Out-of-control O’Reilly gets aggressive with Obama staffer

January 5, 2008

It’s clear watching his show that Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly thinks he’s above such things as social norms, but I didn’t realize he’d go this far.

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly got into a confrontation with an Obama aide after O’Reilly started screaming at him as he tried to get Barack Obama’s attention following a rally here. O’Reilly eventually did chat briefly with Obama and asked him to be a guest on his show.

The incident was triggered when O’Reilly–with a Fox News crew shooting–was screaming at Obama National Trip Director Marvin Nicholson “Move” so he could get Obama’s attention, according to several eyewitnesses. “O’Reilly was yelling at him, yelling at his face,” a photographer shooting the scene said.

O’Reilly grabbed Nicholson’s arm and shoved him, another eyewitness said. Nicholson, who is 6’8, said O’Reilly called him “low class.”

“He grabbed me with both his hands here,” Nicholson said, gesturing to his left arm and O’Reilly “started shoving me.” Nicholson said, ” He was pretty upset. He was yelling at me.”

Secret Service agents who were nearby flanked O ‘Reilly after he pushed Nicholson. They told O’Reilly he needed to calm down and get behind the fence-like barricade that contained the press.

Once the Secret Service has to intervene to ask a media personality to settle down, you know O’Reilly must have been pushing the envelope to the breaking point.

I don’t doubt that O’Reilly will characterize him grabbing a senator’s aide as some kind of media heroics, but “journalists” aren’t supposed to be thugs. We’ve come a long way — in 1968, it was Dan Rather getting shoved by political heavies. In 2008, it’s Bill O’Reilly doing the shoving.

Apparently, at the event, Obama himself didn’t see any of the altercation.

O’Reilly yelled “sir” at Obama and Obama walked over, not aware of what happened and told him he had an overflow crowd to visit. According to the time code from a photographer shooting the two, Obama and O’Reilly talked near 11:45 a.m. eastern time.

He just came right around the barricade. They shook hands and Mr. O’Reilly said he thought Sen. Obama was great and that he loved him and loved to have him on the show and said he would think about coming on after the primaries.

Somehow, I doubt O’Reilly improved his chances of an interview by grabbing a campaign aide and prompting the intervention of the Secret Service.

This diarist has more, and the Huffington Post has a couple of pictures.

Update: In case there were any doubts, multiple media witnesses are verifying the story, including Slate’s John Dickerson who published this piece this afternoon:

When staffers block you because you’re being too aggressive, the standard thing to do is give them a little business and then move to another spot. O’Reilly didn’t do this. He shoved the Obama aide. There was an exchange and a little more shoving. I didn’t fully capture because as I looked at O’Reilly in his black leather Fox jacket, which resembled the kind we wore during football season in high school, I swore I could hear him challenge the staffer to a rumble out by the drive-in. […]

I have a confession. During the shoving, I found myself yelling at O’Reilly to grow up, which was thoroughly unprofessional, except that I have little kids and I think it’s important to discipline misbehavior immediately. If I don’t dare to discipline, they’ll grow up to be like, well, Bill O’Reilly.

He thinks he’s such an alpha male that the universe is just supposed to fall into place for him, and that it can’t really be that someone didn’t notice him when he was trying to get their attention. Doesn’t Bill O’Reilly catch everyone’s eye as soon as he walks into a room? Isn’t he just like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis in the movies? So he turned into a screech-monkey when he couldn’t get his childish wants.

These are the same guys who think that driving well has something to do with driving fast, who get into stupid accidents because of their reckless behavior, and then don’t tell all their “alpha male” friends, who have all done the same thing, because they don’t want to look like a stupid, reckless driver, which is what they really are.

  • I mean, personally, Bill O’Reilly’s dumpy old man look is so awe-inspiring, if he was in a room full of people, my gaze would zip right at him.

  • This is so appropriate, coming right on the heels of Jonah Goldberg fearing unhinged democrats.

  • The bigger backstory here is that O’Reilly had to go begging.
    Obviously his lieutenants couldn’t convince Obama to show.
    Ergo, Bill himself had to go hat in hand.

    The times… they are a changin’

  • Swan why do you hate dumpy old men?

