Bill O’Reilly “celebrated” BFF Donald Trump being named Time’s Person of the Year the Fox News way: by smearing Democrats. For good measure, he demonized the poor and immigrants as shiftless grifters and suggested they are the only reason any Democrats are in office.
O’Reilly started with a swipe at Time. (Transcript via FoxNews.com, with added emphases):
O’REILLY: Today, Time Magazine announced that Mr. Trump is the Person of the Year. They had to make him the Person of the Year but obviously did not want to do so. However, the magazine is correct in saying that the USA is a divided country.
Mr. Trump claims that happened on President Obama’s watch, and he will bring everybody together. Talking Points is not sure that is possible.
This is a familiar O’Reilly trick. Under cover of pretending to care about divisions in the country, he set out to make the situation worse:
O’REILLY: To illustrate that point, let’s take a look at the nation’s largest city - New York.
[…]
The population of New York City is now about eight-and-a-half million people, and many of them can’t make a living.
So the government must support them.
Right now New York City is approaching one hundred billion dollars in debt. The city cannot possibly pay off that money. So it will borrow more and depend on you, wherever you live, to bail it out.
O’Reilly went on to complain about people receiving public assistance. Notice that he cared nothing about how maybe people can’t make ends meet because of the jobs they work at nor the exorbitant cost of housing in the city. Instead, he portrayed the poor as sponges.
O’REILLY: Twenty percent of New York City residents are now receiving food stamps. That’s 1.7 million people at a cost of 250 million dollars a month - a month!
Other assistance to residents is more than 100 million dollars a month.
Five percent of the city’s population is on disability.
Cost? Two-hundred-and-fifty-two million dollars a month.
Finally, 600,000 New Yorkers are receiving payments for public housing.
That’s 7% of the population.
So you can see that New York City, the most powerful financial center in the world, is basically a dependency.
Then O’Reilly specifically tied “dependency” (and we all know he meant “moochers”) to fraud and Democrats:
O'REILLY: And people receiving disability checks, housing supplements, food stamps and other direct payments are not going to vote for Republicans.
Ever.
So, this is a one-party city that will never embrace a guy like Donald Trump.
This is what America has come to, its largest city is falling apart.
There is little desire on the part of the liberal city government to lift people out of welfare.
Liberal politicians actually want dependency.
For example, if the city were to investigate disability claims, they’d find that many of them are completely bogus
It’s a racket. Everybody knows it.
Actually, the real racket here is O’Reilly’s suggestion that our country would be so much better off if we were to just abolish or severely cut back our social safety nets. And while we’re at it, O’Reilly clearly wouldn’t mind if Democrats were wiped out in the process. Because the ones who really stand to benefit from such a thing would be O’Reilly and his one percenter pals. That includes BFF Trump, of course.
Watch the con job below, from the December 7, 2016 The O’Reilly Factor.
“To answer Richard, I don’t think these guys are actually planning to do anything as vile as that. But I do think they’re hoping that ISIS or some other radical group tries something like that.”
I do too Kevin. Because mark my words: if (heaven forbid!) a big terrorist attack on a major American city DOES happen, this much is guaranteed:
THE DRAFT WILL BE INSTANTLY REINSTATED!
Because no matter how you slice it, putting more boots on the ground in the Middle East to fight ISIS (or possibly Iranians — remember, Der Fuehrer III’s CIA pick Mike Pompeo is a FIERCE OPPONENT of the Iran nuclear deal — do NOT let yourselves get suckered by the fact that he was valedictorian of his West Point graduating class) will naturally require A MASSIVE NUMBER OF TROOPS — HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF THEM!
To get disability from the government takes at least 2 years, and multiple hearings. Disability fraud is practically non existent.
The right wing is full of losers with ideas so bad that they have to lie to get people to agree with them. Pathetic.
