It's Official: Bill O'Reilly is a Big Fathead

I try to run a family show here at Relay, so I don't use the monicker beginning with the letter "F" I wanted to. I can only handle Bill O'Reilly in small bits, but I force myself to watch from time to time so I can learn what is going on in his twisted, egomanical brain. This past Tuesday, Bill-o led off with a report on Haditha and an interview with Wesley Clark. Well, I thought, Clark can handle the falafel guy, so this might be interesting. The interview started off about how I expected it; it was no surprise that O'Reilly immediately tried to pooh-pooh the alleged events at Haditha as "one of those things that happen in war." But as he presented his "evidence" of this, I stopped and did an intellectual double-take. Had I just heard O'Reilly actually say that the massacre at Malmedy was committed by Americans against the Nazis? Even my History Channel-education of World War II knows that is flat out ass-backwards. It was "historical fact," according the the O man. Clark immediately jumped on O'Reilly's premise from the point of view that atrocities against soldiers are a completely different subject than atrocities against civilians; he must not have picked up on the Malmedy reference. My first reaction was, "man, is O'Reilly an arrogant ignoramus." My second reaction was, "what will Olbermann do with this?"

Keith Olbermann, if you don't know, is the host of my favorite news program, Countdown, on MSNBC at the same 8:00 time as O'Reilly. Olbermann has had a rather snarky and sometimes nasty rivalry going on with O'Reilly for some time. Olbermann is an old school journalist who doesn't have much time for punditry and takes a journalist's responsibility for getting facts straight very, very seriously. He revels in exposing the outrageous, stupid, and often just incorrect things that O'Reilly regularly says as if they were established truth. O'Reilly counters by snippedly refusing to mention Olbermann's name, instead usually referring to him as the "smear merchant" who has the 8:00 show on MSNBC. O'Reilly lobs ad hominems, but never actually corrects any of the charges made against him. Probably because he can't. Instead, he does silly stunts like raising a petition to MSNBC to replace Olbermann on the air, and lobbing his ratings v. Olbermann's in the latter's face, as if popularity equals validity. Olbermann's pointed attacks on O'Reilly are almost always done satirically because, I think, Olbermann rather enjoys having a buffoon to expose.

I got my answer to how Olbermann would respond to O'Reilly last night. And it was a doozy. There was no humor in Olbermann's response; he was obviously pissed. He devoted an entire segment of his show to O'Reilly's stupid comment and brought up some interesting things I hadn't known before, like for example, this was the second time in eight months that O'Reilly blamed Malmedy on American soldiers, and that Fox News changed their online transcript of the show to remove the reference to Malmedy.

It was one of the most scathing editorials I've ever seen on television, and it is compelling in its righteous anger. I recommend checking out all 7:49 of it, including “Stewie” from Family Guy's intro, here.