Jingo Bells

I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report every night before I go to bed. Obviously, this doesn't make me special. It is just nice to end the evening with people making fun of those in power and other bloviating blow-hards. Now something I've discovered recently is that the O'Reilly Factor, on you-know-which-network, runs its late repeat of the day's show at the same hour that Jon and Stephen are making me giggle with glee.

I will often flip over to Bill-O during commercial breaks on Comedy Central to see what madness is spewing out of his leathery pumpkin head at that moment. Now mind you, I don't like to watch the crazy fucker. I prefer to get my info on the diseased lunacy he his spreading to the country from my friends over at Media Matters because, well, I really don't want to develop a brain aneurysm while I'm still in my 30s.

But there are times I just can't resist flipping over for a second. It's really fun during Colbert to go back and forth between the satire and the real, unbelievable as it is, thing. It really is a self-inflicted torture that I just can't seem to stop.

And this is really Girls Gone Wild's fault. The need to flip channels during late night on Comedy Central is really because of how many of those commercials they run. I swear, I think they sponsor the whole damn Colbert Report sometimes. They are like the Mutual of Omaha to Colbert's Marlin Perkins. I just have to switch channels because they are so vile. And I feel guilty whenever they are on the TV, even though my wife is asleep in the bedroom and I didn't put the dumb "college" girls on the TV on purpose. I just feel like I'm doing something wrong if they're on.

Anyway, to get back to the point. If you read Media Matters enough, you know how the dumbshit O'Reilly acts, with his bullying, screaming, half truths and all-out lies. But sometimes when you watch him yourself you can catch some of his more subtle propaganda and psychotic nonsense.

I flipped over for a minute last night and he was talking about OJ Simpson, because Newsweek has apparently gotten a hold of a chapter of his infamous book that was canceled, which O'Reilly still claims credit for getting axed. And he was going on and on with his grandstanding bullshit calling OJ vile and disgusting and at one point saying he wasn't "newsworthy," somehow missing the irony that he was covering it. And to punctuate his point on why OJ was vile and disgusting he said that "he killed two AMERICANS!"

Not two people. Not two innocents. Not two human beings. Two Americans. Like somehow that matters.

The ridiculousness of the extreme jingoism of people like O'Reilly has taken them so far off the edge that even a 12 year old murder gets framed in the context of terrorism and national identity. It's as if he's saying that if OJ killed them then maybe he'll kill you too, and we better support President Bush because only he can save you good Americans from the Juice.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe "he killed two Americans" was his way of saying "that good for nothing nigger killed two white people." So it could have been a racist O'Reilly moment and not a nationalist one. I guess I should give him the benefit of the doubt.

I really need to program my cable box to block FOX News.