Apparently, tonight was Bill O’Reilly’s night to jump the shark. In a discussion with Bernie Goldberg about Bob Woodward (not) being “threatened” by the Obama administration, O’Reilly told a chilling tale about someone who once got angry at his reporting. A grinning O'Reilly boasted that he grabbed the guy’s tie, led him out the door and said, “Next time you talk to me like that, you’re going in the Charles river. You’re lucky you just got away with the square tonight."
After O’Reilly and guest agreed, as Goldberg put it, that the contretemps between Woodward and The White House was “not the second coming of Nixon’s enemies list,” Goldberg likened the Obama White House to the mob anyway.
(Obama’s) got a great demeanor. He’s got a great smile. He’s always cool. He never gets flustered. But right behind the curtain are the Chicago thugs, the people that will yell at you, they will curse at you, and it’s always… about one thing: trying to intimidate you, to make you think long and hard before you do something they don’t like a second time.
O’Reilly said, “I want them to curse at me, Bernie. I want them to try to intimidate me. …I would find that so amusing, I would just – I would laugh.”
Oh, really? O'Reilly went on to say:
That happened to me once in my career in Boston and the next time I saw the guy, I grabbed his tie and I led him across a hotel lobby by his tie. And I kicked him right out into Copley Square. And I said, ‘Next time you talk to me like that, you’re going in the Charles river. You’re lucky you just got away with the square tonight.’ That’s the kind of guy I am.
After Goldberg talked about “blowback” he got from Dan Rather, O’Reilly jabbed his finger, smiled and said, “If anybody curses at you, Bernie, you let me know right away and then you and me we’ll both go down and get ‘em.”
Talk about thuggish!
Remember how he used to open his now defunct radio show by boasting that he wants to tear out (or was it rip out?) the throats of the powerful with whom he disagrees? He bloviated about how he “slapped” Falwell around, how the Dixie Chicks “deserve to be slapped around” and how he “smacked down” Kinsley. And his, ahem, “jokes” are no better – he once took exception to a column by Dana Milbank and chose to chuckle about Milbank being beheaded and how him and Megyn Kelly should go “beat him up”. The list could go on and on.
No doubt BOR thinks that all this tough, hostile talk makes him more of a man and somehow a better commentator (entertainer?) when instead it actually reveals him to be a hot-headed punk stuck in the 7th grade mindset of a locker room bully. It’s sad and sick that he feels the need to bluster and threaten to make his point. His reliance on violent fantasies (or, in some cases, violent reality if his swaggering Copley Square story is actually true) definitely exposes the ugly side of BOR.
Why am I such a putz? I guess it’s because I believe God will forgive me. I’m very religious!
He threatened Andrea Mackris during the scandal.
He calls for violence against longtime targets.
He suggested terrorists blow up the Coit Tower.
He was caught on film picking fights with Obama supporters.
He assaulted a man with an umbrella.
That’s it… he owes me a dollar every time he uses that word from now on.
