My family and I enjoy Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox TV and watch it most nights. But he says a lot of nutty stuff.

Accosting judges about letting criminals out on low bail
On a weekly basis, O’Reilly finds instances where an accused criminal defendant who was out on bail commits a heinous crime. O’Reilly believes that the judge in question is at fault for having granted bail that is too low given the perpetrator’s past criminal record.

Accosting judges, who are generally restricted either by ethics rules or common sense from explaining decisions beyond the content of those published decisions themselves, is a cheap stunt by O’Reilly and Fox. The villain when criminals who are out on bail commit another crime is the criminal himself and possibly, past inept prosecutors, police, judges, or the public at large for refusing to pay for enough prisons, prosecutors, police, parole officers, and so forth. I would applaud O’Reilly for taking effective action that reduced criminal recidivism, but trying to embarrass judges into setting higher bail to keep people in jail and thereby deter future crimes is wrong and judges who do what O’Reilly is trying to get them to do should be impeached.

Figuring out the correct amount is an art not a science.

Look at Norman Hsu’s bail
Norman Hsu is a Wharton School of Finance graduate (Trump’s alma mater) and a big, well-known contributor to, and fund-raiser for, Democratic Party candidates, most notably Hillary Clinton. The Wall Street Journal thought his name was appearing in suspicous ways in campaign donation records and wrote a story about it. Clinton and other Democrats said he was an honorable man. Hsu and his lawyer were indignant at the suggestion that he had done anything wrong. The State of California then came forward and said they had a warrant out for Hsu’s arrest since 1991 when he jumped bail and fled to Hong Kong. He had pled no contest to swindling California investors out of $1 million and was due in court to be sentenced.

Hsu is a citizen of the U.S. He turned himself into California authorities after the Wall Street Journal story. The prosectuor requested $2 million bail this time but did not demand that Mr. Hsu surrender his passport. California Superior Court Judge James Ellis agreed to the $2 million bail and let Hsu surrender his passport to his own lawyers rather than the court. Neither the prosecutors nor the judge thought there was much risk of Hsu not showing up in court because of the high $2 million bail amount. Prosecutors were OK with it in part because, as they often say on Law and Order, Hsu had extensive business ties to the U.S.

Guess again.

On his new court sentencing date, Mr. Hsu was, again, nowhere to be found. They searched his apartment and found no sign either of him or of his passport. His lawyers say they talked to him since, but do not know where he is. The various Democrats say they are giving the money they got from Hsu to charity. The prosecutors in California say they will use the forfeited $2 million in bail money to pay restitution to Hsu’s swindle victims. But my main point in this article is to show that it is hard to figure out how much bail is enough to prevent flight and how much is too much to pass Constitutional standards. And there is no consideration in bail decisions for the defendant’s propensity to commit additional crimes other than fleeing to avoid prosecution.

Crusade against men who sexually abuse children
O’Reilly also regularly rages against sentences he considers too lenient for men who sexually abuse children, again accosting the judges in question in their driveways. I do not object to that as long as he has his facts straight and is not omitting any pertinent facts. However, I think the focus on this particular crime against this category of victims is incorrect.

There are all sorts of heinous crimes being committed in the U.S. Men sexually abusing children is certainly one of them. But O’Reilly treats this crime as if it were the worst and the one in our society that is most inappropriately leniently punished.

I doubt that. Killing people is pretty bad, too. Something like 18,000 people a year die in drunk-driving accidents. Long ago, devices were invented that prevent drunks from starting a motor-vehicle engine. (It briefly flashes a five-digit number on a small screen. After the number disappears, the driver has to reenter that number in a keyboard to start the car. Drunks can’t do it.) They long ago should have been required in all vehicles by federal law. In fact, no such law has been passed at any level of government.

A Mothers Against Drunk Driving person once called me for a donation. I said,

You are not against drunk driving. You are in favor of it because it lets you perpetuate your organization and collect money. If you were really against drunk driving, you would push for the device that prevents drunks from operating a motor vehicle.

A couple of days later, the newspaper carried a story that said MADD was now going to push for the adoption of the device that prevents drunks from driving a motor vehicle! She did sound like a senior person who was soliciting donations to get a feel for the current public response when I talked to her.

Then there are the 170,000 people who die annually from cigarettes—like both my parents.

