Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [3]
The wise ones saw the peril. They tried to warn the others, but the destroyers silenced their voices. Grinning smugly from judges’ benches and news editors’ desks, the villains bent the laws and warped the news. The people were helpless before their awesome power.
But one man had the wisdom to see and the strength to speak. The villains tried to stop him, but his voice rang out across the land, shattering the silence like a yapping terrier at two in the morning. The people heard him speak the truth. They found courage and joined their voices to his, producing a tremendous chorus of yaps across the nation. The destroyers screeched with rage, but they could not silence the clamor. One by one, the people threw the evildoers from their pedestals and erected giant plaster Ten Commandments monuments and hand-painted resin nativity scenes in their places.
The battle is not yet finished, but the people are rising, and Jesus stands by them. Their liberty will be secured, their property will be protected, their grandparents will expire of natural causes, and no one will pervert anyone.
And so it was that Bill O’Reilly saved Christmas.
DARK SUITED, GRAY HAIRED, AND STERN, Bill O’Reilly is the picture of a serious journalist. He rarely smiles. Indeed, his mouth hardly moves except at critical rhetorical moments. Then he leans forward, raises the sharp peaks of his eyebrows, and enunciates with exaggerated motion as if his lips have broken their restraints and aspire to escape his face. A moment later, the lips are captive again, and O’Reilly continues his stern oration, permitting movement only from shoulders and eyebrows to punctuate the disgust he feels for the events that he is obliged to report.
O’Reilly’s demeanor befits a war correspondent, and indeed, he is an admirer of the late Walter Cronkite.1a But there are no bullets or bombs in the conflict O’Reilly describes every night. He speaks of a culture war in American society between a radical left and a traditional right, pitting “the secular progressives who want drastic change” against “the traditionalists who really want to keep the country pretty much the way it is.”2
O’Reilly makes no secret of his sympathies in this struggle. He is a journalist-soldier, a self-described “T-Warrior” (traditionalist warrior), a lean, mean commentating machine. As he wrote in his bestselling book, Culture Warrior, “My weapons will be facts and superior analysis based on those facts.”3 He bravely wields his facts and superior analysis in defense of traditional Americans at risk of losing their freedom, their heritage, and their inalienable right to watch The O’Reilly Factor.
In December 2004, Bill O’Reilly launched his greatest campaign, gravely announcing to his 3 million nightly viewers that an alliance of secular progressive warmongers was poised to capture a strategic prize: Christmas. In a series of Fox News television segments entitled “Christmas Under Siege,” O’Reilly alleged that parade organizers in Denver had barred a religious-themed float from the city’s holiday parade, that New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg had referred to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree as a “holiday tree,” and that Federated Department Stores, which owns Macy’s and Bloomingdales, had “denigrated” Christmas with marketing material that proclaimed “Happy Holidays,” “Season’s Greetings,” and other offensive slurs.
The objective of the secular progressives, O’Reilly charged, was not simply to destroy the holiday, but to undermine Christianity itself in order to promote a depraved agenda. He explained:
But the real reason it’s happening has little