    I agree with Ten Bear’s assessment. Hang him by whatever you can grab. Or tase him bro.

    This story is pretty much fluff. Weren’t most of the media yelling to Obama? How much can you shove a 6’8 guy? Was he yelling or shouting? Was he emotional or just trying to be heard?

  • It looks like he was desperate. Maybe his show is beginning to tank on Faux and he needs higher-profile victims of whom he can turn off their microphones.

  • I’d have loved to see where “the shrill little mancub from FauxSpews” had gotten himself hauled out of the event in handcuffs. Maybe if folks start referring to him as a homegrown terrorist, we could beat him over the head with the Patriot Act and pack him off to Gitmo.

    Then we tell all the other “Gitmo guests” that he’s really Dick Cheney. I know a good many conservatives who’d lo-oove to be rid of Bill-O—so just think of it as reaching out to conservatives. Although, that would be “a conservative frame,” thus making Madame Chillary and her chief flying howler monkey McCauliffe very, very mad….

  • Methinks Shrill may be in trouble if word gets out that he said he loved Obama.

    I just hope Obama used some sort of sanitizing hand wash after contact with Shrill.

  • If I had to guess, it’d have something to do with his screaming “Sir” at Obama, and then for him not to come running over. The whole incident is pretty comical, but that “Sir” thing is funniest of all. I’m sure Obama is too smart to be duped into thinking a supercilious respect routine and some courtesy (courtesy!!!) from O’Reilly means that attitude wouldn’t drop in a heartbeat as soon as the cameras started rolling on the two of them on the set at Fox. I bet the first question would be, “So tell me, Barack; how long have you been a Muslim?”

  • I’ve always felt that the worst mistake anyone can make is believe their own press releases and propaganda. When politicians do it they become Guiliani. When actors and celebrities do it they become a-holes, when media types do it they tell us that they are really the message. Steven Colbergh imitates O’Reilly just right on his program: a pompous, self-important, bloviating, jerk.

    Hopefully Obama, and all the other Dems won’t go near Faux News, and O’Reilly in particular. How many times does anyone fall for their ambushes?

  • Anyone happen to know how many servings of the sauce Bill O’Reilly had before approaching a famous politician to ask him for an interview?

    I don’t know why they took it off the HuffPo article, but before their post said Bill O’Reilly told Barack he loved him and wanted to have him on his show. Seems like O’Reilly was really trying to lure Barack in there, but whatever his intentions are, you know it’s no good- either to hurt Obama politically, or to hurt Hillary politically because he thinks Hillary is worse for them than is Obama.

    Dale, if you read my comment, I was only implying that dumpy old men aren’t attention-arresting. Why do you write such negative, inaccurate characterizations of my comments so frequently, Dale? Do you not like that I characterized Bill O’Reilly negatively? Sure seems like it. A little weird, pal.

  • John Dickerson wrote:

    I have a confession. During the shoving, I found myself yelling at O’Reilly to grow up, which was thoroughly unprofessional, except that I have little kids and I think it’s important to discipline misbehavior immediately.

    It’s not unprofessional when someone’s shoving somebody and it’s not for a good reason. When a nut like Bill O’Reilly is starting a fight, and trying to shove his way towards Barack Obama, the thing to do is to notify the Secret Service agents guarding Obama. Telling him to grow up stops well short of that.

  • ROTFLMLiberalAO,

    I hate you. I hate you to pieces. After reading that article, I’ll never be able to look at popcorn again—without imagining the aroma of freshly-popped squirrel.

    You are evil. EVIL, I SAY!!!

  • Bill O’Reilly was distracting the Secret Service from protecting a leading presidential candidate, which has been an important part of their mission since the assassination of Robert Kennedy. His selfish antics thus put Barack Obama at risk.

    OK, I’m sure Obama was never really in danger… but I don’t see why someone shouldn’t throw the book at him.

    If only there was a major rival and longtime critic of O’Reilly’s on another television network who could make a big deal out of this…

  • Please Democratic candidates, do not in any way legitimize or recognize Fox. It only encourages them.

  • you’re so vain
    you probably think this post is about you
    you’re so vain
    i’ll bet you think this post is about you
    don’t you? don’t you?