Criminal-prosecution resources are rationed
Fundamentally, criminal prosecution resources need to be rationed as health care is in countries where the government pays all health care costs (single-payer plan). The government already does pay for all criminal prosecutions in the U.S. O’Reilly does not like the percentage allocated to those who sexually abuse children. I don’t like the percentage allocated to those who drive drunk or those who push or profit from cigarettes. You probably have your own pet crimes that you think should get more of the resources.

I do not mind O’Reilly pushing for more money for the crime he particularly hates, but he needs to give his audience the context of the allocation-of-prosecutorial-resources debate and show the pie chart of all the crimes and the resources each gets. There is an intelligent article on the subject regarding the State of Wisconsin at http://www.themonroetimes.com/v0802luh.htm.

I suspect O’Reilly’s audience will believe that many of the other crimes are equally or more deserving of prosecutorial resources. They may agree that men who sexually abuse children should be prosecuted and punished more, but not if it means fewer prosecutions of terrorists or murderers or wife beaters and so forth.

In that case, O’Reilly can argue for higher taxes in general so that all serious crimes can be prosecuted more effectively. But talking about prosecuting men who sexually abuse children in almost a vacuum is misleading to the audience about the true policy issues that are at stake.

Even if O’Reilly gets his entire Christmas list of laws enacted, there will always be crimes committed by criminals who are out on bail in a country with our Constitution and 300 million people. Anecdotal evidence like a particular instance of heinous crime is easily manipulated because of its emotional impact. It is only the overall trends that are a meaningful basis for debating and setting policy.

In the 1988 presidential campaign, liberals accused Republicans of misbehavior when they ran a TV ad about a black criminal named Willie Horton who committed a rape and assault with a deadly weapon while out on furlough in Massachusetts, the state where Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was governor at the time. You can see the ad at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9j6Wfdq3o. O’Reilly seems to be running a Willie Horton-type story a week.

Gasoline prices
The prices of virtually everything are made up of a sort of layer cake of components. O’Reilly repeatedly rails against the oil company executives alleging they “gouge” the public by charging too much for gasoline.

Numerous guests on his show—including Ben Stein and Wayne Rogers—have patiently tried to explain to O’Reilly that gasoline prices are set by the market, not executives. This is really economics 101. O’Reilly often notes that he has a masters from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I suspect the JFK School is mortified every time the word “gasoline” comes out of his mouth.

Are oil company executives above “gouging?” No. They would if they could like the Enron traders did in California energy prices. But they simply are not that powerful. The market is. It determines the price of raw gasoline and every other commodity or service.

Furthermore, the pump price of gasoline is very much a layer cake where the price of the refined gasoline is only one of the layers. You can see one representation of the layer cake—in the form of a layer gas pump—at http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/gasolinepricesprimer/eia1_2005primerM.html. On top of that are numerous taxes and other costs like transporting the fuel, real estate costs of stations, environmental expenses to replace underground steel tanks, anti-air-pollution additives that are required, the cost of unleaded as opposed to the leaded gasoline of the past, and on and on. Here’s an article designed to teach school students how gasoline prices work: http://www.econedlink.org/lessons/index.cfm?lesson=EM60&page=teacher.

FTC clears oil comapnies
On 8/30/07, the Federal Trade Commission annonuced the results of its investigation into increases in gasoline prices in the spring and summer of 2006. They said the market caused them, not criminal behavior by oil company executives. In fact, demagogues have been demanding such investigations repeatedly ever since the 1973 gas station lines. And the investigations always come to the same conclusion: the market sets prices, not evil executives.

No doubt, “fair and balanced” Bill O’Reilly will now apologize to the oil company executives for having libeled them. And no doubt he will now apologize to his viewers and listeners and promise to do his homework better on such issues in the future because he’s “looking out for you.”

Also, I was paying, what, $3.20 a gallon for gas here in California when O’Reilly’s high dudgeon was at its highest. Last time I filled up it was $2.65. No doubt Bill O’Reilly will now praise the oil company executives for their saintly, altruistic, magnanimous act of deliberately lowering gasoline prices, which they are in total control of according to O’Reilly, in spite of the harm such price cuts do to their profit margins. This is a great victory for O’Reilly. He’s looking out for you and he put so much pressure on the oil company executives that now they are looking out for you, too.

Of course, I am being sarcastic. The oil company execs would screw you if they could. But they have no such power. However, the logic of my sarcasm is inescapable. If O’Reilly is going to condemn oil company executives every time gas prices go up, fairness and balance, especially balance, require that he praise them whenever gas prices go down.

