Mister Sensitivity

Let me be the umpteenth person to hop on the "Bill O'Reilly is a twisted nutjob" bandwagon this week. To be fair, I've never really left that particular point of view, I just don't make it my life's work as some folks do. Instead I prefer to let my distaste for the man and all he stands for to lay dormant, until such time as he uncorks another truly insidious remark. This week's winner came from a reflection on his dinner with Al Sharpton. He told his radio audience that he dined with civil rights activist at Sylvia's recently and "couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference" between the black-run restaurant and others in New York City. "There wasn't any kind of craziness at all," he added.
I'm sure that the Woods family, who own and run the restaurant, would be happy to include that notice in their next flurry of print advertisements, and would almost certainly be looking to get some sort of video clip to add to their television campaign. Or maybe they could stick to talking about the ribs, or something like "People come by the busload to owner Sylvia Woods' Harlem institution, where they tuck into huge portions of soul food and soak up the down-home atmosphere." Perhaps what Bill meant by no "kind of craziness at all" was "down-home." Words, after all, can be very slippery things.
That is probably why he needed to whine at the Associated Press about how his idiotic ramblings were "cherry picked" out of a broader conversation about racial attitudes. He had told listeners that his grandmother — and many other white Americans — feared blacks because they didn't know any and were swayed by violent images in black culture. "We didn't call him a racist," Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters said. "We said his comments were ignorant and racially charged and we stand by that."
"This isn't about a racially insensitive remark," he said. "Anybody can listen to the unedited version of the conversation on billoreilly.com. You want to think I'm insensitive to race, you go right ahead."
I did. I do. Thank you for your support.