If you hate Bill O’Reilly, then you have to check this out. It is a compilation of reviews of O’Reilly’s books by two writers from the Nation. But without a doubt, the best part of the review is this:
He has two chapters, “The Sex Factor” and “The Dating Factor,” which he offers as sage advice but which are actually thinly disguised chronicles of what a player O’Reilly used to be during his leisure-suit, Ron Burgundy disco days as a local TV reporter. Following is an excerpt. If you happen to be reciting this as part of a reading at a bookstore or a library, you may want to cover the first two rows of your audience in plastic sheeting. They will get sprayed. I myself have lost every lunch from circa 1979 to the present. Here’s Bill:
My thing was the music: I was a dancing machine. Sock it to me, Donna Summer! Let’s shake this place, Gloria Gaynor! Get down! Now, this was the lad of a quarter century ago, okay? But I make no apologies. I loved the all-out dancing, and quite a few girls loved to dance with me. The dancing got me dates. The dancing said (since you couldn’t hear any words in those places under the rotating mirror balls), Hey, let’s have some fun and see what happens next. Even Catholic girls had their inhibitions lowered by the howls of the Bee Gees or Sylvester. A few hours at clubs like Septembers or Shenanigans and most of my dates wanted to extend the evening at their place or mine.
Of course, this was written in 2000, four years before O’Reilly was accused by one of his producers of making inappropriate small talk with her over the phone while he masturbated.
How is this man taken seriously, and how are his books so popular. Also amusing was this segment from the interview which explains why the NY Times book review section held out so long before giving in and reviewing O’Reilly’s book (something O’Reilly severly critisized the NY Times for not doing):
After Who’s Looking Out for You? had spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, O’Reilly made much of the Times’s lack of interest in reviewing it. No doubt O’Reilly imagines that the Old Gray Lady ignored his magnum opus because of some institutional left-wing bias. Please. Three pages into Who’s, you’ll realize that the Times chose not to review it for the same reason they don’t send a food critic to Chili’s or an art critic to check out a potato chip that looks like Dale Earnhardt.
I love it.
