Bill O’Reilly has a new excuse to attack Beyoncé and also take a shot at the media at the same time: Time Magazine’s decision to put Beyoncé on its cover of the 100 most influential people in the world issue. It’s hard to know why O’Reilly would disagree with the influential part. He keeps painting Beyoncé as almost singlehandedly leading the young women of America down a road of debauched, irresponsible sexuality.
O’Reilly played a number of suggestive clips of Beyoncé, all for the sake of accuracy, I’m sure.
Noting that Time said she “empowers women,” O’Reilly sneered, “Well, that’s a load of nonsense. Beyoncé’s an entertainer. That’s like saying Elvis Presley empowered truck drivers and The Beatles empowered Liverpudlians. Nonsense!”
The conservative guest was Penny Nance, president of “Concerned Women For America.”
Apparently, accuracy and truth are not among Nance’s concerns. She announced that “Drunk In Love,” the Beyoncé song O’Reilly played a clip from, “extols the virtue of being so drunk you black out and don’t remember who you had sex with.” In fact, the lyrics are about making love with her husband.
“I wish she would use her influence to impact the culture in a way that’s positive,” Nance continued. Which further proves how little she knows about Beyoncé. According to MTV, the singer has helped First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity, has raised more than $1 million for her husband’s foundation which helps sends kids to college, founded with her mother a cosmetology training program for women recovering from drug and alcohol addiction and more.
But Beyoncé is just not living her life the way O’Reilly thinks she should. “Beyoncé doesn’t need the money. …She’s talented enough to put out other mainstream stuff if she would like. She chooses not to. Yet Time Magazine thinks that’s just terrific,” he complained.
Liberal Eboni Williams missed the race-baiting, hypocritical elephant in the O'Reilly Factor studio
Eboni Williams, a regular guest, once again played the go-along-get-along, nice, polite and bland liberal guest who either failed to notice the big pile of racially dubious baloney or else deliberately ignored it.
Williams did not correct Nance’s mischaracterization of Drunk In Love, failed to highlight how O'Reilly always seems to use his "concern" for African Americans as a vehicle to attack one or more of them and, most importantly, did not point out how shockingly arrogant it is for a guy like O’Reilly – who traffics in hate, has a very dubious record on race (which Williams has witnessed firsthand) and has been accused of sexual misconduct – to be lecturing anyone on the subject of wholesome messages for African American girls. That’s not counting all the very deliberately salacious ways that Fox uses gratuitous sex on its own airwaves.
Once again, for educational purposes, I am taking the liberty of including here a little 2007 video my colleagues helped put together with Brave New Films called “Fox News Porn.” It’s entirely made up of clips from Fox News. Warning: YouTube has age restrictions for watching it.
O’Reilly brought up President Obama's “very, very good initiative in Washington, My Brother’s Keeper.” It's an initiative to “build ladders of opportunity” for boys and young men of color. As usual, O’Reilly was too busy focusing on the bad news about Beyoncé and African Americans to dwell on anything good. He quickly added, “But it doesn’t address cultural deficits that we see. Not only in black precincts but in poor white precincts and Hispanic precincts. With children unsupervised, are doing things that are harmful to them. Beyoncé’s part of that problem, I believe.”
But Williams missed all this, argued that O’Reilly’s “chief complaint is context” (whatever that means) and called that “a valid point.”
O'Reilly seems to have some kind of obsession with Beyoncé
You really have to see the video to get the full effect of O’Reilly’s hostility as he said about Beyoncé, “She knows, this woman knows that young girls getting pregnant in the African American community, now it’s about 70% out of wedlock. She knows and doesn’t seem to care, Eboni. That’s my problem with her.”
Wrong again. As Think Progress notes:
But if O’Reilly is concerned about unintended pregnancies among teen girls, Beyoncé is a strange target. The 32-year-old singer has been in a relationship with her husband, rapper Jay Z, for more than a decade. They had their first child together not out of wedlock, but after they had been married for several years. …The two are arguably pop culture’s most famous married couple, and effective cultural icons to further conservatives’ argument that matrimony should be the end goal for America’s youth.
