Grenade-Threatening Lunatic Interviews US President

by tristero

Every once in a while, like three or four times a day, it is important to remember how genuinely, utterly, bogus modern American mass discourse has become. For example:

O’Reilly said that he knew “for a fact that President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on in the Internet.” O’Reilly then said, “I have to say President Bush has a much healthier attitude toward this than I do. Because if I can get away with it, boy, I’d go in with a hand grenade.”

Four things here.

First of all, O’Reilly equates presidential ignorance with presidential mental health. By his reasoning, then, George W. Bush therefore must be the sanest president that ever lived.

Secondly, note the utterly vacuous nature of the threat. Where, exactly, would Bill 0’Reilly go in with a hand grenade to destroy the evil bloggers? A server farm in Virginia? Well, that doesn’t really eliminate any bloggers, now does it? To do that, O’Reilly would have to come invade our homes.

But Bill’s right. He’d never get away with it. Oh, not that he’d get in trouble with the law: there ain’t any. Hell, a government that can rationalize torture can easily find a way to excuse Bill O’Reilly’s grenade jihad.

No the reason O’Reilly wouldn’t dare attack us is that he knows that many of us bloggers live with the kind of serious protection that would easily scare O’Reilly into dropping a huge load of falafel into his drawers.

And thirdly, even when eliminationism is uttered by blustering fools, it is still elimationism and fascism. This should be particularly disturbing to those who say we need to wait until the Minutemen… sorry, I slipped, I meant brownshirts… start their patrols before declaring the US a fascist state. After all, O’Reilly is presently deemed mainstream enough to rate an opportunity to interview the president of the United States.

And that was point four, in case you missed it.