(Salon) – On “The O’Reilly Factor” Wednesday night, host Bill O’Reilly had what could charitably be called a tantrum — if any of his viewers were feeling charitable after watching O’Reilly slide down a slippery slope that began with him complaining about the ostensible liberal bias of Yahoo News’ automated news aggregation service and ended with him shouting, “You want a war? You got a war!”
O’Reilly started sanely enough, saying that liberals are “demonizing America as a racist nation” and mentioning that whereas the left was once satisfied with claiming that “white privilege” existed, in the wake of Charleston, liberals have upped the ante and started arguing that America is a “white supremacist” nation.
The very notion clearly angered him, and he claimed that just because there are individual white supremacists in the white community doesn’t mean that “the country is defined by them” — which is a strangely revealing statement, inasmuch as it demonstrates who exactly he means when he’s talking about “the country,” and because it’s the exact opposite kind of logic to the one he employs when, for example, a Muslim commits a crime.