Bill O'Reilly started out his "Talking Points" segment last night like the guy who prefaces his remarks: "Now, I don't to sound like an a-hole, but ..." Because you can be certain that he will then proceed to not just sound like an a-hole but be one.
O'Reilly said he didn't want to "intrude" on the Jackson family's day of mourning, but the truth was, Jackson was a child-molesting jerk whose "incredible selfishness" was paramount (nevermind, of course, that over the course of his career Jackson in fact handed out hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to various charitable causes).
The telling moment came when he leapt to the defense of Rep. Peter King for having verbally attacked Jackson this weekend:
O'Reilly: And if you disagree with honoring Jackson the man, watch out. Congressman Peter King called Jackson a "pedophile" -- an assessment not uncommon -- and was immediately branded a racist. NAACP official Hazel Dukes and Congressman Bobby Rush both said vile things about Mr. King.
What O'Reilly conveniently omits here, of course, is that King didn't merely call him a pedophile (which, considering that Jackson was acquitted, is in fact a slanderous thing to say), he called him a "lowlife" and a "pervert". I guess that in Bill O'Reilly's book, that doesn't qualify as saying "vile things" about Jackson. But then, we're not all bold, fresh slabs of hoomanity.
He continued on the same track with Marc Lamont Hill, who points out O'Reilly's own hypocrisy for having warned everyone away from saying mean things about Jerry Falwell shortly after his death. O'Reilly tries to brush off the comparison as "apples and oranges," but it looks a lot more like Fujis and Braeburns to any sentient being watching the exchange.
It's funny how guys like O'Reilly and King are always big on the "respect for the dead" thing when it involves a white guy. Both of them would have been outraged if anyone had called Frank Sinatra a Mafiosi punk -- what O'Reilly would call a "common assessment" -- in the days immediately following his death and the multiple media homages paid to him afterward. Show some proper respect for the dead, they'd have said. It was the same with Ronald Reagan's death, but on steroids.
But they can never show that same kind of respect for black people. Funny how that works, isn't it?
And if you point that out, then these same clowns turn around and cry out, "Race card! Race card!" As if they weren't the folks who drew it in the first place.