I expect he will only condemn them when they go up because what he is really about is theatrically playing the role self-righteous hero, defender of his viewers and listeners. He is not about truth, doing your homework, fariness, or balance. If he were, he would have gotten the story straight to begin with or at least apologized when it became apparent that he got it wrong.

Religion
O’Reilly is religious—Roman Catholic. That’s his right. But he does not seem to understand the part of the First Amendment that pertains to religion. It says,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

This means, for example, that a government building cannot have a nativity scene, public schools cannot take time out for prayer, and so on.

It is well settled in our courts that the Amendment means the government cannot do anything that favors or approves of any religion or even take sides in the whole debate on religion versus atheism. O’Reilly and others who think similarly are fond of saying that the U.S. was founded based on Judeo-Christian principles. Actually, it was not. People who say they are Jews and Christians combined are currently a majority in the U.S., but Jews were not so numerous when the country was founded.

Furthermore, the Founding Fathers either wrote, or voted for ratification of, the First Amendment. It does not say one word about Jewish or Christian anything. On the contrary, it says no religion in government. That is the only religious principle on which the country was founded.

A great many Americans had fled from countries where religions combined with government to oppress people, including England. In writing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers were determined not to let such religious oppression happen here. Religious exercise by private citizens, yes; religious laws or behavior by government, no.

President Bush calls the sort of combined government-religious activities O’Reilly approves of “faith-based initiatives.” The Crusades, Inquisition, and 9/11 were faith-based initiatives.

Basically, O’Reilly is unhappy with the First Amendment to the Constitution. His only recourse is to persuade the American people to repeal it, which I do not see happening.

That being the case, he ought to quit bothering us about it. Where to draw the line is a bit fuzzy but I agree that things like calling Christmas vacation “winter vacation” at public schools are silly.

The users of the English language have adopted originally religious words for secular purposes like “holidays” which originally was “holy days.” I see no danger in the word “Christmas” (originally “Christ mass”) Everyone knows it means December 25th and Santa Claus and Christmas carols and all that. It’s no threat to non-Christians. Lighten up, already.

The main enemy of combining religion and government is the ACLU which seems to enjoy going overboard just to piss people off and they sure have succeeded when it comes to O’Reilly. He is probably their main fund raising personality and they deliberately push his buttons every several months to get more donations from the O’Reilly haters. He ought to recognize that he is being used and knock it off.

Rosie O’Donnell
Apparently he did finally figure out that Rosie O’Donnell was pissing him off to get him to talk about her on his show.

Liberal bloggers
O’Reilly apparently has one or more staffers whose job it is to find the most outrageous statements from liberal bloggers so he can self-righteously rant about them. Again, this is playing into the hands of the bloggers. Just as there are 300 million people in this country and somewhere one or more of them are always doing something outrageous, there are also 100 million or so Web sites and one or more of them is always saying something outrageous. Indeed, O’Reilly encourages more outrageousness because he rewards it with publicity. See my article that terrorism is a publicity stunt. Those who give terrorists publicity are complicit in the terrorism.

By drawing attention to otherwise obscure liberal blogs, O’Reilly is spreading their “hate speech” as he calls it. That phrase is yet another manifestation of O’Reilly’s hatred of the Bill of Rights. In the United States, “hate speech,” like all other speech except yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater, is Constitutionally protected. O’Reilly likes to claim that such speech is yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. No, it’s not. It’s just some yahoo shooting his or her mouth off.

It is also debatable whether O’Reilly himself is a practitioner of “hate speech.” It often seems to me like he is trying his best to get viewers to hate Rosie, or Ward Churchill, or Judge So and So, or whomever. He angrily denies it every time the accusation is made. Don’t matter. He says what he says.

With Rosie, he repeatedly denied trying to get her fired, but when he criticized her, he almost invariably mentioned that Walt Disney Corporation was her employer as owner of the TV network that broadcast her erstwhile show The View. I cannot think of any reason for him to do that other than to get her fired. In fact, she did get fired.

He did the same with the University of Colorado and Ward Churchill, who also got fired. Applications to the University of Colorado dropped significantly after O’Reilly’s shows about Churchill.

As with gasoline prices, many of O’Reilly’s guests have patiently explained to him that he should not be searching for the most outrageous liberal Web sites because he is encouraging them and rewarding particular sites with invaluable publicity that helps them spread their vile messages. They don’t matter unless he illuminates them with his powerful spotlight.

