Countdown: Bill O'Reilly's "Lynching Party"
We're talking about Bill O'Reilly here so I am not even going to pretend that I am shocked. It's not even that he's trying to be outrageous, he isn't. He's actually trying to be fair here. That's the really pitiful thing about all this. He's such a creature of another political age that he simply doesn't get how offensive he's being.
Eugene Robinson detects a certain amount of low level racism in O'Reilly's comments and it's hard to argue with the evidence. Although, to be honest, I don't think Bill even realises that he's being racist when he spouts this shit.
After all this is the man who said this about a visit to Sylvia's Restaurant of Harlem.
So, it's no surprise that a man like this will use the term "lynching" and not realise it's significance. What's stunning is that Fox continue to give this dinosaur a platform.
After all, David Shuster was suspended for his innappropriate comments regarding Chelsea Clinton. Will Fox do the same thing here and suspend O'Reilly? I doubt it... They'll say it didn't happen on Fox, so it doesn't matter... But it does. It really does.
Orcinus, as always, gets to the point more succinctly than I ever could:
Suppose, back in 2000, that Joe Lieberman were reported to have said something that right-wingers immediately cast as being anti-American. And in discussing it, someone -- oh, say, Bill O'Reilly -- went on the air and semi-defended him thus:I don't think we ought to send Joe Lieberman to the gas chambers unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the man really feels. If that's how he really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.Do you think anyone would have found that acceptable? Do you think he'd have been able to get away with a refusal to apologize for the inappropriateness of the remark?
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