Bill O’Reilly -- Portrait of a Teat-Sucker by Tom Breuer
On Sept. 7, dipshit media personality Bill O’Reilly had this wacky exchange with rapper P Diddy:
O'Reilly: All right. You should be a Republican. You know why?
P Diddy: No. Why should I be a Republican?
O'Reilly: Because you're self-made. Did anybody ever give you anything?
P Diddy: I mean, what I should do is inspire young people to --
O'Reilly: But did anybody ever give you anything? The government ever give you anything?
P Diddy: No, I can't really say anybody ever gave me anything.
O'Reilly: All right, so you made it on your own, right?
P Diddy: Yes, I did.
O'Reilly: All right, so you made it on your own, right?
P Diddy: Yes, I did.
O'Reilly: You're like me.
Now, normally when O’Reilly’s having one of his delusional fever dreams it’s at worst amusing or
exasperating, such as when he declares he’s in a race with Hillary Clinton over book sales or when
he claims Fox News is a straight-down-the-middle, fair-and-balanced tribune of the people and
anyone who says differently is a propagandist.
But this particular fairy tale -- that O’Reilly never got anything handed to him -- actually matters,
because it helps to reinforce a myth that’s as embedded in the American psyche (and as false) as
Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
First of all, there’s no such fucking thing as a self-made man. True rags-to-riches tales are the rarest
of exceptions, not the great American ideal, and even these tend to rest squarely on luck, timing and
a considerable boost from family and community. Lots of “self-made” millionaires understand this.
That O’Reilly claims he doesn’t bespeaks either profound dishonesty or willful, shit-for-brains
ignorance.
To begin with, O’Reilly as humble, working-class hero with a hardscrabble upbringing is a myth that’
s been as thoroughly debunked as that story about Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials blowing
his head off with Pop Rocks.
As Michael Kinsley pointed out in a blisteringly funny March 2001 column in Slate, O’Reilly’s
upbringing was decidedly middle class.
Dare we even say upper middle class? According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR),
O’Reilly’s odd boast that his father never made more than $35,000 a year simply means that when
his father retired in 1978 as an oil company accountant, he was making what would be about 90
grand in today’s dollars. (Shit, if my annual freelance writing and editing earnings ever came
anywhere near 90 large, I’d be out on the stoop every night with a couple 40-ouncers, find me a new
common-law wife, and maybe even parlay part of my modest earnings into big lottery winnings so I
could finally feel OK about taking the plastic off the couch. And I was raised upper middle class!)
But as The Washington Post reported in a revealing Dec. 13, 2000 feature story, O’Reilly went to
private high school in the middle-class suburb of Westbury, Long Island (or the Westbury section of
Levittown, as he claims) and then on to private college in Poughkeepssie, N.Y. His family also sent
him to the University of London for a year -- without financial aid. See? Middle class.
But O’Reilly won’t have it. "We're the only show from a working-class point of view," he told The Post.
"I understand working-class Americans. I'm as lower-middle-class as they come."
He also once told the New York Observer, “You don't come from any lower than I came from on an
economic scale.”
Now, most people have to work really hard to be this delusional, but it comes easy to O’Reilly. One
might fairly ask, of course, why, if his childhood was such a Dickensian nightmare, his mother
continued to live in Bill’s childhood home for years after he made his millions.
The only possible explanations: Either Bill is a callous prick who prefers to live a profligate lifestyle
and/or stow away his millions at the expense of his own mother, or he’s completely full of shit about
how he grew up and is disingenuously using this humble beginnings fable as leverage to fuck over
the truly disadvantaged.
Then again, it’s always dangerous to underestimate how crazy O’Reilly can be. Cognitive dissonance
is to O’Reilly as drug addiction and serial divorce are to Rush Limbaugh.
Indeed, the only reason O’Reilly thinks he’s lower class appears to be that the kids at his private high
school treated him like a rube. According to The Post, O’Reilly “frequently tells the story of how, in
high school, the better-off kids scorned him for his ‘two sports coats,’ bought at the unfashionable
Modell's.”
Wow. Shades of Oliver Twist.
Well anyway, so much for the chip on O’Reilly’s shoulder concerning his impoverished childhood.
Turns out that all of Bill’s woe-is-me squealing essentially breaks down to his not knowing how to
dress.
In fact, O’Reilly’s suburban-poverty war stories are so lame that he (or someone at Fox) felt the need
to embroider his online bio with this irrelevant factoid: “O’Reilly began working in his early teens
mowing lawns, which evolved into a house painting business.”
