Brass Knuckles

I don’t remember when I stopped watching O’Reilly.  For a long time, he was a staple for my wife and I when we lived in Manhattan; watching O’Reilly was fun and he seemed to us at the time to be a bit pithier and didn’t take himself as seriously as he seems to now.  Part of it I think was a marketing angle; he might have been trying to take “fair and balanced” to the limit in order to be known as the “reasonable conservative” instead of a being known as a hot head light Rush Limbaugh.  Personally, I’d rather that than a wishy-washy liberal leaning ingenue.  And, unfortunately, those “cool” Hollywood liberals are not ever going to like or respect Bill O’Reilly.  Or me.

Maybe having his advances spurned ticked Mr. O’Reilly off, and that’s why he’s decided to take on Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post.  Arianna is the queen of the Hollywood liberal set, their mouthpiece.  Left-leaning major Hollywood celebrities, opinion leaders and presidential hopefuls fall all over themselves for the opportunity to write a column for Arianna for free.   It’s really a brilliant business model.

O’Reilly is attacking Ms. Huffington for comments made on her blog by her readers.  Given that Arianna caters to the far left,  it should be no surprise that she is going to have some vapid, hateful and just plain mean comments.   That being said, I don’t see any reason to believe that the Huffington Post does anything other than moderate the comments to the best of their ability.  They get a ton of comments, and I’m sure keeping them clean is a formidable task. 

HuffPost gets around 500,000 comments a month. These comments are anonymous and in no way represent my opinions, or the opinions of HuffPost or our bloggers. We have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to abusive or hateful language or comments — such comments are taken down as quickly as they come to the attention of our moderators.

Even if they never moderated their comments, however, the comments do not necessarily reflect the views of the blog owners; that should be a given, and it is a concept that is crucial to our freedom of expression here in the ether.  If the blog owners are going to be held liable for comment that is legal and reflects unpopular opinion, then the simple answer would be to shut down comments and effectively crush one of the best things to come out of the internet age; the free exchange of ideas, no matter how vapid.

What Bill O’Reilly is suggesting is out of step with the reality of the internet, and is out of step with any libertarian ideals.  He is suggesting that rather than allow comments to be accepted or shouted down by the community, authority should step in and quash them. 

Not quite what I’d expect from him.