Some of you may have heard (and I’d be surprised if it isn’t most people) that Bill O’Reilly is in the news again for making comments about how similar a black restaurant was to the experience of dining in a white restaurant.
I’m certainly no fan of Bill O’Reilly’s. Like most personalities on Fox News, after about 5 minutes of listening to him, my B.S. meter goes off-the-chart. He’s got a long, long history of fabricating information and stories and outright lying about elements of different topics including his own past. He also often sounds elitist to me. Much as Rush Limbaugh does. By the way, just yesterday, I heard Rush say in surprise, “How can you even have a 2,400 square foot house in an upscale neighborhood?” Typical comment from someone so stuck in their own world that they shouldn’t be commenting about the rest of it. Bill is the same way. He’s continually amazed to find out things the rest of us knew all along, like that dining in an upscale restaurant is similar no matter what race of people frequent it.
What always gets me with people like Mr. O’Reilly is their continual need to go on the attack after these silly comments are made. It’s clear to me that Bill O’Reilly was attempting to say something nice in his comments. The fact of the matter is that he chose his words poorly. It was a stupid mistake to go phrasing it the way he did and it’s no one else’s fault that he said it that way. I’m tired of this guy’s rants (and others) against outlets like Media Matters that post his comments verbatim. I want to know how people like Bill O’Reilly can claim that Media Matters took his comments out-of-context when they posted them verbatim? Bill does this all the time. It’s never his fault.
I understand his problem. If he apologized for every mistake he made in his comments most of his shows would be dominated by corrective statements of past mistakes. The problem is that you look ridiculous trying to attack everyone else for your own stupid comments. Bill O’Reilly is a typical, every day kind of person who managed to work hard and make a name for himself in this world. The problem is that he’s also typical in that he cannot easily admit to mistakes and also has the propensity to lie or exaggerate when pushed on something. That combination is a continual tinder box of activity. It means we’re going to have an endless array of things to talk about for as long as he is in the public eye. It’s the reason I tune into his show from time-to-time. You never know when he’s going to say the next stupid thing.