If the denouement of this story were that O’Reilly became the leading lawn-mowing magnate of North
America, that might mean something. But a lot of us -- including many whose parents were pretty
well off -- mowed lawns as kids. So fucking what?
Of course, O’Reilly has to exaggerate his poverty else the hardscrabble, rags-to-riches narrative he
uses to define himself completely breaks down. Nobody wants to hear a marginally-poorly-dressed-
at-a-Northeastern-private-school-to-riches story.
But O’Reilly never bothers to ask himself why an African-American rapper born in Harlem would want
to help people less fortunate, while people like O’Reilly who stand on the firm foundation of centuries
of white privilege and a middle-class suburban private-school education should see those less
successful than he as the undeserving poor.
Nor does he question how the political affiliations of our last two presidents square with their
backgrounds.
To review: One of these men was born in dirt-poor Arkansas to a single mother, lived with an abusive
stepfather, had few real breaks, and parlayed a brilliant mind into phenomenal success in politics.
The other was the scion of a wealthy political dynasty whose father would eventually become
president; was a mediocre student despite going to a wealthy prep school; got into Yale solely
because his father went there; got out of Vietnam and into the “Champagne Unit” of the Texas Air
National Guard through family connections; failed in the oil business and got bailed out by his vice
president father’s rich supporters; got on the board of another oil company through similar
connections, coincidentally selling stock in that company right before it plummeted; used more family
connections to buy into a baseball team (which ended up using ordinary citizens’ sales tax dollars to
build a brand-new ballpark); and then cashed out, becoming a millionaire in the process.
Guess which man O’Reilly admires and which one he never stopped hammering for eight years?
Of course, according to O’Reilly’s logic, George Bush should be a Democrat and Bill Clinton should
be a Republican, because Bush never in his life disengaged from the government’s or his rich family’
s tits, whereas Clinton is a sterling example of how a meritocracy should work. Funny how it doesn’t
work out that way.
But, you might say (if you really wanted to be a prick about it), O’Reilly may have had a comparatively
privileged background (which he’s been frustratingly myopic about) but at least he wasn’t standing in
line for government handouts.
OK, first of all, when your typical white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanite ignores the
mountain of advantages he’s built his life on to argue that we shouldn’t pursue a greater equality of
opportunity for those with few or no advantages (or, as O’Reilly has chosen to do, claim you’re one of
the great unwashed), he’s being a spectacularly dishonest ass.
If you’re lucky enough to have two educated parents who speak the Queen’s English (and not an
alternative dialect that the mainstream culture unfairly associates with stupidity); have a chance to
attend private school or well-funded public schools; and have access to good tutors or educational
enrichment programs, you’re a grade-A prick if you think the kid who was born in the inner city to a
single mother and got raped by her stepfather while going to crumbling schools with bullets whizzing
over her head should be shit out of luck if she gets 20 points less on her SATs than you did. Guess
what? She’s smarter than you are. Suck it up.
And second of all, bullshit.
As O’Reilly never stops reminding everyone, he came from Levittown, a suburb that was essentially
built on government largesse and special privileges.
Ever wonder why our inner cities are a hollowed-out mess of unemployment, crime and despair? A
big piece of the puzzle lies in the history of government-guaranteed, low-interest loans that
encouraged the middle class to abandon the cities around the middle of the last century.
This oft-forgotten and conveniently discarded history is detailed in Suburban Nation: The Rise of
Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff
Speck:
“How did sprawl come about? Far from being an inevitable evolution or a historical accident,
suburban sprawl is the direct result of a number of policies that conspired powerfully to encourage
urban dispersal.
“The most significant of these were the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration
loan programs which, in the years following the Second World War, provided mortgages for over
eleven million new homes. These mortgages, which typically cost less per month than paying rent,
were directed at new single-family suburban construction. Intentionally or not, the FHA and VA
programs discouraged the renovation of existing housing stock, while turning their back on the
construction of row houses, mixed-use buildings, and other urban housing types.
“Simultaneously, a 41,000-mile interstate highway program, coupled with federal and local subsidies
for road improvement and the neglect of mass transit, helped make automotive commuting
affordable and convenient for the average citizen.
“Within the new economic framework, young families made the financially rational choice:
Levittown. (Italics, boldface and unnecessarily large 24-point type mine.) Housing gradually
migrated from historic city neighborhoods to the periphery, landing increasingly farther away.”
