O'Strawman

Bill O'Reilly was in rare form Thursday night. First he bashed Hillary Clinton for daring to refer to Jesus in relation to a political issue. (The segment in which Bill ass-rapes Bill Frist for this little stunt is presumably only available to premium members on his website.)

Typical O'Reilly tactic: Quote someone saying something outrageous, agree repeatedly, act as if playing devil's advocate, and then back away from it.

In this case, it was some random preacher who said Clinton was "despicable" for using Jesus' name in a political context. O'Reilly parroted the statement multiple times, and then when confronted by the token liberal (an attractive blonde, incidentally), said, "hey, I don't think she's a bad person."

Yeah, right. Media Matters has more on the segment's O'inconsistencies, including when Bill suddenly gets his Divinity degree. What they don't have there is the part where O'Reilly opines on how Clinton's religiosity is "obviously" fake. Nice double-standard. Democrats invoking faith must be full of it, and Repubs are always sincere? Good to know.

But Father Bill isn't done. Next up, he has a Black woman on to talk about PETA's latest mornic stunt. Not satisfied with Holocaust on Your Plate, they've thought up a new outrageous trick to get media attention: compare chicken farms with the slave trade. Ridiculous? Of course. So what's to discuss? The strawman, of course.

O'Reilly: what do you think about this?
Woman: I'm outraged. It's horribly offensive, etc.
O'Reilly: Don't you think that this shows that various liberal groups who like to compare themselves to you are out of touch?
Woman: Yes.
O'Reilly: Like the gays, for instance. They say that denying them marriage is like denying you guys rights.
Woman: And it's absolutely ridiculous, and offensive. Don't use us as your poster boys for your struggle, we have problems of our own!
O'Reilly: Yeah, those gays, they just don't appreciate the differences... marriage is a privilege, not a right. It's not like eating at a lunch counter.

O'Reilly conveniently avoids citing any example of any gay groups comparing gay marriage to the slave trade. The only semi-comparison I can recall (and I followed some of the s-s-m controversy fairly closely) was the argument that "saying that s-s-m will destroy society is ridiculous. People said the same thing about inter-racial marriages 50 years ago." Obviously, not the same thing, O'Douchebag.

And incidentally- how is being able to eat lunch where you want substantially more of a right than being allowed to marry whom you want? Feel free to point me to the "lunch counter" ammendment, Bill.

Incidentally, Bill's also full of it when he claims that his show is "number one in cable news"- Fox's ratings, and O'Reilly's in particular, have been steadily dropping since the beginning of 2006. Is this a sign that people are becoming smarter, or more liberal? I doubt it. It probably has more to do with the fact that (if my household's viewing tendencies are at all representative) most people can only take so much of "the Factor" before they get the urge to shove a falafel through O'Reilly's nose.