Heart Medicine

Whenever my blood pressure feels like it’s getting dangerously low, there are two things I like to do. Eat more anchovies, and watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox. Both anchovies and O’Reilly share the same four virtues: bony, salty, fishy, and strong. I like anchovies a lot more than I like Bill O’Reilly, but both appeal to the latent masochist in me.

If you like your O’Reilly in pure, unadltuerated form, you watch his “Talking Points Memo,” which is the way Bill O’Reilly likes himself best, too, I assume–that is, without any intereference even from the most psycophantic, lying, Fox-enriched lickspittle. O’Reilly unfiltered and on-point, baby. Anyway, yesterday’s TPM featured our hero considering the story of Cindy Sheehan, begrieved mother of a slain U.S. soldier. SHeehan has set up shop outside President Bush’s brush-cutting photo-shoot at Crawford, Texas, the better to protest the Iraq misadventure that took the life of her son.

I don’t normally like to waste a lot of time parsing O’Reilly, but it was a slow day around the office. O’Reilly decribed the situation. First, he very graciously agreed that “everyone is certainly entitled to his or her own opinion, and no one should gainsay the grief of a mother in mourning.” (Conservatives frequently offer this sort of consolation, as if it is something they are normally in the habit of witholding.) Then O’Reilly ran a clip of Sheehan wherein she says President Bush did not offer any kind of earnest sympathy, though he hosted her in the Oval Office for a dilatory handshaking, tear-dabbing moment of personal and national pride. She was felt repelled rather than comforted, which I will assume is also her right.

Then came an interesting leap. O’Reilly’s main point seemed to be that since “radical activists” like Michael Moore and Sam Husseini oppose the war, and since Sheehan opposes the war, she is in league with raving, behorned anti-Americans, and is “being used by them, whether she realizes it or not.” Bill’s final talking point? A fair and balanced moment: “A majority of Americans now oppose the war, but we hope that will change when things start going better.”