Bill O'Reilly visited David Letterman's Late Show on January 3, 2006, and Letterman had a piece of him- or tried to.
I liked Letterman here stylistically and personally, as always. He had a real carefully circumscribed approach here, very bluntly expressing his view that "I have the feeling about 60 percent of what you say is crap" without ranting and being personally hateful in his tone - much preferred to O'Reilly's typical crazy and sometimes demagogic ranting.
As style and personality, fellow Hoosier and Ball State alumni Letterman certainly appeals to me ten to one over O'Reilly. Count me among those who would dearly love to slap the taste out of Bill O'Reilly's mouth on a regular basis. Watching the exchange initially, I'm absolutely rooting for Letterman to take this obnoxious blowhard down a peg. Yeah, Dave!
But then there's thinking it through, trying to separate out their arguments from their personalities. Reading the transcript (see bottom of page) gives me, unfortunately, a different result. On the substance, Bill O'Reilly largely had it all over David Letterman. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Bill O'Reilly pretty much made my hero David Letterman his woman.
Here's the main point: Filling out the "full of crap" quote, Letterman said,
"I'm not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling, I have the feeling about 60 percent of what you say is crap. [audience laughter] But I don't know that for a fact."
Well David, if you don't know for a fact then you shouldn't be saying it, should you?
Folks, that's pretty much game, set and match for O'Reilly right there, straight out of Letterman's own mouth. He very clearly said that he did NOT watch O'Reilly's show nor really know what was on it. Moreover, as per that money quote above, he openly admits that he does not know the facts about public policy to factually argue against O'Reilly, the career newsman.
That wasn't just comedic self-deprecation. Letterman just didn't have any facts to back him up, and he was completely out of his depth to talk about any of this public policy. The fact that Letterman himself named it does not make it ok.
Moreover, David Letterman was totally taking a distressingly cheap shot with this exchange regarding Cindy Sheehan
Letterman: Have you lost family members in armed conflict?O'Reilly: No, I have not.
Letterman: Well, then you can hardly speak for her, can you?
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - JELIEL
Oh Dude, trust me, David could factually argue O'Reilly into catatonia. He's just to much of a gentleman to do so on TV. He knows his show isn't called the Daily Show with John Stewart. But his defference on not being smart enough was more of Dave's brilliant cynicism.
2 - Scott Butki
Interesting take on this because most people I know who saw it thought Letterman made O'Reilly look like the overgeneralizing picking on issues that don't exist (the war on christmas, etc),
shutting up anyone who doesn't like what he's saying (see Outfoxed movie for examples), that he is.
And that Dave put him in his place.
3 - GoHah
Al--agreed. I'm a Letterman fan but it bothered me that he was so unprofessional and, as a host, blatantly rude, as opposed to being, as usual, more effectively covert about it. To say that he has "a feeling" that most of what O'Reilly says is crap while admitting that he never watches the show puts caused him the most harm.
4 - Shark
Dave's Best Line: Let's go back to your little red and green stories.
Dave's 2nd Best Line: "...every twenty years somebody gets outraged and says oh by god we gotta put diapers on horses..."
=======
Al, you conveniently left out the part about how THE SILENT NIGHT AND THE BANNED RED AND GREEN WERE FUCKING LIES.
Nice.
Al's Spin Zone.
5 - Shark
O'Reilly is obviously bat-shit insane -- and I predict that it's just a matter of time before he BLOWS HIS FUCKING BRAINS OUT on national television.
6 - troll
lol
7 - Temple Stark
To bad the author doesn't believe what he's writing. Again.
8 - Al Barger
Shark, I've heard questions about some of O'Reilly's red and green stories, but I haven't seen any documentation on them- and don't care enough to research them. They're just not that significant to me. But also therefore, I don't go making claims about questionable stories I haven't checked out.
It would seem unlikely that O'Reilly would use specific factual anecdotes like that knowing that they were certifiably incorrect. Obviously he knows that stuff like that will be- quite correctly- held against him. I'd think he was smarter than that.
