Well-known toe-sucker Dick Morris, and Eileen McGann, who is apparently his court-mandated social worker or something, have used their Town Hall column to flack for Bill O’Reilly’s latest book. But either they are really bad flacks, or they actually dislike Bill as much as everybody else does, because it’s a really inept effort.
But hey, let’s give it a look and you can see what you think.
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann :Where Did Bill O’Reilly Come From?
It’s time for the really scary ”birds and the bees” talk, kids.
Before or after every speech I ever give, somebody asks me: “What is O’Reilly really like?”
And then they say, “He can’t be as big a jerk in real life as he is on TV, can he?”
My answer is always the same: “What you see on television is what you get off camera. It’s the same guy.”
So, yes, he is that big of a jerk.
That much is obvious to anyone who knows him. But what was less clear to me is where he came from.
Yeah, with Bill claiming that he came from Levitown, but his mother assuring the Washington Post that he was actually raised in Westbury, Long Island, a “middle-class suburb a few miles from Levitown,” it is kind of confusing.
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, O’Reilly’s memoir, answers the question. O’Reilly, it seems, was made not born into his philosophy, rather, his values and personae were hammered into shape like a horseshoe, the blows coming not from a blacksmith’s hammer, but from life on the quintessentially American streets of Levittown.
So, Bill got beat up a lot, and the resulting anger, resentment, and insecurity fueled Bill’s values and “philosophy.” (If only he had received some therapy, maybe he could have developed a normal personae.)
Interspersing stories of his youth with bloviation on topics like the quality of courage and the necessity for self-reliance,
Um, Dick, you DO know that “bloviation” (“to speak or write verbosely and windily”) isn’t a good thing, right?
. . . O’Reilly makes it clear that his experiences are his philosophy, his biography is his message.
And his message is the medium, and his medium is Fox News. So, you’ve been warned.
Does he believe in resourcefulness and ingenuity?
No, but he does believe that black people are mostly dishonest, brown people are all illegal aliens, and Santa Claus is baby Jesus’s father.
Does he look down on the nanny state? It all harks back to his job as a kid painting houses. When his buddy dropped a bucket of white paint on a client’s bush, he sawed down the newly decorated plant, replaced it with various branches he collected, quickly cashed the check and was off. When the client noticed that something about the front of his house looked different, O’Reilly hastened to credit his paint job, not the missing bush.
So, Bill believes in covering up mistakes, lying to those who trusted you, never admitting fault even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and bilking people for whatever you can get away with (as long as the “nanny state,” with its pesky consumer protection agencies, can’t find track you down). No wonder his “philosophy” resonates with people like Dick.
‘Reilly was not the bookish sort.
In fact, he still doesn’t know how to read.
He had no particular interest in anything having to do with the outside world as he grew up.
Hey, he and Sarah Palin must be soul mates.
He was a borderline hooligan
with borderline personality disorder.
… who Irish mothers must have suspected of “devilment.” The title of his book comes from how Sister Lurana described him in grade school.
Yes, Bill and his sister attended private school. Let’s not forget that, as we read about his underprivileged life on the mean streets of Long Island.
Most autobiographies relate uncommon stories of great men and women.
But Bill’s relates common stories about a petty, commonplace man. And that’s why you should buy it!
We ponder how the extraordinary influences of their early life matured them and led to who they have become since. In O’Reilly’s case, his Levittown upbringing was the suburban equivalent of Tom Sawyer’s. Instead of painting fences, as Mark Twain’s character did, he paints houses “coated with slatelike shingles” leaving very little wood trim to work with.
Actually, Tom didn’t paint those fences, his dupes did. And is a charmless, grown-up Tom Sawyer really the person who should be angrily scolding everyone else about their moral failings?
But Levittown was a suburban jungle, the very sameness of its houses seeming to spur rebellion in its youth.
LOL! Bill O’Reilly is James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. He is Sidney Poitier in Blackboard Jungle. He is the monkeyman in George of the Jungle! No wonder all the women he meets want him to sexually harass them.
O’Reilly was one of those kids who led adults to despair of the coming generation: out for trouble and self-absorbed, a restless rogue. Yet each of his experiences seems to have spawned a philosophy which, in turn shaped a political outlook. He is not driven by polls, but by personal experience.
Yeah, every self-centered, socially deviant street thug has a personal philosophy too, but they don’t usually get to repeatedly interview the President of the United States.
His background has left him with an internal compass that always helps him to find his way.
As the Bible says, broad is the path and easy is the way that leads to hell.
Al Gore grew up in a Washington DC hotel room while his Dad served in the Senate. Bill O’Reilly grew up in a small house in Levittown while his father was exploited by the Calltex Oil Company, trapped in a badly paying job he hated.
Well, Bill’s dad was making $35,000 a year when he retired in 1978, which is about $92,000 in today’s dollars, so he wasn’t all that badly paid (except in comparison with Bill). But he was a mean drunk whom I’m sure did hate his job, his life, and his son – so yes, Al Gore did have a much better preparation for life than Bill did.
And that has made all the difference for both men.
Denied any exposure to reality as he grew up, Gore substituted ideology for experience, science for reality.
“Science” being mythical mumbo-jumbo with no relation at all to real stuff.
And sure, Gore worked summers as a field hand on the family farm, helping to grow hay and tobacco and raise cattle, but he wasn’t a self-absorbed restless rogue, so what does he know of reality? And Gore only served as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, while Bill saw combat in the Falklands, so it’s clear which guy has had the realest life.
O’Reilly lived a life just like those he calls the “folks” and always roots his spiels in the world from whence he came.
So, if you’re looking for spiels, rants, and tirades rooted in the world of an angry, self-centered, anti-intellectual, bullying Everyman, then Bill’s are the ones for you!
What is Bill O’Reilly really like? Levittown.
That is to say, cheap, mass-produced, and racially-exclusive.