Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill replayed Terry Moran’s question for WH press secretary Scott McClellan:
With respect, who made you the editor of “Newsweek”? Do you think it’s appropriate for you at that podium speaking with the authority of the president of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?
O’Reilly responded: “Now that was an ABC News correspondent. I would have slapped him. If I were McClellan, I would have went down and whacked him. All right? Don’t use that tone with me. O’Reilly says the elite media are “lashing out” because they are “rapidly losing power and influence.” “They’re rallying around a common theme — the Bush administration’s bad for America.”
> Update: 3:48pm: An e-mailer says: “If O’Reilly were a real journalist — which he’s not — he, too, would take umbrage on beating on Newsweek like a straw horse. but, of course, he’s not: he’s blindly defensive and in the pocket of the administration.”
And if O’Reilly could speak English, he would have said, “I would have gone down there…” Not “I would have went down there…”
I love James Wolcott’s descriptions of Bill O’Reilly in “Attack Poodles,” which, if you missed last year, you really should read.
“It takes a bully to run a bully pulupit, and the biggest bully at Fox News is Bill O’Reilly, host of the O’Reilly Factor, best-selling author, and chronic crybaby. He’s the Angry White Male’s Angry White Male, master of a thousand tirades and a single throwaway look of disgust.”
bellowed!converge!smacks groove engendered …