O’Reilly is desperately looking for a way to dismiss and sneer at the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote last month, and did so on the order of nearly 3 million votes. To admit this fact would be to admit that the Pence Administration does not really have that “sweeping mandate” and didn’t really have that “landslide victory” that the Right keeps trying to gloat about. In fact, they had a squeaker, earned from gaming the system and depressing as much of the vote as possible so that they could win enough counties in swing states to pull this off. Had a thousand more people shown up in several of those counties, the vote would have gone the other way and we’d be having a very different discussion. Dems really need to remember this for 2018, 2020 and the future, although we can appreciate that with changing demographics, this little maneuver will not help the Right in another few years. There simply won’t be enough angry white voters to overwhelm the other demographics, and they won’t be able to campaign on straight xenophobia any longer. This was their last gasp of that idea. (And if we think back a bit, the big Reagan landslide of 1984 is no longer possible for them – that was from a time when you really could win a landslide election with just angry white male votes…)
So O’Reilly needs to find a spin to explain away those millions of voters who did not vote for his preferred candidate. He’s already dismissed California with a sneer on several occasions. Partly he’s done this on the basis that he hates California on general principle and thinks he’s somehow morally superior to anyone living there. Partly he’s done this with his outrageous support of Right Wing lies that somehow millions of undocumented aliens were committing voter fraud across California. But he needed to get another cheap shot in. So now he turns to New York, which he presents as really just a bunch of welfare cheats and unworthy slackers who depend on government handouts. He even pushes this nonsense far enough to try to get some moral high ground by stating that he and “good Americans” are being forced to pay for all these cheats and slackers in New York, when clearly those people should just be told to get a job or something. And yes, this is totally consistent with his tantrum on Election Night 2012, when he screamed that Obama only won because of the slackers who want “free stuff”.
And by taking this rather vicious approach, O’Reilly can now get a two-fer. He can dismiss millions of Americans who disagree with Trump and with him, and he can act like it’s some kind of a moral crusade for himself. And voila! Now he can say that Trump has a “sweeping mandate” and a landslide! Nice, eh? It even justifies his triumphal monologue on November 9th where he thought he was putting Hillary in her place by angrily declaring “America has had enough of Hillary Clinton!” and after saying a series of increasingly nasty and mean-spirited cheap shots, then concluding, “But that’s enough about her!” as though he had any moral standing to be making such statements.
To answer Richard, I don’t think these guys are actually planning to do anything as vile as that. But I do think they’re hoping that ISIS or some other radical group tries something like that. It would give them all the justification they want to go “full Cheney” and demand that all Americans support the Pence Administration in whatever chicanery it wishes to inflict. I’d also like us to remember that when W took the country to war against Iraq in 2003, there were tens of thousands of people regularly in the streets protesting it. And the Right simply didn’t care – they went on killing people in Iraq regardless of the protests. If anything, they learned the lessons from Vietnam to make sure that there were as few objective witnesses as possible to the carnage. No photos of the caskets coming back home. Embedded reporters to make sure they were bonded to the units they were covering. Aggressive action against independent and international journalists, retroactively justified by saying “they should have known they were in a war zone”. If the Right learned anything from this, in spite of the fun WikiLeaks has had, it’s that they can get away with the Big Lie and do it repeatedly.
At the same time, I also believe the Right will come to regret their momentary infatuation with Julian Assange. He was useful to them for getting uncomfortable gossip documents about Clinton’s campaign. They even celebrated him for doing so. I wonder how Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly will respond when WikiLeaks starts spreading emails from the various Pence Administration cronies….
As much as I hate to say this (and like every thinking American that possesses critical thinking skills, I’m praying like hell it doesn’t happen), but based on American history over the last fifteen years, my gut feelings tell me the ONE AND ONLY WAY that will happen is if there’s a BIG TERRORIST ATTACK on a major American city (probably Los Angeles or Chicago — remember, New York City was already hit on 9/11/2001) that results in MASSIVE BLOODSHED. My gut feelings are also telling me that Der Fuehrer III and his recently selected cabinet members are probably planning this staged “terrorist attack” RIGHT THIS INSTANT, just as Israel’s Mossad and our own CIA planned 9/11 (or deliberately LET IT HAPPEN). Remember folks: Der Fuehrer III and his cabinet members ARE AND ALWAYS WILL BE SICK, TWISTED AND INCREDIBLY EVIL AND BIGOTED PEOPLE who will ALWAYS look down on Americans not as fortunate as them (including me). Ergo, I wouldn’t put ANYTHING past them. Remember this:
IF THE CHICAGO CUBS CAN WIN THE WORLD SERIES, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!
You are so right. In case you missed my post about it this evening, Fox is already setting the stage:
http://www.newshounds.us/fox_news_democrat_pre_blames_obama_for_any_isis_attacks_on_trump_s_watch_120816
I recall on election night 2012 when President Obama defeated Mitt Romney, Bill said it was because of the free stuff that President Obama gives that minorities would not receive under Mitt.
