Bill O'Reilly's 'Shut Up' Conservatism of Silent Obedience?

As 2008 comes to a close, Bill O'Reilly had another successful year as king of the cable-news mountain. But he really brings out the superiority complex in liberals and leftists. On Alternet, writer John Dolan attempts to review his latest book, but mostly congratulates himself that he's interested in thought and discussion, unlike those moronic O'Reilly fans. He starts with outrage at O'Reilly's claims about Hurricane Katrina victims:

"If I had lived in New Orleans, I would have gotten in my car and driven the hell out of there as soon as the national weather service gave warning." In case the reader missed the point, Bill says that the dead in New Orleans were "either too dumb, too lazy, too mentally challenged, or too unlucky to have provided themselves with basic protections."

Stupid and callous as that may sound, it's the sort of proclamation that helped O'Reilly "succeed in life." In fact, this sort of non sequitur is the most powerful rhetorical device in O'Reilly's part of the ideological spectrum.

O'Reilly's real function is to say out loud, on television, this sort of thing -- and get away with it. His fans don't argue; they hate argument or discussion on principle. They simply glory in the fact that O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have found a way to blurt out their long-nursed spite on national TV and get away with it -- in fact, "succeed in life" by doing it. So, the raw boasting that characterizes this book is something that O'Reilly's nameless fans can share, knowing that O'Reilly's success, such as it is, represents the fact that their long-choked spite has at last found its voice.

A liberal can certainly argue it sounds callous to suggest that the smart thing to do with a major hurricane bearing down on your home is obey the evacuation order, and it sounds callous to "blame the victim" for failing to heed the warning. But a liberal doesn't seem to understand that this assertion comes in response to an avalanche of liberal news media stories and editorials blaming the hurricane victim's problems on everyone else, while the talk of a failure to evacuate goes unspoken like it was a dirty word.

Most noticeably, liberals fail to understand -- or pretend to fail to understand -- that conservatism is not a philosophy of "spite" or negativity, properly argued.  Liberals have a nasty habit of thinking that since conservatives are anti-liberal, they oppose goodness, love, harmony, and sunlight. They deny that conservatism has any ideals or anything positive to say. Dolan thinks the Fox News-watching conservative only believes that everyone should shut up:

O'Reilly's notorious catchphrase, "Shut up!" isn't by any means a mere eruption of bad temper; it's his ideology. His version of conservatism, which he calls "traditionalism," emphasizes silent obedience....That's the key to O'Reilly and his audience: they don't want to know, they don't want to argue, they want you to shut up: "We in America waste far too much time endlessly discussing stupid stuff." When these people meet something new, they run away like the sullen cowards they are.

That doesn't even merit comment. How can a writer like this claim to dislike O'Reilly's boasting at his enemies, and then write sentences about his enemies being sullen cowards who run away? Dolan ends his "book review" on a bizarre note. He finds much more convincing "Irish Catholic moralism" in Bill Maher than in Bill O'Reilly as he praised the courage of the 9/11 attackers:

The only consolation I could find, wincing at every sentimental story here, is the thought of another media player raised in the New York Irish-Catholic tradition who set a far better example of moralizing: Bill Maher paying a huge price for saying, after 9/11, that the hijackers, whatever else they were, were not "cowards." That's Irish Catholic moralism at its best: quixotic, personally disastrous, unpopular, rigorous, and undeniably true. If we must embrace some version of these lame ethnic stereotypes, I'll take Maher's any day as an example of what a "no spin zone" should look like.

It doesn't occur to Dolan that Maher cannot represent the Irish Catholic, since he is one of the country's most egregious haters of the Catholic Church. It certainly doesn't occur to Dolan that the reason Maher's comments were "personally disastrous" is because a true moralist would never argue there's any fraction of "courage" in murdering thousands of innocent people, regardless of your desire to disparage American pilots as comparative cowards bombing people from the sky.