O’Reilly: Next Time You Hear a Politician Say He or She Will Bring Down Oil Prices Understand It’s Complete [Bull Shit]

Next time you hear a politician say he or she will bring down oil prices understand it’s complete [bull shit]. Americans want lower gas prices — cut back. Sell those SUVs. Ride a bike when you can. If every one of us bought 10 percent less gasoline, prices would fall fast. That’s what the candidates should be saying. We need a strong leader who’s honest, smart, courageous and willing to explain dubious associations. That’s what we need.

Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, March 21, 2008

Report: GOP-Fox Mouthpiece Bill O’Reilly Bribed Police to Investigate Wife’s Alleged Affair with a Cop

screenshot-gawker-oreillyAs a leading Republican Party propagandist, Bill O’Reilly often holds himself up as an arbiter of “family values.” In 2004, of course, O’Reilly and his employer settled a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a former Fox employee for an undisclosed sum. Now Gawker is reporting that O’Reilly is involved in what ultimately may become a much bigger scandal:

Last summer, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly came to believe that his wife was romantically involved with another man. Not just any man, but a police detective in the Long Island community they call home. So O’Reilly did what any concerned husband would do: He pulled strings to get the police department’s internal affairs unit to investigate one of their own for messing with the wrong man’s lady.

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Interdiction: There’s Method to Fox’s Rudeness to the President

1. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly-Pres. Obama, Feb. 6, 2011 2. Fox’s Bret Baier-Pres. Obama, March 2010
3. O’Reilly-candidate Obama, Sept. 4, 2008 4. Baier-George Bush, Dec. 17, 2008

During the live portion of Fox’s interview with Pres. Obama before the Super Bowl on Sunday, Bill O’Reilly interrupted the president 43 times, according to Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” on Monday. (See #1 above.)

If Fox were a legitimate news organization, its purpose in interviewing the president would be to let its audience hear what he has to say.

The interruptions continued in a second, taped part of the interview that was shown later, so that by the end of the 15-minute sit-down, O’Reilly had interrupted the president more than 70 times — once every 19 seconds, according to O’Donnell in a follow-up segment Tuesday night.

Conversely, the number of times O’Reilly let the president finish a sentence was zero, by O’Donnell’s count.

O’Reilly’s 70-plus interjections more than doubled the number of interruptions the president endured in his previous interview on Fox. In March 2010, O’Reilly’s lesser known colleague Bret Baier — host of Fox’s daily round-table presentation of Republican talking points — stopped the president in mid-sentence just 30 times or so. (See video #2.)

So, other than rudeness, what is behind this behavior from Fox? In a word: fear.

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Verbatim

I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

— Former NPR and continuing FOX News commentator Juan Williams, explaining to Bill O’Reilly that he’s not racist, just nervous (in the words of comic Marc Maron). Williams was fired from NPR following his appearance on FOX’s The O’Reilly Factor.

O’Reilly on Defense: Denies Race-Baiting on Fox – Maddow Rolls Tape, Proves He’s Wrong

If it’s true that, according to the Rove-Breitbart playbook, when your side is on defense you are losing, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly is losing the debate with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about his network’s use of racism to inflame and agitate its predominantly elderly white Republican viewers.

According to Bill O’Reilly, highly rated shows can’t possibly be racist.

Maddow apparently got under O’Reilly’s skin last week when she did a story about race baiting on Fox that documented the network’s on-air personalities’ lies about Van Jones, ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, the New Black Panthers Party, illegal immigration and other racially charged stories.

The next night O’Reilly took to the airways in defense of his network. He rebutted the video evidence of his colleagues’ racially inflammatory comments with a succinct, “Nuh-UHH” — Fox can’t be racist, he suggested, because his ratings were higher than MSNBC’s, and everybody knows that highly rated shows can’t possibly feature racism.

This defense was the subject of much well-deserved derision the next day, which prompted O’Reilly to return to the air and resort to name-calling — Maddow is a “far left loon,” he said. He then repeated the much-derided defense that his network’s high ratings are irrefutably prima facie evidence that Fox is free of racism.

Maddow responded last night by noting that sharks must be more even less racist than Fox because “Shark Week” beat Fox in the ratings last week.

She followed up with a video retrospective of O’Reilly’s own on-air racist comments — which she offered as irrefutable proof that race baiting is what Fox does.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here’s a rough transcript of Maddow’s report — this was provided by MSNBC:

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O’Reilly Sanctimoniously Denies GOP Senator’s Charge That Fox Disinformed Viewers with Claim Medical Uninsured Will Go to Prison – Cue Video of 20-Plus Instances of Fox Propagandists, Including O’Reilly, Making That Exact Claim

It’s hard to find someone to root for in this one. Bill O’Reilly, the leading right-wing propagandist on Fox before they hired Glenn Beck versus Sen. Tom Coburn, R-0kla., a member of the Family, the scary Christian corporatist cult that owns the infamous C Street house on Capitol Hill.

In the video, O’Reilly chastises Sen. Coburn because, at a town hall meeting earlier this month, the senator had corrected a constituent who had expressed concern that under the health-care reform law people who didn’t buy health insurance would go to prison. Coburn, rightly assuming she’d heard the jail-for-the-uninsured canard on Fox, warned her not to believe everything she heard on the network and encouraged her to get her news from a variety of sources. In the interview, O’Reilly insists that he had researched transcripts and that no one on Fox had ever said the uninsured would be imprisoned.

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After Railing against DailyKos, O’Reilly Finally Goes after Rightwing Hate Postings on Free Republic

This video was edited by Freepers, so who knows what was omitted

Update: This story was originally about Bill O’Reilly’s hypocrisy in going after random comments left on DailyKos while ignoring hate-filled comments left on the Free Republic site. Last night, O’Reilly did half-heartedly criticize Free Republic for the hateful postings in its comments section, but really just focused on them briefly in order to provide himself with the opportunity to go through his litany of comments from DailyKos.

Freepers are already claiming that the quotes O’Reilly read from their site were fabricated. And not all of them are O’Reilly fans, which is ironic since he is first and foremost a righwing tool:

Bill O’Reilly has a really silly, pathetic hatred for any site that criticizes him. that is what it is really all about.

And:

I can’t believe O’Reilly is going after Free Republic. Any vile or inappropriate comments on this site seem to be removed within a split second – the moderators here are the best! And I also feel like a dope for all the defending of O’Reilly that I’ve done on this site.

The excerpts that follow are from Free Republic’s comments, with links back to the original sources.

Here’s my original intro from yesterday, followed by the Freeper comments.

Bill O’Reilly has ramped up his fake outrage over DailyKos again yesterday, calling it “that hate site,” “vicious,” “beyond shameful … very offensive” and “haters.”

ALL dims [Democrats] are allies of bin laden and worshipers of satan… no exceptions… they are pure evil and motivated by a hate of GOD and Country!

It strikes me that O’Reilly is purposefully ignoring the granddaddy of all hate sites, Free Republic. But then he could hardly be expected to criticize his core audience.

As usual, O’Reilly’s hypocrisy in going after DailyKos while giving a pass to Free Republic is never mentioned by the “liberal media.” One of his tactics is to have an intern read the DailyKos comments and cherrypick inflammatory excerpts to read on the air.

Taking a cue from Pam’s House Blend‘s regular feature “Actual Freeper Quotes” (see specific examples here and here), I rounded up a small sampler of comments from the Free Republic site.

Keep in mind that Free Republic is heavily moderated, so these comments have been given a pass by the site’s operators:

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