Again, even if we grant for the sake of argument that O'Reilly is factually correct, he's STILL wrong about the issue.
Out of hundreds of thousands of schools and libraries and such, you could always cherry pick a couple dozen dumbass bureaucrat moves. Notice though that O'Reilly et al never have any kind of real numbers or statistics to back up this foolishness- just a couple of little half-assed anecdotes.
But Letterman obviously doesn't know ANY of this. If he was going to have a piece of him on air like this, he should have done the damned research. Hell, Letterman's got people on payroll that he could have put to checking on this stuff. He didn't.
Letterman was pretty damned lame right here.
9 - RogerMDillon
"He very clearly said that he did NOT watch O'Reilly's show nor really know what was on it."
That doesn't mean he didn't watch the show. That only means he said he didn't watch the show. He might not have wanted to go any further with the discussion since he rarely gets into politics. Also, it was a shot that was intended for laughs, which it got.
Al, if you don't know for a fact that he doesn't watch Bill's show then you shouldn't be saying it, should you?
Hell, a rule like that could shut down the blogosphere.
10 - Scott Butki
SO Letterman's the bad guy for not doing research?
I thought O'Reilly was the bad guy because
he rarely gets his facts straight.
Oh it is just so confusing and depressing. I think
I will have to stick to getting my news from
these papers with ink on them. I think they are
called newspapers. I heard they are filled with
facts and free of much of the loaded BS attached
to stories used by Dave or Bill.
11 - Matthew T. Sussman
I got a theory that's crazy enough to be true:
Letterman played the role of liberal straw man to make O'Reilly look good.
Discuss.
12 - Jeff Coleman
The thing is that what O'Reilly was saying IS demonstrably "full of crap":mediamatters.org
On the January 3 edition of CBS' Late Show with David Letterman, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly appeared as a guest and resurrected his false claim that a Wisconsin elementary school banned the singing of the Christmas hymn "Silent Night." As he discussed his Christmas crusade with Late Show host David Letterman, O'Reilly told Letterman that the school "[k]nocked out the words [to "Silent Night"] and told the little kids to sing" alternative lyrics. According to O'Reilly, this incident "proves there are pinheads at the Ridgewell [sic] Elementary School in Wisconsin. That's what it proves."
...
In fact, the new song lyrics are part of a 1988 Christmas play called The Little Tree's Christmas Gift, in which a scraggly Christmas tree is informed it may not be sold and will instead become firewood, prompting it to croon the revised version of "Silent Night" while lamenting its situation. Think Progress further explained that the play's creator, Dwight Elrich, is the musical director of the New Covenant Singers at Bel Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles -- which a December 20 Washington Post article noted was "former president Ronald and Nancy Reagan's church in California" -- and his play has been performed by churches across the country. According to Elrich's website, his products "make it easy for you to produce a fantastic Kids Christmas Musical Program." Elrich told the Post: "I'm just flabbergasted. I'm a choir director in a church! I perform 'Silent Night' 40 or 50 times each year! I thought the play was a really charming, wonderful, positive story about love and acceptance ... removing it from the Christian tradition was something I never thought anyone could ever come up with. We were telling a story about a little tree, so we used a familiar tune to help the kids get it."
------------------
As you see, O'Reilly was completely mistaken that the school in question "forced" any kids (except perhaps the actors in the play) to sing a secular version of "Silent Night". Nobody was punished or prohibited from singing the traditional version.
The secular version of the song in question was a specific part of a play that was put on. That's not what O'Reilly was claiming at all.
Jeff
13 - Victor Lana
This is television that is pre-packaged. I've been to the Letterman show, and I know how he does a rehearsal. They went through the "shtick" once before the taping. O'Reilly started the whole thing with the Christmas stuff, and it just fed off itself. I think they both wanted it to go like this because it's good for both of them in a convoluted way.
14 - Temple Stark
That sounds like it could be true as well Victor. If Marv Albert can come back from the airing of his perversions, so can O; Reilly it seems.
