As O'Reilly crumbles and melts, I can't help but feel a pang of regret at how I'm going to miss having him to kick around. Admit it: haven't you gotten some perverse pleasure lately, at seeing just how bad he could get, as he goes down the drain?
As O'Reilly heads towards what may amount to a lovable butchering at the hands of Stephen Colbert tonight--a public humiliation from which he is unlikely to fully recover--it's worth remembering how much the old coot has given to us over the years. Since we no longer need fear him--the momentum of his type of hate punditry has been broken--we can rejoice that his clownishness now serves to accelerate the demise of the entire Right Wing death machine.
How will get get along without him, once he fades into Morton Downey Jr. territory?
Let's remember him, at this one last golden juncture, before the axe falls: the New York Irish Catholic boy, the son of an oil company accountant, who grew up in the archetypal suburb amid the Robert Moses freeway nightmare, who tried out for professional baseball instead of going to Vietnam. You probably saw him on your local t.v. news during the 1970s, sandwiched between used car commercials, honing his particular brand of Neopuritan bullying. He is everything you would expect him to have been, and exactly the right person to have led the Hate Charge of 1990s--a walking Superfund site, a toxic celebration of willful Reaganesque ignorance and rigid cathechism-level certainty coated with the intellectual relativism of modern corporatized journalism. He is the part of America that hates what makes America unique, and seeks only to continue the eternal primate-level domination of the Strong over the Weak.
But like all good things, he must come to an end. The advent of 2007 finds him out-of-style in an almost painful-to-watch way. Even if he warily avoids a worse-case-scenario with Colbert, his moment has passed.
How will we fill all that mental space that used to be reserved towards the delicious mocking of him? How will we be able to demonstrate the brain-dead nature of the Right so lucidly with a simple Youtube video? As he continues his slide down the ratings into "niche outrage" status, O'Reilly will justifiably get the last laugh, knowing how much we really needed him as the highest grade combustile fuel in the meltdown of the Hate Movement. Oh, how we're going to miss you, Bill!