Blogs mock vintage Bill O'Reilly in f-bomb explosion
A video posted at YouTube this weekend showing a younger Bill O'Reilly with more hair -- and apparently more agita -- was beginning to draw attention at liberal blogs on Monday.
The bombastic Fox News host is known for taking the left to task for its bad language. In February, he played a montage of mostly-liberal celebrities cursing on television and complained, "If someone does that on my program? Believe me, they'd get scolded." He added, "They’d never dare do it here. You know why? Because they’d be called on it. And they’d be humiliated in front of millions of people."
In the newly revealed clip from Inside Edition, where he was a host before joining Fox News in 1995, O'Reilly runs into a problem with his teleprompter. "I can't read it, there's no words on it," he complains. "I don't know what that means, 'to play us out.'"
After twice blowing the rehearsal of his closing line, O'Reilly finally erupts, screaming, "We'll do it live. Fuck it! ... Fucking thing sucks!"
The video drew almost 400,000 views in a single day between the time it was first posted at YouTube on Sunday and when it was taken down for copyright violations. The liberal blogs have also been quick to pile on.
As News Hounds explains, "We've seen the infamous 'shut-up' and the cutting of the mic; but we've never heard 'traditionalist' Bill O'Reilly spewing the kind of bad words that he accuses the 'far left' of. So we should be very chagrined and appalled that Bill has been caught in a 'melt down.' (snark)"
One diarist at Daily Kos wrote more succinctly, "This is an insane video of bill-o being... insane," while Monsters and Critics merely commented, "The verbiage threw O'Reilly into a tizzy."
O'Reilly has already responded to the flap, suggesting, "That video was just me practicing for my conversations with Geraldo."
Although the original YouTube posting has been pulled, as has one that replaced it, Raw Story has made the video available below.
Catholic League president William Donohue released the following statement on Bill O’Reilly today:
“Last night on TV, Bill O’Reilly took the New York Times to task for op-ed articles in Tuesday’s newspaper that amounted to ‘a counterattack against the late pontiff.’ He said the Times ‘ran a couple of opinion columns saying that the pope was an autocratic guy who may have hurt his own church and that the Polish people love the pope but don’t listen to him.’ (My emphasis.) He was referring to a screed by Thomas Cahill and a mostly flattering piece by Stefan Chwin, respectively.
“Ironically, O’Reilly’s condemnation of the New York Times means that he has indicted himself. Here is what O’Reilly said on his radio show of March 5, 2003: ‘I have never liked this pope. I have always felt he was an autocrat who had no vision about how people live in the real world.’ (Again, my emphasis.) The year before, O’Reilly called the pope ‘an authoritarian guy,’ proving that his contempt for the pope is long standing. And on the same radio show that he called the pope an ‘autocrat,’ O’Reilly questioned whether anyone was listening to him anymore: ‘Now is anybody going to listen to him?’
“Thus, O’Reilly has no business lecturing anyone about bashing the pope—he’s done a yeoman job himself. Indeed, it is hypocritical of him to now feign anger at columnists who use the identical language he previously employed to smear the pope.”
The Catholic League is the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. It defends individual Catholics and the institutional Church from defamation and discrimination
O'Reilly Settles Lawsuit Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly and his accuser
have settled their sexual harassment case.
"This brutal ordeal is now officially over, and I will never speak of it again," he said on his talk show, "The O'Reilly Factor." ... The New York Daily News, citing unidentified sources, reported that O'Reilly had agreed to pay Mackris anywhere from $2 million to $10 million. Separately, the New York Post said it was believed that O'Reilly paid "multimillions of dollars" to settle the suit.