|
|
|
IS THIS THE O'REILLY THEY SPEAK OF SO HIGHLY?
|
|
"...Is this the O'Reilly that owns the hotel?" Those are all the lines I
know of the old song that anticipated the arrival of Big Bill the Bad Man of
Brimstone. The first thing you notice about him is that he sure is mad. It’s his
career. He denounces the usual targets, who have names like Teddy and
Hillary, but reserves the heavy metal for people that have personally offended him.
They catch it good. Some of them are Bill Moyers, Charles Grodin and
somebody named Lloyd Grove, a television critic. They are raked from stem to stern
with everything in the arsenal. It could have been a scene in The Longest Day.
I derived all this from a look at "Who’s Looking Out For You?", O’Reilly’s
latest book describing his hand-to-hand combats with those who go where the
brave dare not venture and tangle with him on the O’Reilly Factor. Some of them
are worthy opponents and some of them are as unworthy as mad cow beef. There’
s just not much to be said for the American Civil Liberties Union and its
campaign to repeal Christianity, or for the California lawyers who offered to
disclose the burial site of a murder victim if their client was excused the death
penalty. When the body was discovered independently and the deal fell
through, the lawyers turned around and defended his innocence while trying to
implicate the victim’s parents.
This is the high point of the book. O"Reilly succeeded in smoking out the
California Bar Association, who insisted that the lawyers had a "right and a
duty" to lie for their client. They have high standards in California; first
they bagged the Simpson case after blowing the first Menendez case, now they tell
the world that only witnesses, never lawyers, can be made to tell the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth in one of their jackleg courts.
Arrogance couldn’t go any farther. Ole´, O’Reilly.
That’s looking out for the people, which is the message embodied in the title
of the book. Bill’s theme is that ordinary people are disregarded by those
with power in our society. The guilty parties include negligent parents,
selfish celebrities, Clintons, other politicians, corporate wrongdoers, a
thundering herd in fact, whose hoofbeats shake the prairies.
Bill takes them all on. It’s easier to name them than to describe the
outrages he blames them for. The Clintons get it for selling pardons, for junkets,
for muddy boots and a number of other things. George Bush is pummeled for
protecting Clinton and his own father from investigation of money they made in
various ways. Governor Jeb Bush gets it for allowing a foster child to fall
through the cracks in Florida’s welfare system. The Immigration and
Naturalization Service is denounced in toto. The entertainment business comes off just as
poorly as might be expected.
I don’t write to disagree with any of this. The targets he picks are the
same ones I would aim at myself…in most cases. What bothers me about O’Reilly
is the way he has of detaching himself from the conservative masses by
insisting that he is not actually a conservative himself. One of his ways of
ingratiating himself with the hip types is the use of bits of doggerel verse by
people I never heard of as chapter headings. Is he really this crazy about rock
and roll? I doubt it. But there it is.
To further prove his ecumenicism he includes lots of disclaimers of forbidden
anti-liberal intentions, along with quite a bit of gushing over questionable
people like Bobby Kennedy, and sideswipes at a long list of outcasts who have
been so greatly abused by the left that the least that rightists can do is lay
off them and stop buying into what the enemy says about them. Louis XVI and
Marie Antoinette? Guillotined by the Reds over two hundred years ago? Why do
they bother Bill? True, they’ve had a bad press all that time, but isn’t
that just the liberal media at it again? (Louis got in trouble because he
bankrupted France supporting George Washington, an O'Reilly hero). And the
American cardinals? Just because they did things the good old Nixon-Clinton-Johnson
American way and covered up their mistakes? Nobody thinks they had anything
to do with the crimes of the pervert priests, but O’Reilly puts them in the
same bag because with ruin facing the church, they took the only action they
could, evasion. Let the church’s enemies affect to believe that they were
complicit in crime, but let the rest of us withhold judgment and extend a little
understanding. If they had tried to keep the perverts out of the church they
would be getting the same treatment as the Boy Scouts, and for all we know Billo
would be denouncing them for exclusionism.
In the end though, we see that Bill hits a lot more of the right targets than
the wrong ones and, even more welcome than that, irritates a lot of people
whom one likes to see irritated. There can’t be much wrong with a man who goes
mud wrestling with the New York Times and the ACLU simultaneously, while
trying to get through them to get at Blessed Walter Cronkite. He seems to lack the
faculty of reverence -- if Bobby Kennedy had lived he’d probably be after
him or Edward R. Murrow or Martin Luther King or some other consecrated idol
-- so nothing’s sacred. He saves all his reverence for himself. It’s very
impressive. Someone said it before me, but I’ll say it anyhow, "He’s a
self-made man who adores his creator".
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
