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.