly deep. They both agree that, not only will we be there a while, but we probably should, and that a functioning Democracy in Iraq is best for all, not just America (whether it is possible is another matter). Letterman thinks O’Reilly is 60% crap, but has only read about his show, which means his experience is filtered. O’Reilly thinks he should watch a half hour of The Flapper(Factor) and make his own mind up.
At the risk of sending this to the pit, We broke it, we bought it. We owe it not only to ourselves, but the world to fix it, not run out on it. Not do some half-a$$ed patch job and leave it to crumble in a few years (as was done with Germany after WW I).
Reasonable people can disagree – disagree with O’Reilly, but he often gives a logical argument for why he thinks what he does – you don’t have to agree with either him or his facts, but rather than dismiss, you should investigate for yourself. Anybody who tells you anything skews it through their own perception (meaning to or not). Check your facts, check his facts, get your news and information from as many sources as you can muster (NPR, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WSJ, Liberal and Conservative bloggers), but for Og’s sake, don’t dismiss someone simply because they are an a$$hole – even they can be right from time to time. The truth doesn’t lie at one end or the other, but somewhere in between. Don’t be either a liberal or a conservative Dittohead – either is a failure to live up to your own potential and the detriment of all.
I’m sorry, but the smugness of postings in this particular forum are as irritating as O’Reilly’s smugness can be (but not quite as bad as Rush or Franken). Don’t be what you hate, in fact don’t hate, but rather educate yourselves and others.
My apologies if I’ve overstepped or hurt anyone’s feelings, I just am tired of these childish “am not” “is too” debates.
ddgrypon, you make some good points, but, as I mentioned earlier, I’m strangely drawn to O’Reilly and have in fact seen enough of him to feel I’ve got a good handle on his schtick. My personal vitriol i based on the fact that the man trumpets his opinions in a “No Spin Zone,” which is just double-speak, plain and simple. Sure, I’ve found myself agreeing with him from time to time (to my chagrin, I will add), but the point is, if you’re looking for reasonable discourse, you’ve got to look elsewhere. O’Reilly THRIVES on getting people heated, on being heated, and facts, well, facts be damned. To say that he does anything but pay lip service to the facts is, in my experience, patently false. He tries to give you that impression, but watch next time someone else tries to mention a fact or two. Pure anger spews forth.
Less longwindedly: You aren’t going to get reasonable discussion on his show or about him. It’s not his aim. He just wants us to talk about him.
Which we’re doing.
Like I said, evil genius.
In other news: I need to go on a comma diet.
Ahh. Is that what “no spin” and “we report, you decide” means?
(O’Reilly → facts) = (Rabbi → pork)
And you misspoke:
(text insertion mine)
No, that’s what an opinion show is–he doesn’t report for us to decide, he decides for us. As for “No Spin Zone” it means at least have something resembling examples or facts at your disposal for whatever you say. In short, you can’t say just spout opinion, you have to support that opinion with examples.
No, a Rabbi won’t eat pork and call it chicken, O’reilly will offer disputable ideas as facts.
Again, no more and no less than any other talking head on any other show offered.
C-span is about the only place to observe events without a lens focusing you one place or another or with “Talking heads” telling you what you just heard.
So, again, no, he doesn’t twist, he slants, like everybody else.
I usually cringe at these political threads in Cafe Society, but when the target is Bill O’Reilly (an indefatigable blowhard) I can’t help but be delighted. He is the Michael Moore of conservatives — a weasel who won’t admit what he is, but whose clearly targeted pandering betrays that he knows what he is.
So when the fact is that fundamentalist parents were complaining about resistance to having their son distribute toy candy canes with a printed attachment saying that the red symbolizes the blood of Christ and the green somehow represents Christ’s gift to mankind, and that “Every time you see a Candy Cane, remember the Wonder of Jesus and His Great Love that came down at Christmas, and that His Love remains the ultimate and dominant force in the universe today,” but were told that witnessing material had to be distributed at a designated “community” area instead of at the party itself (to avoid running into Establishment Clause trouble,) — an incident where the only mention of a prohibition of the colours “red” and “green” was in the complaint filed by their lawyers, which was settled before it went to court – when these are the facts…
There’s absolutely no spin on them when he says that Christmas is being supressed to the point where a Plano school actualled banned the colours red and green from the school? First he says that the kids weren’t allowed to wear red and green clothing, and then he backtracks and says that red and green napkins and plates were banned, because, you know, the school asked volunteers to bring white ones.
No spin. None at all.
Taking lyrics from a Christmas pageant play that is usually performed in churches out of context and falsely implying that it meant a school had redacted all mention of Christmas from their concert and made it only about the season of winter? No spin there?
When you take the barest germ of a fact and use to make a case for something that simply isn’t true, that’s beyond spin – it’s akin to spinning shit from straw.
That’s nothing – O’Reilly lectured John McCain on the subject of torture.
I haven’t seen Letterman like that in years.
I Tivo Letterman every night so I watched the whole interview. I don’t think Letterman was feeling all that great to begin with. The cat skit, the Top 10 List (“How things would be different if Trump ran for Governor”) and “Give Up Your New Year’s Resolution” skit all kinda fell flat. So I think Dave was grumpy before O’Reilly stepped foot on stage. Then when O’Reilly came out and said he had a nice “winter’s solstice”, because he just can’t seem to step out of his smart-ass persona, it just put Dave over the top.
Now, as far as the interview, I didn’t like it. I think it’s highly impolite to invite a guest on your show and then skewer him. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I hated it when Rosie O’Donnell did it to the Magnum P.I. dude (what the hell is his name?), I hated it when Terry Gross did it to Lynn Cheny, and I hated it when Letterman did it to O’Reilly. I vaguely recall O’Reilly doing it to a guest, too, but I can’t recall the specifics so shame on him, too.
The country is so polarized lately. Can’t we just keep politics out of entertainment and vice versa. I watch Letterman and Leno to ESCAPE divisive politics.
[Professor Farnsworth] Good news, everybody! There’s a new Daily Show tonight! [/PF]
No he does not, which is why he shouldn’t have said O’Reilly’s opinion is nonsense unless he had some solid facts to back up his opinion. Dave can make fun of the phone sex all he wants, but telling the man his opinion is nonsense while admitting he does not know anything himself seems very cheap. It would have been a more powerful blow to O’Reilly if Dave didn’t say that and I was hoping for the maximum amount of damage to O’Reilly’s credibility.
Jon Stewart may dismiss his own credibility at times, but you won’t see him say that someone is full of shit but he does not know how to prove it.
Actually, since most main stream news programs don’t do it, people are looking for anyone to trash O’Reilly. Why do you think everyone gets so excited when Jon trashes a spin doctor? It is because no one else is doing it. I think that people are hoping for someone to stand up to O’Reilly’s crap and they are also hoping that they will do it with some facts so that the damage will last. Dave is a long shot, but he pulled himself ahead of most of the actual news media with his show on Tuesday. They can’t even say O’Reilly’s a pile of crap, much less prove it.
I did not expect Dave to have facts; I was just hoping he did. And I got disappointed when he didn’t (not that much really.) Is it really far fetched for someone to hope that O’Reilly’s opinion gets dismantled with facts by everyone he talks to? Do we really not want to see this guy get off the air as fast as possible?
On Jan. 12 Bill will appear on Good Morning America. I actually have more fate in Leno.