Bill O’Reilly isn’t your average d-bag. Not only did he finish college and get two post-graduate degrees (one from Harvard), he also worked in the mainstream press before accepting a position at the tabloid news magazine “Inside Edition”.
He is also above the average d-bag in the quality and coherence of his philosophy of d-baggery. Perhaps this is due to the education he received at Chaminade high school and Marist college, both Catholic schools. Catholic philosophers in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries crafted the most incisive critiques of secular liberalism, political pluralism, and economic liberalism yet developed, and it seems very likely that this is where O’Reilly learned the theory that makes his rhetoric so effective. Compared to standard d-bag philosophy (which is oftentimes merely selfishness), this conservatism also places value on public service and empathy for the poor and disempowered. However, as a d-bag philosopher in his own right, O’Reilly has successfully perverted conservative Catholic morals into one of if not the most virulent strain of d-baggery.
Being a hypocrite to a d-bag is like gills to a fish — it’s how they draw oxygen. For example, the moral imperative to protect the weak is perverted by O’Reilly into a tool to emasculate his enemies. His support of Jessica’s law is not rooted in empathy for children, but rather in a hatred for all masculinities but his own, and his own “care” for little girls who are not of his family smells of perversion as rank as that of the offenders he accuses. Andrea Mackris’s accusation that O’Reilly made improper sexual advances on her is a symptom of this hypocrisy. He appears to experience no guilt or shame over his own improper or illicit desires, but he feels secure in calling Bill Clinton a pervert for the exact same crime. His authoritarianism is rooted in patriarchal masculinity, making him analogous to Rulon Jeffs or Adolph Hitler, if different in particulars like the legality (which is not to say desirability) of polygamy or hatred for Jews (as opposed to, say, Islamofascists). His opponents are always “sissies“, which in his mind also makes them perverts. The reverse side of this logic is that if you are strong enough, whatever you do is law. The problem with Clinton, for example, was that he was a politician (sissy) instead of a President (decider). Bush on the other hand can happily break as many laws as he sees fit as long as he can prove he has the strength to be above the law.
For promoting the cult of masculine power and for being a living demonstration of how much you can get away with if you have your own TV show, we salute Bill O’Reilly as one of our great, national d-bags.
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