Bill O’Reilly is just not one to talk about rape

Oh but he looks so harmless

Bill O’Reilly, like many outspoken conservative commentators, are really easy targets to pick apart for anyone who wants to put forth the small amount of effort required. Typically they make it entirely too easy with simple things like switching positions on things they used to hold so dear when the political winds blow from a different direction, or better yet when life exposes them as hypocrites (Rush & drugs comes to mind).

As far as the hierarchy of “easy to make fun of” goes, one of the people at the top of that list perennially has to be Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. From his cable news megaphone he has lost it on the son of a 9/11 survivor who advocated peace, tried shoving his way to an interview with the then-Senator Obama, expressing shock that black people in America act like… other people in America, and blaming U.S. troops for a World War II massacre on the Nazis that played out in the exact opposite way back here in the real world.

Aside from being a walking comedy hour for all those fact-based people out there, there is a deeper and uglier side to O’Reilly’s shtick, and that has to do with his attitude toward women.

In 2004, O’Reilly was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit that he would eventually settle out of court for a hefty sum. From that point on any time he talked about women, some just hold their breaths waiting for the next bit of idiocy to escape this man’s lips. He has yet to fail to deliver.

I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself

In the 2008 election he rushed to the defence of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s 17-year old daughter, who became another statistic in the teen pregnancy column. Seemingly noble, but ultimately fake as this same person not more than a few months earlier infamously slammed Brittney Spears’ 16-year old sister for getting pregnant – saying she was a “pinhead” (which apparently means terrible things in his world) and saying her parents were irresponsible. The blatant hypocrisy was neatly spelled out by many out there, most notably by Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker – who called him just that, a hypocrite. In response to that, O’Reilly sent a producer to hassle Tucker.

More pertinent to this topic, on an August 2006 episode of his (now canceled) radio show, O’Reilly decided to go off on the murder of Jennifer Moore, an 18 year old student who was abducted in Manhattan, raped, and murdered. Usually a revelation of such facts would cause a more logical (or hell, human) person to tread lightly with whatever opinions they were about to dish out. Not O’Reilly:

These two girls come in from the suburbs and they get bombed, and their car is towed because they’re moronic girls and, you know, they don’t have a car. So they’re standing there in the middle of the night with no car. And then they separate because they’re drunk…

Now Moore, Jennifer Moore…She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff… So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning. She’s walking by herself on the West Side Highway, and she gets picked up by a thug… And the thug takes her over to New Jersey in the cab and kills her and rapes her and does all these terrible things to her…

A loose translation of the above diatribe: it’s all the woman’s fault! In the world of O’Reilly, not dressing conservatively and daring to leave your house after dark means that you are painting a target on your body for every rapist in the city to descend upon you – since they’re just rapists after all and can’t help themselves.

In a more just world, such a commentator would be tarred and feathered in the public square, would potentially lose their sponsorships, have their show be in danger, would have to apologize profusely to the victim’s family, and to his listeners for saying such a vile thing. In some cases, such a commentator would be fired and not heard from again. Unfortunately in a world of advertisement dollars (or at least in the 2006 world before advertising collapsed), the green speaks much louder than what is just and right – and people like O’Reilly get to continue on, unabated, racking up even more unconscionable comments.

In January of 2007, O’Reilly showed that his guns of hatred were not just trained on women, but children too, as he decided to talk about the recent discovery of Shawn Hornbeck, an 11 year old who was abducted and subjected to four years of isolation and rape before he was found by police:

And the question is, why didn’t [Hornbeck] escape when he could have?…The Stockholm syndrome thing, I don’t buy it…The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn’t have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted…I think when it all comes down, what’s going to happen is, there was an element here that this kid liked about his circumstances.

The company you keep says a lot about you, but Ann Coulter is a mess we'll deal with another time.

If one even wanted to attempt a justification to what he just said, perhaps he was aiming for Stockholm Syndrome, but even so, this once again smacks of “things you don’t need to say at any time, for any reason, ever.” The boy liked it? The boy didn’t want to leave? A further examination into the psyche of someone who can say such vile things might cause oneself to be committed their selves if attempted without proper mental projection.

So someone with such a terrific track record would, of course, be the perfect person to talk at a fund raiser about rape. No, not promoting the virtues of rape, promoting help and support for the victims of rape.

What?

This stellar decision was made by the It Happened to Alexa Foundation, which is an organization dedicated to helping rape victims get through the trauma of the criminal trial with the hope that the more people who do, the more who will come forward, and the more rapists will be punished as they should be. Current as of this writing the website proudly announces a fund raising guest:

Bill O’Reilly from “The O’Reilly Factor” will speak at a luncheon in Palm Beach on Thursday March 19, at the Ritz Carlton, Manalapan, Florida, with all proceeds benefiting the “It Happened to Alexa Foundation.”

Now I know in the terrible recession that we are currently going through, good causes of all sorts are hard up for cash since normal donors are suffering from the economy along with them. Still, how desperate do you have to be to invite someone of this sort to your organization to speak out in favor of the victims – the same victims he in so many words has said before on the record were pretty much asking for it. How much is his speaking fee at this engagement? How much money do you have to pay him to support the other side of his apparent beliefs?

That or there’s a marketer or publicist out there somewhere on his side that thinks speaking at such a fund raiser would be a great way to sweep this whole “Bill O’Reilly supports rapists and child molesters” thing under the rug.

Maybe it’s the decision of an incredibly short sighted member at the foundation that thinks the money that A Name would draw in far outweighs canceling on him and losing whatever donations he would have brought in. Since not everyone knows how much of a terrible person O’Reilly is, maybe enough of them who have some money to spare will come to this event and donate, which will allow the mission to continue. Talk about sleeping with the enemy.

Of course such an occurrence has inspired an online petition to stop him from showing, but anyone who has been around this Internet long enough knows, such petitions don’t always have much of an effect on who they are meant for. The real change in tune here is going to have to come from enough voices shouting from enough rooftops of how wrong this is to cause any real change. As of this writing the number of signatures in the petition is somewhere in the mid-800s. 850 voices on the Internet is not enough to do much of anything. The true positive change here will have to come as the idea to write this article came to me, from a friend – to pass the word along. Don’t let this be a case of a future debate of the ends justifying the means, or an opportunity for a noted bigot to try to put a thin coat of paint over all the ugliness he has professed in time past.