Weekly Dave: Bill O'Reilly

This week's Dave award should be combined with an as of yet unnamed award for silliest grandstanding. Bill O'Reilly has decided to launch a campaign against having Nas play at the welcome back concert for Virginia Tech students, describing it as "an atrocity." Watch the video here. In the video, you get some vintage O'Reilly. He shouts down Bakari Kitwana, a brilliant critic and author, in order to assert some facile point about Nas having a gun conviction. Then, he patronizes the token black conservative (a species well-dissected by Adolph Reed) by asking him if he's ever heard of Stephen King. I'm surprised he didn't cover his bases totally by flat out asking the man if he could read.

O'Reilly then proceeds to recite the cliched conservative litany of ways hip-hop is, in the words of Senator Tankerbell, confusing the youth. They are boring and not worth writing about. I would, however, like to take a moment to point out O'Reilly's staggering hypocrisy.

My j'accuse is thus: O'Reilly is in fact a far greater cause of the ills which he attributes to hip-hop. He is a dedicated opponent of affirmative action, minimum wage increases, or reparations, all of which are necessary if there is ever to be economic parity between Blacks and whites. Since crime is intimately linked with poverty, O'Reilly's defense of a social order built on Black impoverishment implicates him in the very criminality he seeks to condemn. What a fucker.