MEDIAWATCH: Wealthy politicians and an even wealthier TV newsman are equally out of touch with voters
THE MOST ridiculous, if ridiculously lucrative, schtick in the American media is Bill O'Reilly's.
From a hectoring perch on his nightly Fox show to his lecturing books that regularly make the New York Timesbestseller list, even as he pronounces that newspaper a force for ill in American life, O'Reilly has become massively wealthy based on the preposterous premise that he is "lookin' out for you".
He does this by defending at nearly every turn the disastrous course the Bush administration has taken the country and the rest of the world on over the last eight years and by dismissing as "secular progressives" anybody who deigns to criticise policies such as legalised torture as antithetical to American values.
O'Reilly speaks with all the passion and conviction of a snake oil salesman selling faux (Fox?) patriotism and, watching him interrupt and insult guests on his show, it is hard to decide which is more laughable: his insistence that he is not a right-wing shill, or his network's claim that its news is "fair and balanced".
When Britney Spears's unmarried teenage sister got pregnant, O'Reilly went on the air and lambasted her and her parents, saying they were emblematic of stupid, irresponsible Americans.
When it was revealed that Sarah Palin's 17-year-old unmarried daughter was pregnant, O'Reilly declared that any talk about what this said about Palin or her policies, including her abstinence-only approach to sex education, was off-limits.
It is not a coincidence that O'Reilly became America's foremost journalistic bully in an era when the American government became a bully on the world stage. Like most bullies, O'Reilly expresses incredulity when called out: he isn't being disingenuous and mean-spirited, he's just lookin' out for us.
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld said pretty much the same as they lied us into Iraq. As this seemingly endless presidential campaign steers mercifully toward the finish line, both candidates, and by extension, the American news media, have taken to aping Bill O'Reilly, saying they are, ahem, lookin' out for us.
The only thing more ludicrous than a couple of multimillionaires like Obama and McCain pretending they understand the current plight of the average, ordinary American is those among the American media elite doing the same. Case in point: a column in the New York Timesby Roger Cohen.
Cohen is a marvellous journalist who should have won a Pulitzer for his heroic war correspondence in the Balkans. But his dispatch out of Branson, the capital of Dollywood, suggested he has spent more time in Macedonia than Missouri.
Basically, Cohen patted all them clean-livin' Bible thumpers on the head and congratulated them for having indoor plumbing at their hillbilly music halls. He concluded that - hold onto your hats - people who live in the heartland are just as normal and decent as the rest of us.
Speaking of indoor plumbing, given where the US economy currently resides, it was inevitable that a plumber would be called in. Joe the Plumber, it turns out, was the perfect Republican pitchman. He's anti-regulation: he doesn't have a plumber's licence. And he regards taxes with appropriate conservative disdain: he doesn't pay them.
John McCain decried the fact that the press dug into poor oul' Joe's background. This was after McCain mentioned Joe no less than 23 times during his final debate with Barack Obama and after McCain went on TV saying he was going to take Joe along on the campaign trail.
That a presidential candidate would pluck from obscurity some ordinary Joe, use him for partisan purposes, then dismiss any press scrutiny of the guy as a left-wing witchhunt proves that everybody who said McCain has no sense of humour was wrong. Hey, we had to check him out.
For all we knew, Joe the Plumber might have been one of them thar domestic terrorists! Come to think of it, he does bear a resemblance to a UVF man I knew in Portadown.
Everybody except my pal Eamon Keane on Newstalk interviewed Joe the Plumber last week. My favourite was when ABC's Diane Sawyer - former aide to Richard Nixon, current wife of director Mike Nichols - asked Joe to consider the 95 per cent of Americans who make less than $250,000 (€194,000) a year.
Given that Ms Sawyer makes $12 million a year presiding over mostly pap on Good Morning America, it was a question she could have reasonably posed to herself. But give the girl some credit: she nailed Joe the Plumber by pointing out that even if he earns more than $250,000, his tax would increase from 36 to 39 per cent under Obama. Hardly something worth jumping out of the window over.
But Joe the Plumber would have none of it. While disingenuously declining to say who he was voting for, Joe said Obama had "a very scary socialist view". Which is really all the Republicans wanted out of Joe the Plumber in the first place, to inject the S word into the debate.
Coming on the heels of Bush, with McCain's and Obama's assent, nationalising the banking industry, it's a curious strategy to get all whipped up about socialism. But that isn't what right-wingers, or even most Americans, mean when they call someone a socialist. They mean communist.
Calling Obama a socialist is almost as funny as Bill O'Reilly saying he's lookin' out for you. In a European context, it's fair to describe Obama as a social democrat.
But for most Americans, democratic socialism is an oxymoron. And, as Bill O'Reilly would scream, "Who you callin' an oxymoron?"
• Kevin Cullen is a columnist for the Boston Globe. cullen@globe.com