O'Reilly vs. The New Yorker

[billr]

O'Reilly added The New Yorker to his enemies list last night. Here's what apparently upset him. He called it "character assassination."
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BAH HUMBUG

Chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, with Jack Frost nipping at your nose and folks dressed up like Eskimos—or, to update the line for political correctness, with tots in boots just like Aleuts. It’s that magical season when lights twinkle and good will abounds. It’s time again for the thrill that comes but once a year: the War on Christmas.

The War on Christmas is a little like Santa Claus, in that it (a) comes to us from the sky, beamed down by the satellites of cable news, and (b) does not, in the boringly empirical sense, exist. What does exist is the idea of the War on Christmas, which, though forever new, is a venerable tradition, older even than strip malls and plastic mistletoe. Christmas itself, in something like its recognizably modern form, with gifts and cards and elves, dates from the early nineteenth century. The War on Christmas seems to have come along around a hundred years later, with the publication of “The International Jew,” by Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, whom fate later punished by arranging to have his fortune diverted to the sappy, do-gooder Ford Foundation. “It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they”—the Jews—“preach and practice,” he wrote. “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and certain patriotic songs shows that.” Ford’s anti-Semitism has not aged well, thanks to the later excesses of its European adherents, but by drawing a connection between Christmasbashing and patriotism-scorning he pointed the way for future Christmas warriors.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051226ta_talk_hertzberg

[Thom Little]

1. You left out the best passage. This just nails it.

O’Reilly sees the War on Christmas as part of the “secular progressive agenda,” because “if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage.” Just as Christmas itself evolved as a way to synthesize a variety of winter festivals, so the War on Christmas fantasy is a way of grouping together a variety of enemies, where they can all be rhetorically machine-gunned at once. But the suspicion remains that a truer explanation for Fox’s militancy may be, like so much else at Yuletide, business. Christmas is the big retail season. What Fox retails is resentment.

[billr]

2. Yep

That nails it. I've been warned about quoting more than two paragaphs, though. Figured first two would be acceptable.

[Thom Little]

3. I believe the rule is four paragraphs, not two.

That's what they've always told me when I've been warned.

[billr]

4. That's it.

I "misunderestimated."

[dennisnyc]

7. i think this word may become part of the language--and it freaks me out

I heard someone use it recently where it sort of made sense. And here you did perhaps incorrectly underestimate....oh, jimminy, i'm going bonkers.............

[yurbud]

12. "what Fox retails is resentment"

Great line.

They can't just DO the kind of Christmas stuff they claim to be defending--they have to spike the eggnog with bile.

[LVdem]

5. I love the New Yorker....nt

[yurbud]

6. New Yorker and O'Reilly probably have less than zero audience in common

Reading the New Yorker requires that you know how to read.

[No Exit]

8. Now that's a good point.

What is O'Pervert worried about, anyway? "Character assassination"? If a character is assassinated, and no one hears the shot, has it really happened? I believe that the set of O'Reilly watchers, and the set of people who read The New Yorker, have no overlap.

Not one of his watchers would ever know about this "character assassination" if he didn't mention it.

He must like it. (Perhaps he feels the same pleasure from it as he gets when he is scrubbed especially hard with a loofah.)

[yurbud]

9. O'Reilly like guy at back of lynch mob

Who yells "get a rope" knowing that he won't be the one who actually has to do the lynching.

This is probably how most New Yorker readers saw O'Reilly even before the recent story. Anybody who does the War on Christmas as a serious story can't expect to be taken seriously by anyone with an IQ in the triple digits.

[No Exit]

10. That's for sure! Now if the article had been in "Soap Opera Digest",

I think thousands of O'Reilly's viewers would have seen this "character assassination".

[yurbud]

11. professional wrestling weekly

[No Exit]

13. Yeah--that would clue in his male viewers, just as Soap Opera Digest

would get his female viewers into a murderous rage.

Of course, they could hit them both if they put their "character assassination" article in "Us" magazine...