A small but I think telling item. Dave Silverman said in a public Facebook post an hour ago that Bill O’Reilly “talked shit about us, but did not invite us on.” Dave is sarcastically pleased that BillO is afraid of him.
He has a real point though. I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that O’Reilly is indeed reluctant to have Dave on his show again, for reasons that have to do with what a bully O’Reilly is.
O’Reilly is a big man, a burly man. He has a loud voice. He uses his size and his loud voice (and his control of the show) to intimidate people he invites on his show to talk.
Dave says he’s been on the show twice, and I think I’ve seen both. I think I know very well why BillO doesn’t want Dave on the show – it’s because Dave is a pretty good physical match and just as good as O’Reilly at shouting.
So what does that say about O’Reilly? That he’s both a bully and a coward.
What does it say about the US that people like O’Reilly and Limbaugh are so popular?
Nothing good.
In my experience bullies are invariably cowards. Also, I suspect that many confuse a loud, blustering bully for a strong person. they admire the ‘strong’ person, without realising they are actually admiring and enabling a common bully. Usually this works when the bully happens to be kicking someone that the watcher already dislikes/disagrees with.
A true, but little known, fact is that many of the right-wing talk shows use professional paid callers who are primed with talking points and scripted questions to highlight points the programmer wants to make and present he show as being aligned with popular opinion. The scripted callers are supplied by an agency and selected, in part, for their ability to sound like average working people while keeping to a script.
Bullies, cowards that they are, tend to demand a permissive environment with people scripted as random callers but paid and primed to agree and ask the questions necessary to get the rhetorical ball squarely in front of the net so the host can dramatically score the point.
Pleonasm
It might also be because one of those two times ended being famous. Silverman’s face became a meme. That particular interview is likely one O’Reilly would prefer everyone forget.