O'Reilly Is An Asshole Watch

Last night's "Talking Points Memo" was a break from the martyr complex O'Reilly's been playing up lately. Instead, he reverted back to the same folksy, bullying authoritarianism that got him where he is.

Big Bill started by denouncing Martha Stewart as typical of America's slow transformation into Babylon, a woman who thinks she is innocent because she "doesn't think lying to the Feds is a crime." From that point of departure, O'Reilly went on to denounce those multitudes of Americans who selectively decide which laws apply to them, picking out Bill Clinton, the city of San Francisco, the city of New Paltz, New York, Judge Roy Moore, and his favorite bogeymen, drug users, as law breakers and anarchists who are destroying our society. He claimed that Martha Stewart has compared herself to Nelson Mandela, which, if true, is stupidity as grand opera, and finished with the flourish of defending Gandhi's civil disobedience on the grounds that "he wasn't lying and wasn't violating the laws of legitimate legislatures."

I'm sure Gandhi, who I think has been reincarnated as JC Chasez, appreciates the compliment. An ignorant thug like O'Reilly can't be expected to pin down a definition of "legitimate legislature," but I'd be quite interested to know why he thinks that the British imperial government in India was not legitimate. Since the nation's founders, whom O'Reilly risibly claims wanted "all Americans to be on the same moral page," were by and large drug users themselves, and would have regarded prohibitions on what private citizens may or not do (without hurting others) as disgraceful infringements on liberty, I would think that the millions of peaceful, law-abiding, loyal, patriotic, and drug-using citizens of this country have some basis for their view that the war on drugs is itself illegitimate.