He is one of the top-rated talk shows on TV. I presume that ratings motivate him to a large extent. I further presume that he rants about outrageous liberal blog postings in order to get higher ratings or at least to maintain his current ratings. If so it would appear that he is willing to cause wider dissemination of liberal “hate speech” for his own benefit.

Joe McCarthy
I would not be surprised if someday O’Reilly is brought down like Senator Joe McCarthy was during the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954. O’Reilly is not Joe McCarthy in the sense of making wild accusations about Communists and waving documents that he said proved his case but which he would not show to anyone. However, O’Reilly is distressingly willing to hurl his elephantine media weight and uninhibited invective at numerous little people like judges and prosecutors and ordinary citizens who get caught up in major news stories. I would not be surprised to see one of them commit suicide as a result.

If I recall correctly, around August of 2007, one criminal couple that O’Reilly denounced did commit suicide. O’Reilly expressed regret that they did that but not that he did the story. I am concerned that some ordinary, non-criminal person will feel suicide is their best course of action to avoid the massive public contempt that O’Reilly can bring down on them.

I would like to say that O’Reilly does not know his own strength like a huge man who accidentally hurts a small child by not handling him delicately enough. But it is hard to make that argument when O’Reilly regularly brags about his ratings and rankings. He seems at the same time well aware of his power but unaware of the severity with which it affects his targets who are not the same level of public figure that he is. He generally seems like a nice guy, but I still cringe at how being negatively profiled on his show must affect those who are barely public figures.

The keystone event in the downfall of McCarthy was when he started to denounce a young lawyer named Fred Fisher. The Wikipedia write up on the Army-McCarthy hearings called it, “the Famous Exchange.”

McCarthy responded to pushy questioning from the Army's attorney, Joseph Welch on June 9, 1954 saying that if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a group which U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. had called "the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party." At the time Brownell was seeking to designate the NLG as a Communist front organization. McCarthy’s statement violated a pre-hearing agreement not to raise the issue because the Communist designation was being litigated. Welch responded:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness...."

When McCarthy resumed his attack, Welch said:

"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

It is generally believed that this exchange ended McCarthy’s power. I think O’Reilly is often cruel and reckless when he denounces those who are barely public figures. It is arguably illegal—a violation of privacy—to even speak publicly about non-public figures. These judges, professors, teachers, and prosecutors he denounces are barely out of the private-person category.

‘Mercenaries’
For a while O’Reilly was trying to raise hatred against some reporter who used the word “mercenaries” to describe U.S. Troops. As my article on the need for a draft notes, that word has been used by many, including one Chief of Staff of the Army, over many years to describe the U.S.’s all-volunteer Army and it is a legitimate issue to discuss in the policy debate about whether we should have a draft. Mercenary status is not an all-or-nothing issue. Rather, it is part of a spectrum of motivation for joining or staying in the military when there is no draft.

Draftees are not mercenaries. Person who enlist but who get no pay other than room and board are not mercenaries. But the more attractive the financial incentives are to entice people to join or stay in the military, the more we get military personnel who are motivated by financial incentives. Military personnel who are motivated purely by financial incentives are mercenaries. Those who are motivated partially by financial incentives are partial mercenaries.

O’Reilly’s position seems to be that the word “mercenary” may never be applied to U.S. servicemen and women. Yes, it can. To ban the word is to ban discussion of the important issue of whether we should have a military that is even partially motivated by money to kill enemy soldiers. As I say in my draft article, the motivations of our troops whom we provide with powerful weapons and ammunition and training on how to use them are and ought to be a matter of great concern to the American people.

Communist

O’Reilly is a communist who may be too ignorant of basic economics and U.S.Constitutional law to realize it. I expect he would be revealed as such if you could question him on what he believes in ways that would not reveal what the “correct” answers were. In other words, use phraseology that represents Communist principles, but not the famous phrases like “from each according to his ability and too each according to his needs” or “Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

There is not much difference between O’Reilly’s “the folks” and Communist use of phrases like “People’s Republic,” or O’Reilly’s allegations that those he does not like are “out of control” compared to Lenin’s accusations against “counterrevolutionariness,” or O’Reilly’s calls for prosecutions of “hate speech” compared to Communists’ prosecution of “slander against the state.” When it comes to class envy, free markets, free speech, and a number of other issues, O’Reilly supports Marxist and Stalinist principlesone after another.

“Out of control” is a synonym for free.

All Communists claim to speak for and act on behalf of “the people.”

“Hate” speech is speech and all speech is legal in America.

I appreciate informed, well-thought-out constructive criticism and suggestions.

John T. Reed