Poor Bill O'Reilly. Throughout the March 26 appearance of his guest, Caroline Fredrickson, he treated her with hostility. Ultimately, with a sneer, he pfffted! her arguments about how the Supreme Court would rule on the Affordable Care Act. He promised if he was wrong, he would apologize to her and admit that he is an idiot. He was wrong. Called upon by various parties to live up to his promise, on Monday, he offered a 10-second nopology in which he said he wasn't really sorry and then pivoted into the usual left-baiting bombast about one of the organizations that asked him to live up to that vow.
Everybody makes bad predictions. You can read them in comments and diary posts here every day. We all do it. Nothing to apologize for when speculation smacks into reality. What made O'Reilly's remarks to Fredrickson so obnoxious was the absolutism, the no-way-I-could-possibly-be-mistaken-YOU'RE-an-idiot tone he chose. She is hardly his only target. Unprovoked, fact-free eye-pokes are his stock-in-trade.
His overall mistreatment of her ought to have been the subject of a genuine apology running the whole five-plus minutes on Monday. But nope, not a word. The issue, he repeatedly made clear, was totally the product of leftist partisans out. to. get. him.
Vintage Bill. The usual toxic spew. Not only did he use the nopology to repeatedly stab various critics, he also brought on the show one of his favorite sycophants, Bernie "Baseball Bat" Goldberg, to help him out by telling him how unfair the whole matter was and stroke his ego for few minutes.
O'Reilly and I both attended parochial school, he much longer than I. So I know he has heard more than a few times what real repentance, really being sorry, requires: An act of contrition, introspection about one's misbehavior and a vow to avoid repeating whatever action led to the need for contrition in the first place. Instead, what we got was a claws out, teeth-bared snarling blast at the left punctuated by his sanctimonious snickering.
O'Reilly's hostile treatment of Fredrickson will no doubt be repeated with future guests. It's a feature not a bug. Anyone who anticipates getting an apology when he or she is mistreated'whether O'Reilly promises to offer one or not'might as well be counting on "fair and balanced" and "no-spin" to become reality at Foxaganda instead of the biggest pile of manure in North America.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.
No comments:
Post a Comment