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Bill O'Reilly is such a narcissist that he didn't bother discussing President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech -- which was one of the most newsworthy items of the day yesterday -- until the second half of his show. Nope, first on his list of priorities was to rant and rave about a fictional TV show that dared to have a character who openly called out O'Reilly and his conservative colleagues for the hatemongering nativists they really are.

That's all it takes to set off patented BillO Rampage. 'Law and Order' is just out of control for O'Reilly, and the show's creator, Dick Wolf, is his target.

L&O: Garrison, Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, all of them. They are like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate. They have convinced folks that immigrants are the problem, not corporations that failed to pay a living wage, or a broken health care system.

O'Reilly: That is defamatory.

Bill, this is not reality. Then again, Bill believes George C. Scott's portrayal of Patton was real too. BillO then proceeds to play a few select clips from 2005 and earlier where he actually sounded (albeit ever so briefly) like he was defending poor illegal immigrants on his show. Sorry Bill, we know better, and so does Geraldo Rivera. I guess he forgot this meltdown between the two over BillO's vilification of illegals in the country.

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Here's a flashback from Apr 04, 2007:

GERALDO: "Cool your jets! It has nothing to do with illegal aliens...it has to do with drunk driving! Don't obscure a tragedy to make a cheap political point. It is a cheap political point and you know it!!"

As Silent Patriot noted, Bill did the same thing with the tragic Bronx fire just the month before. He just loves exploiting these isolated incidents to, as Geraldo says, to make "cheap political points."

Back then, Oliver Willis pointed out: "A young girl was tragically killed by a drunk driver. But this was not enough for O'Reilly. Instead, because the criminal was an illegal alien he added this incident to his ongoing crusade against the brown people. Luckily Geraldo was on the show and he - to his credit - called out O'Reilly's xenophobia for exactly what it was. This drove Bill O'Reilly insane. I was almost certain he was going to reach across the table and hit Geraldo."

Ah, but really, he's a nice guy now. Really.

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What hath Republicans wrought?

Sure, they believed, as John noted the other day, that when they were unleashing what Bill Kristol likes to call "guided populism", they were in fact opening the gates for right-wing populism. And now they're looking not only at a a phenomenon much more popular than the standard Republican brand, but a movement that is about to swallow them whole.

And the Tea Party organizers -- notably the Astroturf outfits that originated the Parties, such as FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity -- are making that perfectly clear. Two spokesmen for those groups -- Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks and the AFP's Tim Phillips, went on Hardball yesterday and made this explicit:

MATTHEWS: Matt, how about third party? What about the Tea Party? Sarah Palin is kind of hard to read. She is fascinating. Let‘s face it, we‘re all fascinated with her, because she‘s exciting as a political figure right now. But she‘s talking third party. I mean, she answered the question of Lars Larson. Maybe it just came to mind, but she said, yeah, I might go third party, something like that. Would you guys knock off an incumbent Republican by going third party? You know how the vote splits. Split the right, the Dem wins.

KIBBE: The better way to do it is to take over the Republican party. Frankly, that‘s what our goal is. We need to replace the Republican establishment with fiscal conservatives that are actually willing to cut spending.

All this talk about a "third party" is just so much smokescreen. What's actually happening is that the GOP is fast becoming a full-fledged right-wing-populist entity. Which means that the latent extremism lurking out on the right's fringes for so many years is becoming its new lifeblood, such as it is.

Funny thing is, as Matthews managed to point out early in the segment, not even the Tea Partiers' supposed hero -- Ronald Reagan -- can live up to their standards:

MATTHEWS: Has there ever been a strong conservative president, for example, in your lifetime or anybody—your grandfather‘s lifetime? Who do you look to as a good role model for the tea party people?

KIBBE: Well, obviously, Ronald Reagan is the closest thing we have.

MATTHEWS: What did he do in terms of fiscal policy?

KIBBE: Oh, he—he said that we shouldn't spend money we don‘t have, and he said that the government shouldn't get involved in things that it‘s not very good at doing.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Yes. Have you ever checked the numbers with Reagan?

KIBBE: Well, I understand. I understand...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: The national debt went from under $1 trillion to $3 trillion. He did more to increase exponentially the size of the debt of any president in history.

And he's your role model.

KIBBE: Well, President Obama is...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, I'm asking you. I have asked you one president that you can look up to who was good at tea party politics and ideology.

KIBBE: Right. Right.

MATTHEWS: If it's not Reagan, because he clearly didn't do it, who do you look to? Coolidge? How far do you have to look back?

KIBBE: I think we need to find somebody that can meet that standard.

MATTHEWS: So, nobody has recently?

KIBBE: No, certainly not.

Ah well. Blowing off cognitive dissonance is a special teabagger trait. It just adds to their "insane" mystique.

Republicans may have thought these guys had their backs. But now they're looking with increasing worry back over their shoulders. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, dudes.

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August 12, 2009

(Nicole) MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is going out of his way to refute the rumors of a deal made between FOX and MSNBC by naming Billo the Clown once again as his Worst Person in the World. His infraction this time? The insinuations by Bill--all completely unresearched and unconfirmed BY BILLO'S OWN ADMISSION--that MSNBC parent company GE is under suspicion for supplying parts found in roadside bombs, purportedly placed there by Iranian forces.

So he smeared a company which he had previously threatened with public blackmail. You can talk all you want about feuds and cease-fires and childishness. But if I or any actual reporter like me had gotten as much wrong in any story as Bill O'Reilly got wrong in this one, I'd be fired in 15 minutes, as he should be now.

Silly rabbit. No one actually thinks Billo the Blowhard is a reporter, do they? He's a talking head. And as we've seen time after time from Fox News Channel, the heads need only talk, not have a brain, much less report facts. Facts have a liberal bias, Keith, and that's something you'll NEVER find on Fox News.

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