Hey Fox News, what sterling addition to the public discourse did you offer last night? Not much, just one of college basketball’s most corrupt coaches and cable’s most notorious race-baiters, chillin’ and waxin’ poetic about hip-hop.
You guessed it. It’s Bill O’Reilly, raging against the Devil’s music. And if this tune sounds familiar, it’s probably because he has routinely pointed a crooked finger at “gangsta rap” and bellowed, “J’accuse!”.
Sometimes he even drops the pretense of being anything but a shameless bigot, like in 2007, when O’Reilly was chatting on his radio show about his David Livingstone-esque journey into the deepest, darkest reaches of uptown Manhattan at Sylvia’s Soul Food with the Rev. Al Sharpton, saying: “I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. It was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks [and has a] primarily black patronship. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea!'” And adding, “It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people [who] were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.
I feel you, Billy! It’s downright nutty that the blackitty, black blacks in Harlem, Harlem, mind you, are just like the normals. And by “normal” of course, I (or rather, you) mean real Americans, aka white people.
Last night, in a programming move that may finally kill off irony once and for all, after giving Dr. Ben Carson and Bernie Goldberg ample space to denounce President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder for “playing the race card” and declare that they are “intentionally stoking racial resentment” because they had the temerity to actually discuss voting rights, O’Reilly sat down with the University of Kentucky head coach, John Calipari to continue this deep, complex investigation of race in America.
Why was Coach Cal venturing into Fox News? Well, Cal’s got a book to sell, yo! After all, he lost out on an additional $375,000 bonus (in addition to the $275,000 he’d already earned as a result of the Wildcats’ deep tournament run and his $5.2 million annual salary) after losing to UConn in the NCAA finals.
O’Reilly doesn’t know that much about sports, (or politics, or history, or how the Moon got there) so after a brief stop to shill for Calipari’s tome, Players First: Coaching From the Inside Out, he tried to dragoon him into taking a ride on his favorite hobby horse, the Hippity-Hop music that’s clearly destroying “urban” America.
O’REILLY: I mean, you are a good guy coach but—now, the coaching has coarsened, you teach at the University of Kentucky it’s coarsened. I don’t know if you listen to this rap stuff and hip hop stuff. Has that changed their attitude? I mean, how do you impose discipline on kids who are pretty much gonna do what they want to do.
Calipari tried to pull his best Leo McGarry by refusing to accept the premise of the question, and instead babbled about ‘trust’ and players leaving school early, but our ever vigilant, loofah-wielding crusader kept banging away.
O’REILLY: Do they act differently toward you? Do these use four letter words towards you?
Good one, Bill. Because if it’s not the violence-glorifying, so-called music that’ll be the ruin of this once, proud nation, it’ll be the rampant cussing. Again, Calipari deflected by pointing to his players’ academic record, slinging tired, old bromides about ‘character’, praising their ever-vigilant single moms and grandmothers, and so on.
O’Reilly, satisfied that the Kentucky Wildcats are not a gang of crazed, would-be violent felons, realizes that the problem must be all the drug-fueled, fake rape-accusing sluts.
O’REILLY: Okay. How do you keep them away from temptation with the hustlers everywhere?
CALIPARI: Who?
O’REILLY: So they go out with a girl and the girl said hey you raped me. There is drugs [sic] everywhere. They are giving the kids drugs for free. How do you keep them away from that?
The most impressive part of all this dreck is that O’Reilly actually manages to make John Calipari come out of this looking like a saint.
Instead, what if he’d followed up with something along the lines of, “Coach, you talk a lot about character. When you probe deep into the hearts and minds of these young men and their families, do you ever bring up the fact that at the first stop on your storied career, your star player, Marcus Camby, was accused of taking money from agents, voiding your UMass team of it’s tournament victories, causing your then-employer to have to give back $151, 617. Then (shockingly), the same thing occurred at Memphis, where Derrick Rose’s faked SAT scores led to a massive, $530,000 fine, the eradicating of his team’s victories from the history book, and a slew of sanctions. Once you realized that your squad would be decimated by the NCAA, you skipped off to Kentucky, taking all of your prized recruits with you. And amazingly, you had no idea that any of this was happening, let alone any involvement.”
“My question is: What would your mother or grandmother say about that? Please try not to curse or quote Ludacris lyrics when responding.”
But of course, that would make O’Reilly a real, live journalist and not a walking pile of stale deli-meat slinging coded, slick, yet still equally pernicious remixes of everyone’s angry dad and/or uncle’s race-baiting Facebook comments.
Instead, we get this sad little playlet that feels like it was plagiarized from the Onion, featuring a corrupt coach that’s gamed an indentured servitude-driven system, and a pathological liar burbling hoary rage-farts that are the equivalent of saying that if it weren’t for Motown, we wouldn’t have lost the Vietnam War and Jazz caused the Great Depression, because black people.