SOMETIMES O'REILLY IS A PAIN IN... SOMETIMES O'REILLY IS A PROBLEM, TOO | 2003-08-23
Like Rumsfeld, Bill O'Reilly of The O'Reilly Factor on Fox Cable News is a real relief for us Americans. He often says exactly what we are dying to say, and that is why he is the most popular person by far on cable television.
But O'Reilly is a Northern Irish Catholic who spends all his time in the national media which consists of Jews and WASPs who look upon Catholics, and especially ethnic Catholics, as peasants. Anti-Catholicism was accurately described a century ago as "the anti-Semitism of the Intellectuals." Back then people generally looked down on Jews, but the academic community, including its large contingent of Jews, looked down on Catholics.
They still do.
The result is that Bill O'Reilly has the same weaknesses that are shown by the leading Northeastern voice of Catholic conservatism, National Review. O'Reilly and National Review like to say that they don't care what WASPs and Jews think of them, but their every thought and statement begins and ends with what the "Intellectual anti-Semites" think of them.
William Buckley, who founded and owns National Review, is not only a Catholic, but his family is Southern. That is a double whammy from the media point of view. He is the peasant's peasant. When he went to Yale he was, from the point of view of the anti-Semitism of the Intellectual, both Jewish and black.
Buckley and O'Reilly desperately try to prove they are good Yankees. This gets very tiresome. National Review insults the South at every opportunity. It refers to Southerners as "southerners," even though that category is just plain WRONG. Hawaiians are living south of the Mexican border, as are Puerto Ricans. Southern California is a as far south as the Old Confederacy.
The real "southerners" of the world are researchers at the South Pole. This is the kind of distinction National Review talks about all the time, but no inaccuracy is as important as proving to Northern intellectual anti-Semites that they are good Yankees, not at all like the Catholic peasants or the Southern peasants.
O'Reilly went to pieces over Georgia high school students who didn't want to dance with blacks, so they held their own private prom. Bill Press was proud of O'Reilly for that. Press said, "That's what America is about. Blacks and whites go to school together, they should dance together.
O'Reilly said that when the Founding Fathers called this "the United States," the word "united" referred to interracial dancing.
Yes, Virginia, that is what Bill O'Reilly SAID, and he said it more than once.
When it comes to proving to Northern Intellectual Anti-Semites that they are not bigoted Catholic peasants, O'Reilly is true fruitcake. When it comes to proving to Northern Intellectual Anti-Semites that they are not a bunch of peasants, National Review goes for simple bad spelling.