6 Reasons Bill O’Reilly Is Probably Crazy
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Bill O’Reilly is the top-rated cable news host, and his main selling point is that he’s telling it like it is because he’s a regular guy. But what if O’Reilly is successful largely because he’s crazy? Here are six reasons why that might be true:
6. O’Reilly created a chart purporting to show a vast array of powerful forces financed by George Soros devoted to attacking him and destroying Democracy As We Know ItTM.
5. Bill O’Reilly claimed that the French economy was in trouble because he called for a boycott of that nation 
for their opposition to the Iraq war. As evidence he cited a publication called the Paris Business Review. No such publication exists (well, maybe).
4. Bill O’Reilly had an on-air freak out when NY Times columnist and economics professor Paul Krugman cited research from Media Matters for America. He went on to compare Media Matters to Fidel Castro and the KKK. Nowhere on Media Matters’ website is there any expressed support for white supremacy or communism.
3. Bill O’Reilly said that white people were afraid to say things to black people.
2. Bill O’Reilly screamed that Geraldo Rivera wanted anarchy because Rivera didn’t think that the most important element of a drunk driver killing two children was the fact that the driver was an illegal alien (as opposed to him being a murderer).
1. Bill O’Reilly thinks that gay marriage will lead to people marrying goats, dolphins, and ducks.
41 Responses to “6 Reasons Bill O’Reilly Is Probably Crazy”
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© 2000-2011 Oliver Willis
“Bill O’Reilly claimed that the French economy was in trouble because he called for a boycott of that nation for their opposition to the Iraq war. As evidence he cited a publication called the Paris Business Review. No such publication exists.”
Au Contraire, Oliviere!!
Regardez ici!
Oui, I amended le blog entry. Je lament le shoddy research.
(I took Spanish)
Oliver, come on, show a little more character than that. You got the Paris Business Review thing flat out wrong; don’t just add “well, maybe” and be done with it. I’m sure a quick scan of the net will reveal a perfectly acceptable and completely true replacement reason that Bill-O is off his nut, and you can still keep this entry “6 Reasons.”
I love it. There is a constant dreary drumbeat on this site concerning opinion polls and why they are so important: Bush’s approval rating is 37% and he should honor the will of the American people and reject all his policies!! Blah. Blah. But along comes Bill O’Reilly whom the PEOPLE have made the most popular cable news host. The most poular host. What does it mean. Trust O’Reilly and believe all he says? No!! The people have now magically gone crazy.
Au Contraire, Oliviere!!
Is everyone here kidding, or stupid? That’s a spoof site.
…or too lazy to click on a link. There’s that, too.
It’s a joke, son.
D’oh! Je suis une idiot!
Dugger -
Bill O’Reilly works for Fox News. Our opinion of him means very little.
The President works for Us. Our opinion should mean something.
Or it could be that, like Howard Beal, people watch him because he’s like a train wreck. Even if he is the highest rated cable talking head on the air, how many of his viewers actually take what he says seriously?
BTW, did you see the hips on that goat? Man!
I do hope that someone corrects Keith Olbermann regarding the Paris Business Review site. He should know about it.
Oliver, you forgot one of O’Really’s most, shall we say, freakin’ off-the-wall crazy moments:
His rant against Jeremy Glick, son of a 911 victim, who came on his show and had to be escorted out of the building after O’Reilly attacked him.
http://www.oreilly-sucks.com/transcripts/oreillyglick.htm
I don’t think I would like to marry a dolphin but a short fling might be nice.
Spider,
Its your (OW’s milieu) consistency of thought that is being challenged – not the relative importance of your opinions on one versus the other. If you are off the track on O’Reilly you easily could be likewise on the President. You are saying the Pres is wrong because the American people said so (in polls). Yet O’Reilly , whom the people clearly favor, is not just wrong, but crazy. You are clearly having it both ways.
How can teh people be so smart about Bush and so ‘crazy’ about O’Reilly. Does that inconsistency of thought bother you at all?
Spider,
Its your (OW’s milieu) consistency of thought that is being challenged – not the relative importance of your opinions on one versus the other. If you are off the track on O’Reilly you easily could be likewise on the President. You are saying the Pres is wrong because the American people said so (in polls). Yet O’Reilly , whom the people clearly favor, is not just wrong, but crazy. You are clearly having it both ways.
If it had been real it wouldn’t have touched the English language with a ten foot pole.
Because look at what O’Reilly does all the bloody time, he’s a crazyman. He has a “Slowly I Turned” reaction to anyone mentioning Media Matters, for one thing.
Dugger, once again for the love of God, apples and freaking oranges.
ALL the leading NATIONAL POLLS are saying that Americans disagree with Bush on everything.
