O’Reilly Spews Defense of Previous Spewage

As you may recall, a couple of days ago, Bill O’Reilly offered up San Francisco to al-Qaida as punishment for their passing a ballot measure urging public high schools and colleges to prohibit on-campus military recruiting, culminating with the invitation: “You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Not surprisingly, San Franciscans were none too pleased:

One of the ticked off was San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, who Friday called for O'Reilly to be fired.

"For an anchor on a major station, Fox News, to be saying those kinds of things, it's just not OK," Daly said Friday. "It was just over the top."

Agreeing with Daly was San Francisco firefighters union president John Hanley, and not just because the hose-shaped tower is a tribute to firefighters.

"Who is this guy, O'Reilly?" said Hanley, who identified himself as both a third-generation San Franciscan and military veteran. "I've got guys fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm a veteran myself. What's he talking about?"

I love it. Not only does he make a generally jackassed statement that would offend any American with a lick of sense, but he also chooses as his prime target a building shaped like a hose to honor some of the city’s first responders. Brilliant.

Then O’Reilly, consummately irrepressible in his jagoffitude, was given the opportunity on a conservative San Francisco radio show to, oh, I don’t know, explain or perhaps even apologize for his latest bout of verbal diarrhea, but instead chose to defend his statement by noting it was not controversial and “needed to be said,” because San Francisco “has absolutely no clue about what the world is,” and its “left-wing, selfish, Land of Oz philosophy…is an absolute intellectual disgrace.” (For a real stunner, go read the whole thing. ThinkProgress also has an audio link if you can stomach it.)

Now, I don’t know about you, but if a sense of decency and a functioning capacity for reason didn’t prevent me from offering up national sacrifices based on those who engage in what might rightly be deemed an absolute intellectual disgrace, the first on my list would not be the residents of San Francisco.