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Let's face it, O'Reilly is certainly guilty...Guilty of creating an Us vs. Them worldview that encourages over-the-top ranting and raving instead of rational dialogue, but were he an extreme left-winger, the damage would be the same.
My father is somewhere to the left of Fidel Castro, and had he been second-in-command during the Khmer Rouge, would have had Pol Pot summarily executed for being too lenient toward the rich. Just the same as Wil Wheaton can't have a reasonable dialogue with his father, I can't dare approach middle ground with mine - and I'm far more liberal than most! In my father's mind, if you only support Bush's impeachment that barely makes you a moderate. So where does one go from there?
It's the problem with politics of today from both right and left. Nobody wants to debate an issue or see anything good on the opposite site. If you're against the death penalty, then you might as well be a rapist yourself; if you join the Army, then you're a mercenary death merchant bought and paid for by Big Oil.
O'Reilly and his fellow goons know that argument and conflict bring people together at their most base level, so they keep spoonfeeding it out, and we keep lapping it up, and we're a little more scared to walk out the front door into a world where the mailman can become our bitterest enemy or most trusted ally based on what communal nutjob show we watched last night.
Fucking internet. Fucking cable TV. Information with no purpose. Just like the legendary Library of Alexandria...you know, the one that burned when the civilization fell.