NIELSEN ratings, which measure cable viewership, put O’Really on top of his time slot for CABLE “NEWS” hosts. FOX is way behind TNT and USA in total cable viewers; and FOX is even further behind nightly NETWORK NEWS viewers.
Try to make coherent arguments, you sound like a fool.
IMHO, the correct answer is, tah dah, BILLO IS Crazy. The scary thing is that most of the people who watch him, and agree with him (witness some of the comments here) must be just as crazy. Fortunately, his ratings have slipped lately, so maybe his viewership is beginning to think Billo is a little nuttier than they are comfortable with. How they overlook his hyprocacy (loofa and other incidents) and let him speak for them is beyond me. They must have no shame whatsoever….oh, well, neither does he. There’s no way in hell he actually believes even half of his shit-talk. Most of it doesn’t even make sense.
Dugger forgot to mention that O’Reilly’s lead in cable news is with a share of about 1% of the general public. 99% of the public has better thinks to do that watch the falafel man. In Duggies words, the American people have rejected O’Reilly by a 99-1 margin.
Dugger, comparing public opinion polls with TV ratings to try to prove anything is an incredible leap.
Do you really believe that when someone watches a television show they automatically agree with everything that the host says?
Yeah I mean if you want to sub the will of the people voting for Nielsen ratings we’ve gotta take orders from President Soprano or President Cowell.
Sorry, Ollie, Simon isn’t a citizen, he can’t be President.
President Soprano, on the other hand….
Are you sure he’s mentally fit?
I didn’t know that was a factor. Doesn’t appear to be a problem.
O’Reilly is the most popular news channel host. In fact, Fox is the top cable news channel – has been for some time. Those statements are based on Nielsen polling data. Guess what? Bush won the last presidential election. He won the last one before that. All you have, away from real elections, is -guess what- polling data. Sampling figures. On one hand when political polls show Bush (and actually Congress) losing the confidence of The American people, its a big deal – the will of the peopel must be respected! When the most respected polls in the media business show O’Reilly is most popular – the people are crazy SOBs.
I don’t particularly like O’Reilly – but I recognize envy and hypocrisy when I
see it.
BTW, how’s Olbermann’s hiring record?
On one hand when political polls show Bush (and actually Congress) losing the confidence of The American people, its a big deal – the will of the peopel must be respected! When the most respected polls in the media business show O’Reilly is most popular – the people are crazy SOBs.
C’mon Dugger. I’m sure you see the flaw in that argument. The two samples have different bases.
In choosing a radom sample of all Americans, you get an approximation of the opinions of all Americans.
In selecting a non-random sample limited only to those people watching cable news shows at a specific time of day, you don’t learn much about the sentiments of the entire population.
To get a comparable reading on how what “the people” think of Mr. O’Reilly, you’d have to conduct a survey similar to the one that reflects Mr. Bush’s ratings.
O’Reilly is the most popular news channel host…
Dugger, even the world’s tallest midget is going to be passed over in the NBA draft…
O’Reilly… he’s not the most popular TV host. He’s not the most popular cable host. He’s not the most popular TV news host. He’s not the most popular cable TV host. No, he’s the most popular cable TV news host. Yay for him. This being the blogosphere, I understand perfectly well that we tend to view everything through the lens of what we watch and read– thus, cable news, low-circulation political magazines, and political websites tend to have an exaggerated importance in our perspective. However, the reality is that these things are pretty much irrelevant to most people, who, if they pay attention at all to the news, catch Brian Williams, their local “bleeds/leads” 11pm news program, and read their local paper which endorsed Bush on the editorial page.
O’Reilly, Chait, and Tim Russert don’t really fall into their field of view. What they do know, however, is that Bush is an incompetent president and that things are really screwed up in Iraq.
You are right Quaker. The sample bases are different and I would agree that political-based sampling poll is probably broader contextually than the Nielsen sampling. But I would still maintain the basic principal: that if we conclude the President is wrong about things to a large degree, more or less, because of poor ratings in political polls, we can hardly turn around and call O’Reilly ‘crazy’ etc when the appropriate polls say he is the very best cable news host. Are the surveyed ‘audiences so different that one is crazy and the other wise? Has Nielsen surveyed ‘crazies’ for decades? I suspect there is large degree of overlap.
Or, to buy the OW position, then you must conclude all cable news, CNN, Olbermann, etc. is crazy – all of it. How else to explain the dominance of a ‘crazy’ man?
Tyro
You are right about the host distinction. And re Chait, he not only believes Bush is incompetent, he has publicly announced that it is OK to hate Bush – as many on your side do.
Very best =/= most watched.
