I'm posting this article and editorial because they addressed something I've noticed about O'Reilly lately. He's growing really paranoid, and he's a megalomaniac living in a world of his own delusions. Cynics may point out to me that's he's always been that way, and I agree. But lately, it's really gotten out of hand.
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...ent/Columnists
My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly
By HEATHER MALLICK
Saturday, May 1, 2004 - Page F2
It's someone's fault I appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Tuesday night to discuss a column I wrote welcoming the presence of American deserters in Canada.
So who's responsible? Either Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle, the Dalai Lama or me.
Eeny meeny miney mo, Doyle.
Mr. Doyle, a dear friend -- together we have plucked the gowans fine -- has long campaigned for Fox News to run in Canada. I think he regards it as a second Comedy Network. It's all staged, so we can all laugh at its Bush-licking rendition of the news, its ridiculous "fair and balanced" slogan and this man Bill O'Reilly, whose talk show is really more of a spitting contest gone off track.
Al Franken calls Mr. O'Reilly a "lying, splotchy bully," and proves it in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, but Mr. Doyle thinks he's a great comic creation, I guess, like Britain's The Pub Landlord, this guy who's always ranting about how Great Britain used to be called Fookin' Fantastic Britain until all the immigrants arrived.
But Mr. Doyle is Irish and he likes his comedy blacker than a raven's eyeball. I should have remembered this, more fool me.
Eeny meeny miney mo, Dalai Lama.
It's not enough to show compassion to people you love, the great man told Canadians this week. You also have to show it to people who hate you. This was lingering in my mind as Nate Fredman, the nice assistant to Mr. O'Reilly, the man who once said to the son of a Twin Towers victim, "Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces," urged me to appear. You're the best kind of guest, Nate told me. You really believe in what you're saying, so you don't take it personally when . . . and then his voice tailed off. Nate was so sweet, and then the Dalai's (the Lama's?) words echoed in the distance.
Eeny meeny miney mo, me.
I always say yes to American TV because how else are Americans going to hear about radical notions like feeding the poor and sheltering the gentle, or letting black people vote in Florida?
So I asked Nate for a car and driver and a makeup person to lacquer my face into immobility, and I did one of those remote-studio things where the host can see you but you can't see him and he asks you questions through an ear mike. And that's when the trouble started.
Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He talks to his trousers. You know the type. They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.
We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.
I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.
I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."
"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. Mr. Doyle would have been shrieking.
And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk. He then went into a mad rant about lefties like Mr. Doyle and how I was a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.
It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.
Overnight, I received hundreds of e-mail messages from American men who think my private parts have gone communist, if you grasp my meaning. The saddest thing was the e-mail from kind Americans, apologizing for their "idiot," quivering with humiliation and praising me for having remained calm and composed under fire, not realizing that I was simply frozen with disbelief. I have replied to each one of the nice ones.
The whole degraded debacle and everyone's reaction to it, including mine, reminded me that Americans now have to cope with a new surrealism in public life. In the 1936 Spanish Civil War entries in a diary I read long ago, by someone who may well have been Stephen Spender, the writer describes an O'Reilly-esque scene. "A man squats and defecates in the street, without comment." Re-reading these diaries decades later, Spender writes, "What on earth did I expect him to say? Olé?"
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