Significantly, blacks were all but excluded from this new American dream early on because of
housing discrimination (and were explicitly barred from Levittown homes) -- a sad legacy that
remains with us. And O’Reilly’s neighborhood, as dirt-poor as he likes to claim it was -- would have
been all but impossible without (wait for it) a combination of government housing subsidies and
government transportation subsidies.
But try to tell O’Reilly and his ilk that we ought to support affordable housing for the poor so their
minimum-wage paychecks can last the whole month without them having to work three jobs, or that
we should provide subsidized mass transit so they can actually get to those shit jobs, and he’s liable
to squeal about our pernicious welfare state.
This makes him a dick.
Turns out, lots of people gave O’Reilly lots of things, and without the government exercising its
financial muscle to get middle-class whites (and with them middle-class jobs) out of the city while
leaving poor blacks behind to fend for themselves, his ol’ neighborhood would have likely stayed a
potato field.
Unfortunately, he can’t see it. He thinks he got where he is solely on his own steam.
Thankfully, not all rich people are as selfish as O’Reilly. Some, while attributing a portion of their
success to themselves, nevertheless see society’s and the government’s hand in their success.
Take Martin Rothenberg, a New York-based software entrepreneur who was profiled in United for a
Fair Economy’s excellent report “I Didn’t Do It Alone: Society’s Contribution to Individual Wealth and
Success” (a PDF of the report is available at UFE’s Web site, www.responsiblewealth.org).
Rothenberg has joined with the group in opposition to permanently repealing the estate tax (or what
the GOP has so cleverly rechristened the “death tax” and what others prefer to call “the worms crawl
in the worms crawl out the worms play pinochle on your snout tax”).
Here’s Rothenberg’s take:
“I’m a small business owner, and my family is in the top two percent of wealthy Americans who
would get a windfall if the estate tax is eliminated. But I believe the estate tax should be fixed, not
repealed. Here’s why: my wealth is not only a product of my own hard work. It also resulted from a
strong economy and lots of public investment, both in others and in me.
“I received a good public school education, and used free libraries and museums paid for by others. I
went to college under the GI Bill. I went to graduate school to study computers and language on a
complete government scholarship, paid for by others. While teaching at Syracuse University for 25
years, my research was supported by numerous government grants -- again, paid for by others.
“My university research provided the basis for Syracuse Language Systems, a company I formed in
1991 with some graduate students and my son Larry. I sold the company in 1998 and then started a
new company, Glottal Enterprises. These companies have benefited from the technology-driven
economic expansion -- a boom fueled by continual public and private investment.
“I’ve never once heard my family complain about the prospect of part of their inheritance going toward
an estate tax. That’s because we all believe that paying the estate tax does not mean choosing
between taking care of your children and giving back to society. You can do both.
“I was able to provide well for my family. Upon my death, I hope taxes on my estate will help fund the
kind of programs that benefited me and others from humble backgrounds: a good education, money
for research and targeted investments in poor communities. I’d like all Americans to have the same
opportunities I did.”
But, naturally, O’Reilly thinks the estate tax is an abomination. Why should a guy who nobody never
gave nuffim’ to have to pay so much of what he accumulated to the government when he dies?
O’Reilly thinks the market is presumptively moral, and that monetary rewards naturally flow to the
hard working and the pure of heart. He thinks this because he’s now stinking rich. But most good-
hearted people realize that luck, timing and being born rich are far greater determinants of wealth
than a nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic.
And it doesn’t hurt to be a fatuous blowhard with a simpleminded worldview at the very same time a
rabidly conservative media mogul is casting about for someone who can steal viewers from Wheel of
Fortune for an hour every night.
Again, some “self-made” millionaires are quick to acknowledge the simple role of luck in their
success.
As Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is also mentioned in the UFE report, told Forbes in 2001: “Lots of
people who are smart and work hard and play by the rules don’t have a fraction of what I have. I
realize I don’t have my wealth because I’m so brilliant. Luck has a lot to do with it.”
So fuck you, O’Reilly. Fuck you and the white middle-class privilege you rode in on.
But, just for the sake of argument, let’s grant for now that you did do it all alone, and your white skin,
father’s upper-middle-class salary, private schools, welfare neighborhood and congenitally high
threshold for embarrassment had absolutely nothing to do with your success.
You’re a goddamn multimillionaire now. For God’s sake, buy your mother a decent house.
