Most ridiculous item of the week (2007-04-07)

Happy Easter, folks.

I'm sure most of you have heard about the shouting match between Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera that took place on the former's show Thursday night. To see two total morons -- the worst of the worst at Fox News -- go at it the way they did was extraordinary in itself. But what surprised me the most was that it was Rivera that claimed the moral high ground.



What was it that made it so ridiculous? Not just that Rivera who was the hero -- getting an unprecedented honourable mention from no less than archenemy Keith Olbermann. It was the fact that O'Reilly had the gall to try to tie a fatal drunk driving accident to the issue of illegal immigration. Rubbing salt in the wounds of a grieving family by suggesting that the accident would never have happened if the suspect had been deported set an all-time low for O'Reilly; and I thought he had gotten low enough when he libelled US military personnel not just once but twice regarding a Nazi-organized massacre in Malmédy, Belgium in the closing days of WWII.

Trying to confuse the issue like this is racism, pure and simple. Rivera had it right: Most illegal immigrants are otherwise law-abiding persons more so than the general population. O'Reilly has long past the point of being a mere buffoon -- Rivera covered that ground years ago with his infamous "Al Capone's vault" stunt and a later police drug raid he covered live that turned out to be a woman just doing house painting at night. And even when he's called out, O'Reilly finds a way out to prove he's never wrong.

Being a high school teacher as he once was and a media personality are two different things. The simple fact is, O'Reilly regressed into a ten year old throwing a temper tantrum. Maybe he should go on Jeff Foxworthy's show on the sister main network just to prove, as most of us already know, that he's not "smarter than a 5th grader."

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