Good TV
I’ve got to say, it’s bracing for me to see unstoppable force meet unmovable object here. These are two of my least favorite television personalities ever, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard them both sound this sincere before, and certainly not at the same time. Since I think of both of them as insufferable pricks, it’s hard to actually pick a side in the debate; my only real wish would be that the confrontation devolve into an actual fistfight that leaves them both hospitalized.
Here, by the way, is the story they’re discussing.
LOL. That was hilarious. Pair of blow-hards.
“This is Justice!”
“No. THIS IS SPARTA!!”
People always take cases like this as an excuse for racism or easy vague ideas, and O’Reilly seems to be the bigot in this case. I’m completely with Geraldo on this one. There’s not even a constest.
It’s perfectly clear who’s right, I just can’t bring myself to type the words “I’m with Geraldo.”
Shit! I just did. Now I have to go wash my hands.
I’m with Geraldo. At least on this issue, in this fight.
O’Reilly was being a total ass, a total demogogue, and a total bigot.
This clip was great, it was nice seeing someone stand up to O’Reilly, to a degree that not even Stewart or Colbert did in person.
There is something darkly comic about one professional exploitationist condemning another for being a professional exploitationist. But Rivera does seem genuinely offended by where O’Reilly is taking his act this time. I doubt O’Reilly actually gives two shits about illegal immigration, the victims, their families or anything else for that matter. They’re just material for his angry truth-teller routine. But I agree that O’Reilly is sincere here: he’s sincerely upset that Rivera is questioning his methods. Nothing makes a dishonest man angrier than being called dishonest.
If he thought having sex with chickens while wearing a jester’s hat would make him rich, powerful and famous Bill O’Reilly be doing that on TV every night. Think Progress has an amusing video of his darker-haired “Inside Edition” days where he did a segment on how the CIA was in on the Kennedy assassination. You go where the money is.
It occurred to me later that, after the cameras were shut off, O’Reilly probably patted Geraldo on the shoulder and said “Hey, good segment.”
After reading about the actual story they’re discussing, I realized that O’Reilly couldn’t possibly mean what he’s saying because the argument is ludicrous and indefensible. His mistake was to use his “You say you don’t like pie, so you must support the end of the world” technique on a fellow master of bullshit journalism. He tried to bullshit a bullshitter and, yes, he was incensed when the bullshitter didn’t fall for it.
I haven’t watched the Inside Edition clip yet; I sincerely hope Dan Sheedy does some VO work on it.
Rats. No Sheedy VO, but I did learn that the young O’Reilly does bear a striking resemblance to Tom Hanks.
Back in the 70’s Geraldo was a real muckraking crusader. He was a lawer for a Nuyoriceño radical group. He exposed the treatment of mental patients in NY state hospitals. He worked with John Lenon to set up a benefit concert to help them.
He’s been throughly sold out for decades of course, but it’s nice to see that there’s enough of the old Geraldo buried in there to stand up to a bully like Bill.
I’m old enough to remember when Geraldo was a “muckraking crusader,” and he was just as much of a self-important blowhard then too.
The two are hardly mutually exclusive.
My question is how, exactly, a mayor goes about deporting somebody as a facet of a criminal trial.
But you see, that’s why we need a strong federal government. Which, of course, Bill O’Reilly roundly denounces.