Previous Column: O'Reilly vs. Hillary: The Race That Never Was (and still he lost)
On Sept. 7, dipshit media personality Bill O’Reilly had this wacky exchange with rapper P Diddy:
O'Reilly: All right. You should be a Republican. You know why?
P Diddy: No. Why should I be a Republican?
O'Reilly: Because you're self-made. Did anybody ever give you anything?
P Diddy: I mean, what I should do is inspire young people to --
O'Reilly: But did anybody ever give you anything? The government ever give you anything?
P Diddy: No, I can't really say anybody ever gave me anything.
O'Reilly: All right, so you made it on your own, right?
P Diddy: Yes, I did.
O'Reilly: All right, so you made it on your own, right?
P Diddy: Yes, I did.
O'Reilly: You're like me.
Now, normally when O’Reilly’s having one of his delusional fever dreams it’s at worst amusing or
exasperating, such as when he declares he’s in a race with Hillary Clinton over book sales or when
he claims Fox News is a straight-down-the-middle, fair-and-balanced tribune of the people and
anyone who says differently is a propagandist.
But this particular fairy tale -- that O’Reilly never got anything handed to him -- actually matters,
because it helps to reinforce a myth that’s as embedded in the American psyche (and as false) as
Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
First of all, there’s no such fucking thing as a self-made man. True rags-to-riches tales are the rarest
of exceptions, not the great American ideal, and even these tend to rest squarely on luck, timing and
a considerable boost from family and community. Lots of “self-made” millionaires understand this.
That O’Reilly claims he doesn’t bespeaks either profound dishonesty or willful, shit-for-brains
ignorance.
To begin with, O’Reilly as humble, working-class hero with a hardscrabble upbringing is a myth that’
s been as thoroughly debunked as that story about Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials blowing
his head off with Pop Rocks.
As Michael Kinsley pointed out in a blisteringly funny March 2001 column in Slate, O’Reilly’s
upbringing was decidedly middle class.
Dare we even say upper middle class? According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR),
O’Reilly’s odd boast that his father never made more than $35,000 a year simply means that when
his father retired in 1978 as an oil company accountant, he was making what would be about 90
grand in today’s dollars. (Shit, if my annual freelance writing and editing earnings ever came
anywhere near 90 large, I’d be out on the stoop every night with a couple 40-ouncers, find me a new
common-law wife, and maybe even parlay part of my modest earnings into big lottery winnings so I
could finally feel OK about taking the plastic off the couch. And I was raised upper middle class!)
But as The Washington Post reported in a revealing Dec. 13, 2000 feature story, O’Reilly went to
private high school in the middle-class suburb of Westbury, Long Island (or the Westbury section of
Levittown, as he claims) and then on to private college in Poughkeepssie, N.Y. His family also sent
him to the University of London for a year -- without financial aid. See? Middle class.
But O’Reilly won’t have it. "We're the only show from a working-class point of view," he told The Post.
"I understand working-class Americans. I'm as lower-middle-class as they come."
He also once told the New York Observer, “You don't come from any lower than I came from on an
economic scale.”
Now, most people have to work really hard to be this delusional, but it comes easy to O’Reilly. One
might fairly ask, of course, why, if his childhood was such a Dickensian nightmare, his mother
continued to live in Bill’s childhood home for years after he made his millions.
The only possible explanations: Either Bill is a callous prick who prefers to live a profligate lifestyle
and/or stow away his millions at the expense of his own mother, or he’s completely full of shit about
how he grew up and is disingenuously using this humble beginnings fable as leverage to fuck over
the truly disadvantaged.
Then again, it’s always dangerous to underestimate how crazy O’Reilly can be. Cognitive dissonance
is to O’Reilly as drug addiction and serial divorce are to Rush Limbaugh.
Indeed, the only reason O’Reilly thinks he’s lower class appears to be that the kids at his private high
school treated him like a rube. According to The Post, O’Reilly “frequently tells the story of how, in
high school, the better-off kids scorned him for his ‘two sports coats,’ bought at the unfashionable
Modell's.”
Wow. Shades of Oliver Twist.
Well anyway, so much for the chip on O’Reilly’s shoulder concerning his impoverished childhood.
Turns out that all of Bill’s woe-is-me squealing essentially breaks down to his not knowing how to
dress.
In fact, O’Reilly’s suburban-poverty war stories are so lame that he (or someone at Fox) felt the need
to embroider his online bio with this irrelevant factoid: “O’Reilly began working in his early teens
mowing lawns, which evolved into a house painting business.”
