Lawrence has fun with Mr. O!

THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2013

Big pot calls large kettle black: Bill O’Reilly melted down Tuesday night on his semi-eponymous program.

On The One True Liberal Channel, Lawrence O’Donnell has had big fun with this major meltdown on each of the last two evenings. Last evening, he teased the vastly pleasing meltdown all the way through his program. It was the way he kept us rubes tuned in:

O’DONNELL (3/6/13): Having just watched his show, I can tell you that Bill O’Reilly is just as ignorant tonight as last night about President Obama and spending cuts.

[...]

O’DONNELL: Coming up, in The Rewrite tonight, Bill O’Reilly’s tools for anger management. I’m not kidding you. He actually has ideas about that.

[...]

O’DONNELL (after a brief video clip): That was Bill O’Reilly at the beginning of his show just a couple hours before. Bill O’Reilly’s whole show tonight—OK, almost his whole show tonight—was about his show last night and his on-air meltdown with Alex Colmes.

Bill O’Reilly’s problems with anger management have landed him once again in tonight’s Rewrite which happened to serve up the perfect opportunity to show you the absolutely greatest rage explosion in TV anchor history. It is vintage O’Reilly video that you just will never, ever get tired of seeing. That’s coming up.

[...]

O’DONNELL: Coming up, the ramblings of Rand Paul. And a video history of Bill O’Reilly’s problems with anger management. That’s in the Rewrite.

Finally, we reached the show’s penultimate segment. Lawrence started like this:

O’DONNELL: In tonight's Rewrite, the O’Reilly rules of anger management. Bill knows he has anger issues. And he’s working on them. He really is. He’s just not doing a really great job of working on them. He knows that millions of people have seen that video of him getting gloriously enraged back in his years as a gossip-monger on Inside Edition.

Let’s offer a few basic points:

First, O’Reilly didn’t devote “almost his whole show” last night to his meltdown with Colmes. O’Donnell was simply making that up. In his own preferred piddle-like parlance, Lawrence was “lying” again.

Second, O’Reilly did open last night’s show with a fascinating review of his Tuesday night meltdown. In a rational world, that opening segment would be seen as front-page news by our major newspapers.

Last evening, Lawrence ignored the massive news value of O’Reilly’s opening segment. In the penultimate segment of his own program, he simply treated his liberal viewers to some great big fun.

For Lawrence, this was big entertainment. This is one more way liberals get dumb.

There is a third point we ought to make about Lawrence’s review of O’Reilly’s “anger management problems.” In essence, Lawrence was a great big pot who was calling a large kettle black.

O’Reilly melted down Tuesday night in a vast display of misinformation and fury. Last night, Lawrence described an earlier meltdown by O'Reilly as “the absolutely greatest rage explosion in TV anchor history” (our emphasis).

There may be a reason for the word we have emphasized. As everyone knows, Lawrence himself has staged several of the biggest rage explosions in cable history. He has had to apologize for his explosions (and for the misstatements contained therein). He has been kicked off the air for months at a time.

That said, he wasn’t serving as an anchor during his most famous rage explosions. For sheer rage, one explosion in 2004 might make Lawrence a rival for O’Reilly’s crown—but Lawrence wasn’t an anchor that night. This means that Mr. O is the clear winner among rage-challenged anchors.

In the next few days, we’ll show you the transcript of O’Reilly’s meltdown, though last night’s follow-up segment by Mr. O was a great deal more newsworthy. During that segment, Kirsten Powers kept showing O’Reilly how wrong he had been in his factual claims during Tuesday’s explosion at Colmes.

O'Reilly kept refusing to admit that he had been wrong. He offered a string of absurd complaints about the corrections Powers was making. Adamantly, he continued to misinform his four to six million Fox viewers.

Last night’s segment with Powers was truly astounding, a world-class example of our horrendously broken pseudo-news culture. But then again, to a lesser extent, so was the clowning by Lawrence.

Lawrence is a gigantic clown—and he has a “mercurial” temper. He has been a clown for a good many years, although he’s well informed and functional in a few minor areas. (In fairness, so is O'Reilly.)

Lawrence O'Donnell is served to us liberals as a great big tribal star. In truth, he’s a deeply dysfunctional clown, though O’Reilly can sometimes be worse.

O’Reilly’s first segment last night was astounding. Our guy plays the fool every night.