Alan Colmes and His Pesky Facts Trigger Another Bill O’Reilly Meltdown

Bill O’Reilly was having a ball on the Factor last night, spinning poutrage over the benefits the mother of the Boston bombing suspects received, when he made the mistake of asking Alan Colmes what he thought about O’Reilly’s hysteria. Colmes told him he was “manufacturing outrage” and began to drown the witch’s lies with facts, and the next thing you know, a flummoxed Bill O’Reilly was sputtering “Shut up! Shut up!”

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If you believed everything you heard on Fox, you’d be angry too, so it shouldn’t surprise you that Bill O’Reilly whipped himself up into a right frenzy of half truths and abandoned facts in order to smear all immigrants, the welfare system, President Obama and Governor Patrick Deval because two alleged terrorists did a horrible thing. There is no tragedy too low to be politicized.

Thusly, O’Reilly had conflated the $100,000 in welfare benefits the family (of five) had received (over many years) along with a (ten year old) Mercedes in order to determine that there is no end to Obama’s failures. O’Reilly seemed to be, ironically, calling for more oversight of the welfare system. (Perhaps he forgot that he’s selling no oversight.)

Pleased with himself, he turned to Colmes to accuse Colmes of not being outraged by smugly asking if he was outraged.

Colmes agreed, he was not outraged because “I think this is manufactured outrage to go after people who are on welfare, go after immigrants.” He followed that up with — and this is where it got dicey for O’Reilly– FACTS.

Colmes pointed out that the Tsarnaevs received welfare because the parents qualified for it. He had to walk O’Reilly through the fact that ten years ago, no one knew what the children would do, so this fact could not be used against the parents. Colmes pointed out that the family was on welfare and food stamps, the parents who qualified were in the country legally, and the benefits were over a ten year period going to five different people.

But O’Reilly had another card up his sleeve — the parents were receiving welfare but they were going back and forth to their home country. Yes, no one who has ever moved to another country ever goes back home to visit, so hello, Obama, this is all your fault (never mind that the family immigrated under Bush).

When Colmes attempted to interject more facts, O’Reilly sputtered, “They were driving a Mercedes Benz automobile! Wait! Shut up! Shut up!”

Colmes was not impressed, and he relentlessly pursued his attempt to educate O’Reilly, “Let me put this context. The Mercedes Benz was ten years old, it was worth a couple of thousands of dollars — (O’Reilly tried to interrupt him again) Yes, it was a 1998 Mercedes, and it was not a classic.”

O’Reilly tried to regain face by conjuring up the old time machine card, “I don’t understand how you can say, knowing what we know, that if you went back in a time machine, you’d still allow them to come here. Even though they weren’t being persecuted, that was a con. But the bottom line is this, there is no supervision over any of this. No supervision on asylum, no supervision on welfare payments. You can con the system, yet you wouldn’t do anything about it.”

So, O’Reilly’s point was: If only we had a time machine and a funded government, imagine what we could do in terms of oversight.

It was only a week ago that O’Reilly blew up at Colmes, screaming “bull blank!” in an attempt to shut him up. O’Reilly couldn’t afford to let Alan Colmes finish a sentence, because O’Reilly’s outrage was based on the notion that if only we had a time machine, he could successfully meet his contractual Fox duties of smearing all immigrants and welfare recipients, while blaming President Obama for the acts of two terrorists.

Sarah Jones

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