I see your Imus, and I raise you an O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly.

If the name alone doesn't put you off your Pop-Tarts, perhaps his unconscious racism will.

Media Matters has recorded yet another instance of Bill being magnanimously generous to the African American community while uttering something so obliviously racist (not a typo, he's completely clueless), that I almost couldn't believe it until I had played it back a few times.

Remember how shocked he was when he had a nice dinner in a Black restaurant in New York, and he didn't get mugged, stabbed, or forced to perform involuntary Hip-Hop? Well, this was along those lines, but the overtones are actually sinister. I kept thinking, as I listened, “Is he stupid, ignorant, or vicious?”

Rhetorical choices, mostly. I can't read his mind, or what's left of it.

The clip is a conversation with a caller who claims to have inside information on how Michelle Obama really feels about this country—this comes on the heels of her pounced-upon comment that she for the first time in her adult life, felt “really proud” of her country.

As in, people really seem to grasp the significance of this election cycle, and I'm pleased by that. Anyway, the caller has a bit of an edge, an accusatory tone, and Bill “Independent Fair And Balanced Don't Block the Shot!” O'Reilly steps in and says—defender of fairness that he is—that they shouldn't start a “lynching party” until they really know how she (Obama) feels.

Bill was so busy positioning his ego in the Fair and Balanced glow of Faux News that his mental governor didn't block the racist effluent spewing from his piehole.

In one brilliant sentence he evoked the KKK, and the Thought Police from Orwell's 1984.

Once we have a good idea of what her opinion is, only then will we send some goons around to shut her up. Don't worry; I'll make that happen.

Amazing.

Yes, I'm aware that Fidel Castro stepped down yesterday, that the Navy just shot a satellite out of the sky, and that Hillary Clinton's campaign appears to be unraveling. We should be talking about news.

But if we leave racism unchecked and unacknowledged—even if it's from the deep recesses of an egomaniac's tortured psyche—we run the risk of having it burn slowly like an ember from a fireplace that ends up burning down the house.