If the denouement of this story were that O’Reilly became the leading lawn-mowing magnate of North
America, that might mean something. But a lot of us -- including many whose parents were pretty
well off -- mowed lawns as kids. So fucking what?
Of course, O’Reilly has to exaggerate his poverty else the hardscrabble, rags-to-riches narrative he
uses to define himself completely breaks down. Nobody wants to hear a marginally-poorly-dressed-
at-a-Northeastern-private-school-to-riches story.
But O’Reilly never bothers to ask himself why an African-American rapper born in Harlem would want
to help people less fortunate, while people like O’Reilly who stand on the firm foundation of centuries
of white privilege and a middle-class suburban private-school education should see those less
successful than he as the undeserving poor.
Nor does he question how the political affiliations of our last two presidents square with their
backgrounds.
To review: One of these men was born in dirt-poor Arkansas to a single mother, lived with an abusive
stepfather, had few real breaks, and parlayed a brilliant mind into phenomenal success in politics.
The other was the scion of a wealthy political dynasty whose father would eventually become
president; was a mediocre student despite going to a wealthy prep school; got into Yale solely
because his father went there; got out of Vietnam and into the “Champagne Unit” of the Texas Air
National Guard through family connections; failed in the oil business and got bailed out by his vice
president father’s rich supporters; got on the board of another oil company through similar
connections, coincidentally selling stock in that company right before it plummeted; used more family
connections to buy into a baseball team (which ended up using ordinary citizens’ sales tax dollars to
build a brand-new ballpark); and then cashed out, becoming a millionaire in the process.
Guess which man O’Reilly admires and which one he never stopped hammering for eight years?
Of course, according to O’Reilly’s logic, George Bush should be a Democrat and Bill Clinton should
be a Republican, because Bush never in his life disengaged from the government’s or his rich family’
s tits, whereas Clinton is a sterling example of how a meritocracy should work. Funny how it doesn’t
work out that way.
But, you might say (if you really wanted to be a prick about it), O’Reilly may have had a comparatively
privileged background (which he’s been frustratingly myopic about) but at least he wasn’t standing in
line for government handouts.
OK, first of all, when your typical white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanite ignores the
mountain of advantages he’s built his life on to argue that we shouldn’t pursue a greater equality of
opportunity for those with few or no advantages (or, as O’Reilly has chosen to do, claim you’re one of
the great unwashed), he’s being a spectacularly dishonest ass.
If you’re lucky enough to have two educated parents who speak the Queen’s English (and not an
alternative dialect that the mainstream culture unfairly associates with stupidity); have a chance to
attend private school or well-funded public schools; and have access to good tutors or educational
enrichment programs, you’re a grade-A prick if you think the kid who was born in the inner city to a
single mother and got raped by her stepfather while going to crumbling schools with bullets whizzing
over her head should be shit out of luck if she gets 20 points less on her SATs than you did. Guess
what? She’s smarter than you are. Suck it up.
And second of all, bullshit.
As O’Reilly never stops reminding everyone, he came from Levittown, a suburb that was essentially
built on government largesse and special privileges.
Ever wonder why our inner cities are a hollowed-out mess of unemployment, crime and despair? A
big piece of the puzzle lies in the history of government-guaranteed, low-interest loans that
encouraged the middle class to abandon the cities around the middle of the last century.
This oft-forgotten and conveniently discarded history is detailed in Suburban Nation: The Rise of
Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff
Speck:
“How did sprawl come about? Far from being an inevitable evolution or a historical accident,
suburban sprawl is the direct result of a number of policies that conspired powerfully to encourage
urban dispersal.
“The most significant of these were the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration
loan programs which, in the years following the Second World War, provided mortgages for over
eleven million new homes. These mortgages, which typically cost less per month than paying rent,
were directed at new single-family suburban construction. Intentionally or not, the FHA and VA
programs discouraged the renovation of existing housing stock, while turning their back on the
construction of row houses, mixed-use buildings, and other urban housing types.
“Simultaneously, a 41,000-mile interstate highway program, coupled with federal and local subsidies
for road improvement and the neglect of mass transit, helped make automotive commuting
affordable and convenient for the average citizen.
“Within the new economic framework, young families made the financially rational choice:
Levittown. (Italics, boldface and unnecessarily large 24-point type mine.) Housing gradually
migrated from historic city neighborhoods to the periphery, landing increasingly farther away.”