Dugger, my point was not about Chait’s ideological views, but rather his relative importance in the sceheme of things when it comes to the opinions of his work. The blogosphere has been a-twitter about Chait of late, but that’s because it’s the blogosphere, which reads this stuff and pays attention to Chait. The average person who has a strong opinion about Bush isn’t reading Chait, doesn’t watch MTP, and doesn’t watch cable news, much less Bill O. Please re-read my post again. It’s only natural that you and I would be particularly interested in what Chait and O’Reilly and Russert have to say. It is wrong, however, for you to immediately think that their noteworthiness among us and cable news watchers is somehow a sign of what the rest of the country is thinking.
“American Idol” is the #1 TV show on the planet…and ALL of the winners are utterly worthless, talent-wise. (OTOH, one of the LOSERS just won an Oscar for her very first picture.)
The fact that millions of people watch – and vote for – these hacks don’t mean they’re any good. Of course millions voted for the Scumbag-in-Chief. And I’m sure a fair percentage now regret doing so.
I’m not particularly arguing your point that ‘we’ might pay more attention to Chait etc, but I do think the average television news viewer is more representative of the typical voter than you at least seem to.
And I still think there is -I’ll just say- a disconnect between the constant bombardment of Bush on this site with negative opinion polls and all of the negatives that is supposed to entail, and then the hate and ridicule of O’Reilly, very popular in Nielsen ratings.
O’Reilly is popular in the relatively narrow world of political tv news hosts. President Bush is very unpopular in the relatively wide world of the actual American people.
By the way, who got the most votes in 2000? Hint: The answer is not George Bush.
Which party got the moste votes in 2006? Hint: The answer is not the Republican party, of which George Bush is the leader.
You have to love cons and their unswerving devotion to skewing the debate.
Rejecting Bush’s policies never had anything to do with polls. His administration is a disaster based on the merits, or lack thereof, of his policies. Current opinion polls merely reflect the fact that a sizable portion of the populace has pushed beyond ideological boundaries to arrive at the same conclusion, namely that Bush and his administration are bad for the country and the world. Increasingly it is only those people who cling to a fractured world view predicated on fear and a brutal and oppressive nationalism that continue to support this corrupt gang of thieves.
Obviously this is just Dugger trolling, but it is interesting to watch him and the other cons who frequent this board consistently fail to engage the discussion honestly, much like their television counter parts.
Truly the echo chamber is a sight to behold.
I’m not trolling at all Bill. And I’m not avoiding debate by dismissing contrary opinion as “trolling.” I say that there is hypocrisy here in celebrating a derived expression of public opinion against Bush but arrogantly dismissing another derived expression of public opinion when it runs contrary to progressive theology. And if you say well cable news isn’t that important, then why this post which fulminates against O’Reilly and the many other hate O’Reilly posts here. After all, he’s not that important is he?
No, actually, he isn’t. It just infuriates me (and probably a majority of the folks here) that he continues to occupy his bully pulpit and talk smack out of his ass every day.
And I still don’t know what a popinjay is.
It’s like a clay pigeon.
You distorted the debate by claiming that general opinion polls were the basis for rejecting Bush’s policies. Clearly they aren’t, or this and hundreds of other liberal blogs would have only popped into existence a year or so ago. Following that line of thought, you insist that since O’Reilly’s ratings are the highest among a particular demographic, and since liberals worship public opinion, O’Reilly must not deserve all the vitriol hurled at him on the Internets.
You also try to advance the idea that Bush’s ratings are equivalent to a general measure of the cable audience for a vitriolic cable pundit. A number of people here have already knocked down many of the flaws with that thinking (not to mention that to be in the same ballpark, you would have to compare the audience numbers for Bush’s national addresses, not an opinion poll on Bush’s policies or performance, to O’Reilly’s numbers, since we are talking about audience numbers, again, not opinion polls).
Taken on his own, O’Reilly isn’t important. When seen as part of a larger picture, along with the rise of Fox News and conservative radio (Clear Channel, primarily), however, he can be seen as part of the disturbing decades long slide of our media into corporatist, rightwing hands. Once there were laws governing the airwaves intended to promote fair and balanced reporting. Now we have Fox “News.” We can all thank the Gipper for much of this (Clinton did his part, too, by allowing federal laws restricting station ownership to be gutted). Let’s not forget Powell’s idiot seed, either.
I would still maintain the basic principal: that if we conclude the President is wrong about things to a large degree, more or less, because of poor ratings in political polls, we can hardly turn around and call O’Reilly ‘crazy’ etc when the appropriate polls say he is the very best cable news host.
Now I can agree with that. It makes no sense to trust the polls in the case of Mr. Bush and discount them where Mr. O’Reilly is concerned.
So how can one possibly conclude that Mr. O’Reilly is on the far, far extremes of popular opinion?
The polls, of course.
The polls say that approximately 30-35 percent of the American public approves of the job Mr. Bush is doing.
The polls also say that only 2 percent of the public approve of the job Mr. O’Reilly is doing.