O’Reilly’s hypocrisy stands out—for instance, waxing indignant at someone’s name-calling or “personal attacks” before engaging in belligerent name-calling and personal attacks on the person he just righteously accused—often unjustifiably—of doing the same.

On his program, O’Reilly claims that Howard Dean “alienated him”. Why? “Because he's an obnoxious SOB. With all due respect, he is. He's obnoxious.” (Apparently irony is lost on this man.)

Jacques Chirac “is a really nasty SOB." Dean, again, is “narrow-minded and vindictive”, a “real vitriolic kind of guy.” Jimmy Carter “remains clueless to this day about the presidency and everything else”, and is “a fool”. The director of the ACLU is “a moral coward”. John Kerry is “a sissy”. Bill Moyers is a “secular, far left fanatic”, “a coward”, and “totalitarian”. Hillary Clinton is a “left-wing nut”. Ralph Nader is “that loon.”

Referring again to Howard Dean, O’Reilly says, “The most visible spokespeople for the secular left liberal movement are loons." Attacks on Dean, and anyone (mostly liberals) whom O’Reilly disagrees with—undermining his “independent”, “no-spin” imagery—fly freely.

Even with the oft-quoted incident of demanding a young man whose father died on 9/11 to “shut up”, O’Reilly tells his audience, for example, that liberal journalist Bill Moyers "finds it morally offensive to hear points of view with which he disagrees”. (Oh the horror! An ideological man hosting a news program? How did O’Reilly stay restrained?)

Through the vitriol and name-calling, O'Reilly manages to write, sarcastically of course, that “the thing you've got to love about Howard Dean is that he is sincere in his hate.”

Speaking of shutting people up, Jack Shafer has written on O’Reilly’s frequent use of that O’Reillyian tactic, one that is starkly at odds with his self-proclaimed love of American values. Shutting up opposing viewpoints would seem correct in Saddam-era Iraq, not America. Still, he has all but accused the New York Times of treason for daring to report on the Abu Ghraib scandal—as if they truly loved America (including, one assumes, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom from torture), they would stop questioning Our President. That’s the O’Reilly No-Spin solution to the Abu Ghraib scandal: New York Times, shut up!

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Let’s now take a page from O’Reilly’s playbook: let’s talk about me. As I’ve mentioned, I’m Canadian, so what I have to say matters distinctively less, since my Canuck kind do not contribute to FOX News ratings (which, of course, are the reason for O’Reilly’s mere existence).

Deeply engrained with the South Park-esque “America, fuck yeah!” frame of mind, O’Reilly doesn’t like Canadians. (We’re too progressive and anti-Bush for his tastes.) The Canadian correspondent on The O’Reilly Factor, Rachel Marsden, is Canadian but doesn’t like Canada or Canadians in general since we tend to vote Liberal. And until recently, FOX News wasn’t even available here—it was a sort of television pornography, available only by way of illicit satellite feeds. FOX News was something we could only read about and hear wild stories about from our American friends.

Still, from a few viewings, as well as blogs, watchdog sites, video clips, and articles, I feel I have a good knowledge of who O’Reilly is, what he represents, and what makes him tick. “You don’t even watch the show nightly, you don’t contribute to my ratings, you’re full of hate and all you can do is name-call, so your socialist opinion doesn’t count, you loony asshole”, as I assume O’Reilly himself would say to me if we ever met, isn’t an entirely valid criticism.

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The man has an insanely thin skin, the kind that reminds one of L. Ron Hubbard, the notoriously wacky, mentally unstable God of sorts. It makes you wonder when O’Reilly will form his own religion—The Church of O’Reillyology? —created to feed O’Reilly’s ego, attack his enemies in an organized fashion, and save on taxes. It would be designed to rid the soul of leftist thought and promote healing of billion-year-old curse of Liberalism by way of vitamins and Rupert Murdoch publications.

