Bill O'Reilly Jumps the Shark

OK, I realize that some might argue that Mr. No-Spin jumped a long time ago, but I just can't enough of the lead for Bill O'Reilly's new column (which will appear in Sunday's Daily News):

Whenever I start feeling sorry for myself over personal attacks by my far-left media opponents, and those have been known to happen, I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Come on, Bill, Blessed Teresa? Don't you think you're more like Job, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Christ all wrapped into one? Come on, man, let's show a little humility.

That said, I do think O'Reilly is getting a bum deal in this phony brouhaha over his supposedly racist comments. Earl has offered a rather tepid defense below, but too tepid, IMO. Earl's position boils down to: Bill's probably not more racist than a lot of other people, when truly, I don't think his comments were racist at all.

If you hear them in context -- and I heard the whole conversation on the radio this morning -- O'Reilly is not saying that he's surprised that black people were behaving civilly at the restaurant and concert he went to. What he did say was that he thought a lot of other white people -- those whose only experience of African Americans is what they see on the nightly news or MTV -- would be surprised. And that's essentially the same comment black civil-rights leaders have been making for years in their protests of the media's depiction of African Americans.

No wonder Juan Williams, who is black and was being interviewed by O'Reilly at the time of those comments, didn't object. Far from it, he agreed with him. Indeed, in response to CNN's over-hyped treatment of the story, Williams said, "It had nothing to do with racist ranting by anybody except these idiots at CNN."

Take a moment to see who's driving this story: It was spurred by Media Matters, a far-left outfit run by right-wing-hit-man-turned-left-wing-hitman David Brock. It's a smear on the part of a long-time smear artist. And CNN has made a big deal out of this because, well, CNN is a ratings-toxic network that routinely gets its snot kicked in by O'Reilly's Fox.

So O'Reilly is right when he says he's getting a raw deal. But that doesn't make him a Mother Teresa, not by a long shot.