After he was fired by Fox News, Bill O’Reilly quickly tried to paint his job loss as some sort of “hit” by the left. O’Reilly promised to blow the whistle on the “organized left-wing cabal” pulling the strings, but so far, the disgraced TV host has withheld whatever evidence he has of a conspiracy against him. While everyone waits patiently for O’Reilly to reveal his promised “truth,” he took some time — in an op-ed for The Hill — to defend President Trump’s “both sides” press conference as some sort of rebuke to a lock-step media.
Ignoring how his old employer covered the President’s wild, shouty press conference, O’Reilly decries CBS and CNN as networks that didn’t “provide a counter opinion” to anti-white supremacy interview subjects. He then describes President Trump appearing to side with white supremacists as “injecting different opinions into a story where only one point of view is tolerated by the media,” namely, that a white supremacist murdered a woman.
O’Reilly then goes on to say Trump keeps shooting himself in the foot, or “elongating the controversy,” because he hates the “activist left” so much after they “demonized” him during his campaign for saying Mexicans are rapists. “From the beginning of his foray into politics, the hard left has demonized him in vicious ways,” O’Reilly writes. “Entire news organizations are working to destroy him.” Here’s more:
Donald Trump is very, very angry about that and so are millions of his supporters.
So the president vents by attacking “fake news” and highlighting the sins of the left every chance he gets. For him, this is fair payback for what he has endured. He sees his opponents as dishonest, deserving of constant disparagement.
In O’Reilly’s mind, President Trump “knows that Nazi sympathizers are bad people” but feels it’s more important to attack the left whenever he can to get revenge on the left for all the mean (and accurate) things the left has said about him. Further, this tactic plays well with Trump’s base. O’Reilly ends his column by saying there’s a civil war percolating:
In America there is, indeed, a civil war underway. And the president along with his supporters will lose that war unless they fight it smarter. Anytime Nazis are involved you condemn them and walk away. That’s all.
There will be time to expose the hard left fanatics down the road. It’s all about picking your spots. It’s all about an effective wartime strategy.
Sleep tight, I guess?
(Via The Hill)