Although O’Reilly frequently laments the teen pregnancy crisis, he typically doesn’t mention the significant progress in this area over the past several decades. The pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates for U.S. teens have all recently hit record lows. That’s true for the black community, too. Between 1999 and 2009, unplanned pregnancies among African American teens declined by 51 percent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this progress is due to the fact that more kids are making responsible sexual decisions, and are choosing to delay sex and use birth control.
There’s certainly more work to be done in this policy area. But federal researchers attribute the current teen birth rate not to pop stars’ lyrics, but to the fact that most teens don’t receive any sex education until after they’ve already started having sex.
But Williams merely said quickly that teen pregnancy rates are going down and moved on to talk about “feminism and what it means. It’s not a singular stance.” As if O'Reilly cared.
Yeah, listening to a song changes your behaviour, because you feel something from it, Tom… That’s why Ted Nugent’s songs about banging underage girls inspired all his fans to become pedophiles.
What? They didn’t?
Well, how about Marylin Manson… surely all his fans are in a satanic prison cu- What? He actually had well-behaved audiences?
Well, how about Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson using their music to slander their exes? Surely this led to unstable people going after the- What, we just figured that was small of them, and lost respect for them as artists?
Well, everyone hates Justin Bieber, surely there’s a song about that, I mea- What? Justin Bieber’s hatred comes from his abusive disrespect for women, compounded by his hiding behind his fame to beat up his critics, as well as paparazzi?
Well, then… It would seem that cases like Charles Manson, if he really was inspired by the song “Helter Skelter,” and not just making that up to sound crazier… are an extremely rare set.
Oh, and as a pretty hard Beyonce fan, here’s something I know that both Bill and Tom ignore, if they knew this to start with: Beyonce hates being objectified. She ended her Sasha Fierce persona because she thought it enabled the people trying to make her a piece of meat, and when she’s given a choice in what to show up in, she comes dressed like this:
http://ibelievedress.com/Public/Uploads/Products/20130118/Satin%20Beyonce%20Black%20Best%20Evening%20Prom%20Party%20Dress%20Knee%20Length.jpg
Or this:
http://www.gotceleb.com/wp-content/uploads/celebrities/beyonce-out/for-dinner-in-new-york/Beyonce%20hot%20in%20blue%20dress%20in%20New%20York-03.jpg
Or this:
http://www.celebrityfashionista.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/beyonce-lanvin-dress.jpg
Funny how O’Reilly leaves that part out- Though not nearly as funny as how he’s never been this concerened about people like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, who want to be objects. Or artists like Carrie Underwood, who made comments telling girls they shouldn’t even try if they can’t be sexy while singing. Or the bane of my existence, Taylor Swift, who tells her fans they shouldn’t think they deserve rights as women. Wait, those are all white artists, never mind.
Billy is obsessed with Bey. He’s been obsessed with her since she danced on Grant’s tomb a while back. Billy said that he didn’t mind if “she danced on his grave.” Those are his words.
If only Jay Z would drop out of the picture.
The first one I was thinking of is that duet she did with her father, Frank. A little ditty called “Somethin’ Stupid.” It has lines like “But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late when I’m alone with you/The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red, and, oh, the night’s so blue/And then I go and spoil it all by saying somethin’ stupid like I love you.” And this is a romantic love song between a father and daughter.
As for the second flashback, here’s one I think O’Reilly would approve of wholeheartedly: http://www.allmusic.com/album/sugar-mw0000643842 (The cover to her 1967 album, “Sugar.” Though the cover to her “Boots” album—which contained “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”—isn’t very subtle either; even though she’s as fully covered as can be, the pose is definitely what you’d expect from a Playboy feature. http://www.allmusic.com/album/boots-mw0000171412 )
You are correct, i did miss the point on that one.
“These boots were made for walking and they’re a gonna walk all over you.”