There's no blithering un-self-awareness quite like right-wing blithering un-self-awareness.
Especially when Bill O'Reilly's part of the program, as he was during The O'Reilly Factor last night. He opened with a scathing attack on the New York Times for its own scathing cartoon.
Somewhat hilariously, O'Reilly speculates wildly about the effects of the release of the photos of prisoners being tortured, saying it's "beyond question" that American servicemen and women abroad will be harmed because their publication will foment so much resentment -- even though, of course, he can produce no evidence to support that speculation at all.
Nonetheless, it's enough for O'Reilly to call the cartoon an "atrocity" and "garbage" and accuse the Times of "pushing a hateful, far-left agenda," while the heads of the Times, NBC, and other "far left" outfits are "doing an enormous amount of damage to this country" and are "haters."
Then he invites on Karl Rove to talk about that NYT cartoon, and Karl happily obliges by making the subsequent attack on NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger as vicious and personal as he can:
O'Reilly: What did you think when you saw that cartoon in the New York Times yesterday of the Statue of Liberty with a whip? What did you think of that?
Rove: I thought Pinch Sulzberger was right to worry about why he had to sell his building and his stock is in the toilet, and I'm glad it is.
O'Reilly: But weren't you offended as an American? I mean, that is just the lowest!
Rove: Look look look, I'm from Texas! I've met this little Pinch Sulzberger. He is an elitist, effete snob, who thinks he knows better than the rest of America and has views that are distinctly outside the mainstream of what America's all about.
[Note to Karl: You're not from Texas, at least the way most Texans I know define being "from Texas". You're from Utah by way of Nevada. Big diff. But the tough-guy talk is duly noted, anyway. We're convinced. Really.]
Anyway, the comedy reached a real zenith later in the hour when BillO had that night's edition of the O'Falafel Loofah-Loving Harem on: Gretchen Carlson and Margaret Hoover. They set about decrying those nasty liberals thus:
Hoover: A lot of these people are degenerates from the 1960s. Like they didn't get the memo that the revolution is over, right? There's nothing to fight about anymore. They demonize people who they disagree with. And a lot of time you find them going after you personally when they can't make the argument with logic.
... O'Reilly: Look there's a difference between being an elitist -- Karl Rove at the top of the program said that was Sulzberger, he's an elitist, left-winger, knows better -- and being downright nasty mean. Nasty mean.
Hoover: You know why they do that? Because they can.
Yeah, I don't know where those hateful little elitist degenerates ever got that whole "nasty mean" thing either.
