This will make perfect sense eventually, trust me.

Bill O’Reilly is the gift that just keeps on giving.  From his radio show yesterday:

We have a lot of crazy people running around America, and the internet encourages the craziness and the hatred.  Hatred in this country is ratcheted up now, a hundred times… more than it was ten years ago, because of the internet, which provides haters with sanctuary, and encourages them.  Because other haters can say "Oh yeah, you’re just like me, you’re not alone."

So it used to be that there were isolated nuts like the killer of John Lennon, the killer of Martin Luther King…  Now these people, just like child molesters, can get comfort from the internet, so all people in the public eye are in danger.

Oookay.  Um, BillO?  Just a spot of helpful advice, if I may: If you had to pay off a former employee millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit chock full of vibrators and loofahs and steamy triple-X falafel talk, you should probably think twice before you start punting child molester stones out of your big glass sexual harassment house.

And while we’re talking about glass houses, it struck me that your description of "the internet" (and your ten-year timeframe of hate-ratcheting) sounds a helluva lot like right-wing talk radio, which puts the dissemination and validation of hatred at the very center of its business model.  Have you listened to any Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage or KSFO, Bill?  Or to yourself?

That constant drumbeat of hate that you thump out to millions and millions of listeners every day positively dwarfs the impact of the occasional blogger or Daily Kos commenter who says something vile.  It’s not even close.  You’re the ones who have poisoned our discourse, not us.

And you know what else, Bill?  Every time some knuckledragging creep on either side of The Internet (I say either side, but 99% of it is from your side, Bill) says something beyond the pale, something so mean-spirited and awful as to turn any decent person’s stomach, you know who taught them to do that?  You, Bill!  They learned it by watching YOU!

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