15 - Sam Jack
O'Reilly just doesn't want to address substantive issues, because if he's wrong even once, then it's a huge blow.
Thing is, Letterman doesn't do the 'puncturing the inflated egos of hacks' bit very often. If he had done his research, he could have perhaps come closer to what John Stewart did with Crossfire.
I don't know how O'Reilly can stay so angry all the time, though. I think I would probably have a heart attack.
16 - plainavy
"The secular version of the song in question was a specific part of a play that was put on."
That's right. Unsurprisingly the leftwing Media Matters write-up of this story misses O'Reilly's point: There is a secularization of Christmas in this country. When you've got Sears/K-Mart, Loews, Wal-Mart, Target, Federated Department Stores, etc., and a host of public school districts and libraries in recent years taking up decisions about the Holiday/Christmas nomenclature, then it doesn't take much objectivity to recognize that some sort of culture-wide problematic concerning the status of Christmas is in the air (numerous leftwing denials to the contrary notwithstanding).
The fact that there's a secular version of a well-loved traditional Christmas song shows that secularity has made inroads on a holiday inspired by a religious tradition.
Not many on the left appear sensitive to the loss of lyrical integrity to a religious holiday song, perhaps because, as O'Reilly has suggested, the forces of secular progressivism celebrate the slow dismantling of religious inspired public holidays. They see no loss of order because they abandoned the order long ago and have inured themselves, willingly or not, to any disrespect for that order. Please understand that people who have not abandoned that order, who live their lives by it, feel its most modest moments of dissolution keenly.
Media Matters's own article's reasoning over the song lyrics, whether other liberal or secularized churches have performed the play, or taken it on innocently or not, or whether the song's lyric reviser thought that the song was being secularized or not, has no bearing on the fact that the lyrics ARE a secularization of the song.
To take another example from the legion of mutually reassuring lefties convincing themselves furiously, like lions in the forests of Oz, that there is no war on xmas, there is no war on xmas, there is no war on xmas, see Terry Krepel, 12/24/2005, at
http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2005/christmas05.html
"The rewording is a plot point in a play; it has nothing to do with 'secularizing' the song."
To the contrary, the lyrics ARE, again, a secularizing of the song--the rewording IS secular and in an exemplary way. Whether the lyric writer did the revision for pedagogical purposes is also beside the point. That's just another logical meltdown in the rearguard action that many on the left feel called upon to perform in this matter. The meltdowns aren't hard to find at any of these piles of commentary at http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/14/silent-night-fraud/
or at http://mediamatters.org/items/200601040009.
17 - gonzo marx
plainavy sez...
*that secularity has made inroads on a holiday inspired by a religious tradition.*
and what religious tradition do you mean?
no, seriously...where there a lot of decorated fir trees in Bethlehem?
tinsel at mangers?
or had it slipped your mind that according to the new testament, Christ was born in March, not December?
christmas as you are speaking of it is an entirely artificial invention composed of a plethora of cultural traditions swarmed around a celebrations of the wniter solstice and commercialized in American culture to such an extent that both Saint Nicholas and Kris Kringle would vomit multicolored light strands at the mere thought
a favorite Story on the subject tells of the origin of the "angel" on top of the christmas tree...it seems one holiday season was going particularily rough for old Santa, half his elves were down with the flu, the reindeer were threatening to go on strike, Mrs Claus was sick and tired of him only "coming" once a year and he had just put his boots on the wrong feet when the front doorbell rang...
it was a tiny angel with this years Tree...who said in it's tiny voice...
"tree delivery, Santa...C.O.D.....
where did ya want me to put it?
true Story
Excelsior!
18 - Indigobusiness
Letterman mopped the floor with O'Reilly. Anyone who can't see that is blind.
Research? Research what? You missed the point entirely. Dave, by saying what he did, indicated the irrelevance of O'Reilly while insulting him in the process. It, in no way, was an admission of being uninformed of anything significant.
