Last night Bill O’Reilly, in the preciously named “Back of the Book” segment, punched his pop cultural ticket for the week to play concern troll for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aka The Oscars™. Bill called Sacha Baron Cohen a pinhead for not showing the proper respect to the Red Carpet and the conspicuous orgy of consumerism the Oscars represent. Yet, earlier in the show Bill’O sent Jesse Watters to the Red Carpet to yell out provocative questions and tease Liberals. What O’Reilly did was far worse than anything Borat may have done. Baron Cohen was being true to his art, and used Hollywood’s massive publicity machine to play a prank on Hollywood itself, and drum up some publicity for his next picture. You’ve got to admire that. Jesse Watters, and by extension Bill O’Reilly, are the real pinheads for attempting to interject partisan politics into the Oscars. An official even told Watters, “The Academy is very disappointed in you” over some of the questions. What sense does it make to send someone to The Oscars to ask people what they think of Bill O’Reilly?
The best part of the video was when George Clooney took Watters to task for calling the president “Obama” instead of “President Obama. To O’Reilly’s credit he also slapped Watters around for the same thing and then added, “Next time you say ‘President Obama’ because I always say that, or ‘Mr. Obama,’ because we want to be respectful of the office, as we have to do.” Watters knows who butters his bread. He replied quickly, “Okay.” Video after the jump.
It’s Hannity who always calls Obama “the anointed one.” O’Reilly is reasonably respectful to Obama.
Or Mr. Obama? $10 says that if I went on Bill’s show and said “Mr. Bush”, Bill would take 5 minutes off-script to tell me exactly why it’s “Former President Bush”. There would be no “or Mr. Bush” in that equation.
In fact, didn’t he do that a few times? If you said anything other than “President Bush” or he didn’t like your tone, he’d drop the conversation to correct you.
But you can say “Mr. Obama.” Classy.