He’s got the paranoid delusions of persecution, as if someone were after him at all times, and his egoism is beyond that of a politician. On his show, he is the moon around which his guests revolve. (Take his recent interview with FOX contributor General Wesley Clark, who was actually forced to listen as General O’Reilly took the interview over to offer his own military insights. The former host of Inside Edition was lecturing a Four-Star General on the intricacies of foreign policy and the Iraq War.)

Like the egotistical, power-mad Hubbard, O’Reilly was writing books from the onset of his career and remains doing so—everything from novels to political propaganda to children’s books. The creativity is certainly there. Unlike Hubbard, drugs don’t seem to play any part in O’Reilly’s antics (but his parallels with drug-addled Rush Limbaugh may invoke some suspicions). Like Hubbard, O’Reilly’s a bit on the wacky side.

Of course, there’s no offense intended with the Hubbard comparison or “wacky” label, but really, there’s no better way to get your name mentioned repeatedly on TV than by getting on O’Reilly’s bad side. Al Franken, who really lit O’Reilly’s fuse, would’ve been in a ditch long ago if O’Reilly had any murderous tendencies—which he doesn’t, since beyond his impalpable on-air persona, he’s as cuddly as a teddy bear.

Well, not true: he’s as bad in real life as he is on camera. Take his sexual harassment suit with Andrea Mackris, for instance. It’s the stuff liberal critics’ dreams are made of.

There are enough examples of outrageous O’Reilly comments, controversies, scandals, hypocrisies and laughable statements to fill a book, so I won’t go through the trouble of repeating them all in this article. (Pay attention to Al Franken, NewsHounds  and MediaMatters for more—and, of course, anyone else who O’Reilly hates should be paid attention to, because they’re likely on to something.)

One of O’Reilly’s biggest exploits is his bombastic criticism of the Liberal Media—the one, he conveniently forgets to acknowledge, that employs him and has his show as the top-rated program on cable news. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Liberal Media hiding in every corner of O’Reilly’s mind.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen writes, “Suppose … the New York Times reviewed his latest, chart-topping book, Who's Looking Out for You? If the Times is true to itself, the review would almost certainly be negative, and O'Reilly could scream liberal bias.”

On the subject of a Times review he was surely expecting, O’Reilly complained, “But somehow the Times has not gotten around to reviewing any of my books, while tomes by the liberal 'satirists' are given major exposure.”

That ‘satirist’ would be Al Franken, of course, O’Reilly’s number one enemy just ahead of the Times. As for their ignoring his book, it’s “another example of liberal bias” to O’Reilly, writes Rosen. Just the same as had they actually gone ahead and reviewed it, giving it the probable negative review. He gets the win either way, Rosen believes.

And that’s where O’Reilly is unstoppable: he is a one-man wrecking ball, given the task of knocking down the unstoppable force known as Liberal Media. He can say anything he wants—criticism of his viewpoints or tactics are by themselves proof of a conspiracy against him: a multi-pronged liberal conspiracy, of course, or a well-oiled anti-O’Reilly machine, at the least.

Review his book, and it’d better be positive. Ignore it at your own peril, because he will point it out on his show, self-involved as always, as proof of Liberal Media. It is reminiscent of the TIME feature on Ann Coulter, as positive and an article as one could have asked for on America’s foremost venom-spewer; yet she admitted to not having read the glowing piece before pointing to the apparently unflattering cover as yet more proof of Liberal Media. O’Reilly brings the same, as Rosen calls it, “paranoid style”.

As Ann Coulter has shown, and Bill O’Reilly is demonstrating, hate is a beautiful thing in politics when power and money is the motive—but along with that hate comes egoism, extreme hypocrisy and L. Ron Hubbard-like paranoid delusions, bad enough that even a mid-life switch to Scientology won’t ease your problems away.

As O’Reilly recently wrote, “hate has been very good to Howard Dean”. If only O’Reilly would take the focus off of himself for enough time to take a long, hard look at himself, he’d realize that those words more easily apply to him.
 

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