19 - Jeff Coleman
"The fact that there's a secular version of a well-loved traditional Christmas song shows that secularity has made inroads on a holiday inspired by a religious tradition."
Okay, two points.
One--who cares? So what if there's a play that uses the melody for "Silent Night" and has words that aren't religious? Like a previous comment pointed out, the actual holiday of Christmas is only tangentially related to the Christian religion anyway. Decorated trees, Santa Claus, gift-giving, lights, candy canes... none of that stuff has anything to do with Jesus.
And two--Media Matters didn't miss the point at all, O'Reilly did. The point HE wants people to believe is that this school actually forbids children from singing the religious version of "Silent Night", when that's not what is happening at all.
Jeff
20 - Christopher Rose
Obscure egocentric TV pundit has minor squabble with other similar TV personality. World yawns.
21 - Shark
Al Barger: "...I've heard questions about some of O'Reilly's red and green stories, but I haven't seen any documentation on them- and don't care enough to research them. They're just not that significant to me."
Fucking astonishing. Barger, how can you type this shit with a straight face? What? You think we're NOT PAYING ATTENTION?
Fuck, man, give us some credit!
THE WHOLE POINT ABOUT O'REILLY is that he's a liar! He consistently lies to his national audience.
Letterman rightly questioned him on it. You portray the story as if it were some meaningless Entertainment Tonight celebrity cat fight.
IRONY: You berate Letterman for a lack of data, research, etc, and then write off the TWO MAJOR "war on xmas" themes O'Reilly bullshitted about on NATIONAL TELEVISION as 'not interesting' and apparently beneath your dignity to investigate.
One can pop those URBAN MYTHS with about 10 seconds of Googling.
Once again, Al -- like O'Reilly -- everything you say is suspect.
22 - Bliffle
Your astonishing characterization of one person being thrust into an inferior position WRT another person as "being made his woman" would result in a thorough verbal drubbing from any one of my high-achieving daughters. Verbal, at least.
A guy should be careful about making such lurid invidious comparisons: you could get hurt. Really hurt.
23 - Scott Butki
I was going to link to Media Matters so you can do some fact checking but someone beat me to it.
So here is how you can do what I plan to do next - go watch the whole thing and decide for myself.
You can download and watch it
here via Crooks and Liars.
24 - Al Barger
Shark, y'all are going on with LIAR LIAR LIAR on O'Reilly, but you haven't established much basis for that here. At least in this corner, the complaint is entirely based on this one high school Christmas play incident. The description I'm reading here doesn't sound like O'Reilly's specifically lying.
He's spinning hell out of it, it would appear. Further, I'd say that Plainavy here in this thread is exhibiting rather princess-and-the-pea sensitivity.
Still, if you're going to scream LIAR LIAR LIAR at the top of your lungs, you'll have to do a LOT better than this to establish the point.
You certainly have no basis for saying that anything I say is suspect. I specifically state that I don't have enough facts to say much about this particular incident that I don't care about, and that therefore I'm rendering no judgment. I'm not saying anything about it to be suspicious of.
YOU are the one who has repeatedly and specifically rejected reason and empiricism as a basis for argument. That's giving yourself carte blanche to say any kind of bullshit, isn't it? And oh yes, you make full use of that.
Mr Butki, I already linked that Crooks and Liars download in the version of this story on my MoreThings blog. It was an oversight that I didn't already have it in this story. Thanks.
Watch the video, but I say you'll get a better fair and balanced view of the real argument from reading this transcript. Reading the words on paper distanced from their physicality helps to separate out the actual arguments from the personality factors.
Bliffle, sorry if I have offended your sensibilities there. Your daughters might give me a well-deserved beat down of one kind or other. I'm sure I've got it coming.
Still, Letterman asks for that kind of comparison with this display. Note also that I was NOT talking like this about an actual woman. Wouldn't be the same thing at all.
25 - IgnatiusReilly
Obscure egocentric comment editor gives opinion. World yawns.