This little piece of wonder was from FOX Nov. 6 election night coverage.
I always knew Bill O’Reilly was a nasty, arrogant man but I never realized how deeply that arrogance ran until I saw his reaction to Barack Obama's likely reelection to the presidency of the United States. His response to the Megyn Kelly’s almost child-like question of “how could this have happened?” doesn’t just border on misogyny and racism; it crosses the border, builds a house and starts a family. It is a stupid, hateful response delivered with that special touch of O’Reilly arrogance in which he tries to appear as a learned pundit while completely insulting his fellow citizens. It is an amazing moment made even more so not only by the blatancy of it, but by the fact that he was never called out by the Kelly or the station on the sheer bigotry of the statement.
He actually said, “The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?” And no one at FOX thought it might be a good idea to cut his mich.
You can’t really expect better from O’Reilly. This is a man so in love with himself that he actually believes his self-proclaimed publicity about his own grandeur. When it’s convenient, he fancies himself a journalist, a claim which might have at one time been true but is now a ship that has sailed so far from shore you can’t even see it. He is the bully who instinctually knows that if he blusters loudly and long enough, the other person will back down from sheer weariness.
So talented a man is he for spreading bullshit he’s probably at this point able to completely convince himself that the crap he says is true. I have no doubt that in his mind, women and brown people did not vote for Obama because they felt more confidence in his vision than they did in that of his opponent’s. No, in the little mind of Bill O’Reilly, women and brown people voted for Obama because they want stuff and he promised to give them stuff (Rush Limbaugh, O’Reilly’s radio twin in assholishness, stated that the women and brown people “didn’t want to kill Santa”).
In other words, per these two creatures that have far too much influence over people, women and brown people are lazy children looking for a hand out. These modern day versions of Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens” want some of that free stuff that Obama has been promising (though for the life of me, I can’t figure out what free stuff they’re talking about. I’ve never heard him make any such promise). The racial makeup of America is changing, and in their minds, the numbers of white men, the bastions of the pure work ethic, are decreasing. So the numbers of the women and brown people (who I’m guessing per O’Reilly’s implication don’t understand hard work) were large enough to help Obama be victorious. And now the white men will be forced to give all their money to the government to support the women and brown people.
It is an amazingly racist claim that had I not actually heard it from the mouth of Bill himself, I would have thought was something made up in a political sketch on SNL.
And it’s a rather hypocritical statement coming from a man who professes to be Christian. This good Catholic boy insulted great swaths of his fellow Americans by basically calling them freeloaders. Bill O’Reilly decries the war on Christmas while he declares war on his fellow tax paying, law abiding citizens. And here’s one of the problems with that: O’Reilly has a viewership made up primarily of morons who are willing to believe every idiotic claim he spews and are only too happy to accept the premise that nation is being taken down by the freeloading of the brown people.
Let’s just move the pieces representing race relations about ten squares back on the board.
Days after Barack Obama’s win, the GOP has offered a number of memes to explain how he was reelected. They range from changing demographics, to the timing of Hurricane Sandy, to (and this is rich) the claim that Obama’s camp was guilty of voter suppression. It will be interesting to see if O’Reilly vacillates on the reasons as his masters have been, or if he will stick with the “blame it on the freeloaders” theory he posited on election night.
I suspect, however, one reason (a real reason, not a reason made up out of fear and desperation) for Obama’s win could be that while President Obama was thanking his staff for a job well done; Mitt Romney was calling to cancel the credit cards of his campaign staff before they even made it home in their taxis. It’s the difference between a man expressing thoughtfulness and gratitude, and the cold mentality of a man who is able to transform the worth of a campaign staff into that of a load of fat that needs to be trimmed.
Newly reelected President Obama thanks his staff