Significantly, blacks were all but excluded from this new American dream early on because of
housing discrimination (and were explicitly barred from Levittown homes) -- a sad legacy that
remains with us. And O’Reilly’s neighborhood, as dirt-poor as he likes to claim it was -- would have
been all but impossible without (wait for it) a combination of government housing subsidies and
government transportation subsidies.
But try to tell O’Reilly and his ilk that we ought to support affordable housing for the poor so their
minimum-wage paychecks can last the whole month without them having to work three jobs, or that
we should provide subsidized mass transit so they can actually get to those shit jobs, and he’s liable
to squeal about our pernicious welfare state.
This makes him a dick.
Turns out, lots of people gave O’Reilly lots of things, and without the government exercising its
financial muscle to get middle-class whites (and with them middle-class jobs) out of the city while
leaving poor blacks behind to fend for themselves, his ol’ neighborhood would have likely stayed a
potato field.
Unfortunately, he can’t see it. He thinks he got where he is solely on his own steam.
Thankfully, not all rich people are as selfish as O’Reilly. Some, while attributing a portion of their
success to themselves, nevertheless see society’s and the government’s hand in their success.
Take Martin Rothenberg, a New York-based software entrepreneur who was profiled in United for a
Fair Economy’s excellent report “I Didn’t Do It Alone: Society’s Contribution to Individual Wealth and
Success” (a PDF of the report is available at UFE’s Web site, www.responsiblewealth.org).
Rothenberg has joined with the group in opposition to permanently repealing the estate tax (or what
the GOP has so cleverly rechristened the “death tax” and what others prefer to call “the worms crawl
in the worms crawl out the worms play pinochle on your snout tax”).
Here’s Rothenberg’s take:
“I’m a small business owner, and my family is in the top two percent of wealthy Americans who
would get a windfall if the estate tax is eliminated. But I believe the estate tax should be fixed, not
repealed. Here’s why: my wealth is not only a product of my own hard work. It also resulted from a
strong economy and lots of public investment, both in others and in me.
“I received a good public school education, and used free libraries and museums paid for by others. I
went to college under the GI Bill. I went to graduate school to study computers and language on a
complete government scholarship, paid for by others. While teaching at Syracuse University for 25
years, my research was supported by numerous government grants -- again, paid for by others.
“My university research provided the basis for Syracuse Language Systems, a company I formed in
1991 with some graduate students and my son Larry. I sold the company in 1998 and then started a
new company, Glottal Enterprises. These companies have benefited from the technology-driven
economic expansion -- a boom fueled by continual public and private investment.
“I’ve never once heard my family complain about the prospect of part of their inheritance going toward
an estate tax. That’s because we all believe that paying the estate tax does not mean choosing
between taking care of your children and giving back to society. You can do both.
“I was able to provide well for my family. Upon my death, I hope taxes on my estate will help fund the
kind of programs that benefited me and others from humble backgrounds: a good education, money
for research and targeted investments in poor communities. I’d like all Americans to have the same
opportunities I did.”
But, naturally, O’Reilly thinks the estate tax is an abomination. Why should a guy who nobody never
gave nuffim’ to have to pay so much of what he accumulated to the government when he dies?
O’Reilly thinks the market is presumptively moral, and that monetary rewards naturally flow to the
hard working and the pure of heart. He thinks this because he’s now stinking rich. But most good-
hearted people realize that luck, timing and being born rich are far greater determinants of wealth
than a nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic.
And it doesn’t hurt to be a fatuous blowhard with a simpleminded worldview at the very same time a
rabidly conservative media mogul is casting about for someone who can steal viewers from Wheel of
Fortune for an hour every night.
Again, some “self-made” millionaires are quick to acknowledge the simple role of luck in their
success.
As Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is also mentioned in the UFE report, told Forbes in 2001: “Lots of
people who are smart and work hard and play by the rules don’t have a fraction of what I have. I
realize I don’t have my wealth because I’m so brilliant. Luck has a lot to do with it.”
So fuck you, O’Reilly. Fuck you and the white middle-class privilege you rode in on.
But, just for the sake of argument, let’s grant for now that you did do it all alone, and your white skin,
father’s upper-middle-class salary, private schools, welfare neighborhood and congenitally high
threshold for embarrassment had absolutely nothing to do with your success.
You’re a goddamn multimillionaire now. For God’s sake, buy your mother a decent house.
Previous Column: O'Reilly vs. Hillary: The Race That Never Was (and still he lost)
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
Sweet Jesus, I hate Bill O'Reilly, Intl.
an organization of hope
an organization of hope