  • The Obama aide was 6’8″? I’ll tell you what O’Reilly was trying to do: He wanted the guy to shove him back or punch him so that he’d have an “Out of Control Obama Camp” story to run. Bank on it.

  • I tried to watch O’Reilly once or twice and then gave up; it was so far from logic or reason.

    Ironic that this unhinged activity by O’Reilly follows a CBR topic that “Jonah Goldberg fears unhinged Democrats”. Twould seem that O’Reilly with his wealthy hubris is acting out his own form of insanity.

    #20, Toast, may be on to something thinking that this was an intentional provocation on the part of O’Reilly. If it wasn’t intentional, then O’Reilly is in fact, insane.

  • After not learning anything from the condescension of telling his viewers how civilized a predominantly black restaurant was, O’Reilly must have thought calling Obama “sir” would totally melt his heart into Bill’s putty.

    Republican mouthpieces like Bill must have some small glimmer of fear about what will happen when their power base becomes last week’s leftover fish.

  • Next time BO attends one of these things, could someone please slap a couple Obama bumper stickers on his ride?

  • Libra…

    Regarding that link: A hyperbole would be tempted to say we are watching the explosion after the implosion of the Republican Party.

    Not me.

    I’ve lived too long.

    The batter that holds the republican fruitcake together is physic’s missing fifth force.

    Still… I’ve never seen them look so old and so far from grand.

    But you can’t blame them.
    They’ve got no buzz at all.

    I mean really lets be honest here…
    Is anybody out there thinking about anything else other that Obama?
    He is the show stopper.
    The game changer.
    The one that has caught our ear and our hearts.
    The entire political world is standing absolutely still in awe:
    What is going to happen on Tuesday?

  • And so it begins; the final assault on “Fortress Fox.” It was only a matter of time before the shrill little mancub converted his rhetoric of physical force to actual force; now that he’s done it and failed, he seeks to spin it off as a “gentle attempt” to communicate with the candidate. This should serve as the opening gambit that causes all Dem candidates to reinforce the shield against the Murdoch minions, their cameras, and their microphones.

    O’Reilly argued the justification of an individual being assaulted by aides to George Allen when their candidate was faced with an embarrassing question or two, suggesting that “he got off easy.” And O’Reilly—time and again on his radio show and his TV stint—openly promotes and threatens violence against others. These “pre-identifiers” alone should be enough to warrant his barring from all political events.

    One might also argue that O’Reilly “got off easy.” In a state where the motto is “Live Free or Die,” having a rabid neocon lemming the likes of O’Reilly try to cause a ruckus at a Democratic candidate’s event might be considered an attempted act of suicide.

    That motto—“Live Free or Die”—also plays out quite well, when one looks at the NH GOP pulling out from the Fox debate. May those Granite State folks have started a trend: Don’t just boycott Fox; disengage from them completely. Make them irrelevant. Leave them twisting in the wind from the end of a barbed-wire noose—and let the buzzards have them for breakfast….

  • O’Reilly is an embarassment to we Irish everywhere – the living embodiment of every English slur over a thousand years. Just another Mick drunkard – drunk on his own perception of his power. There’s nothing more small than a small-minded Irishman.

  • It’s just possible that O’Reilly wasn’t kidding when he said he loved Obama. Did anyone think to frisk him for loofahs?

  • Pingback: Those Who Trespass | Blog of the Moderate Left

  • NO-SPIN-ZONE or MARKET-DRIVEN BLOWHARD? O’Reilly feed his appreciative audiences plenty of ‘Ann Coulter style’ red meat’ when the radical-right’s attack machine was at it’s zenith. Then as foot soldiers [like Gingrich, Limbaugh, DeLay, Foley, Libby, Craig, Rove] started falling out, Bill’s tone/edge softened. And now he’s running to catch the democrats bus?

  • for God’s sake drop it. this is fuel for the show, and fuel for the channel.

    this will get dissected and distorted, and by the end of the week — obama will be the honky-hating
    black panther candidate and o’reilly will be the frail I.F. Stone …

    sadly, the knuckle-dragging mutants who devour FNC’s crap will be believing the O’Reilly version of events by Tuesday —- then again: they’d never vote for the Uppity Candidate anyway, so no great loss there.

    but the bigger picture: the dems are finally figuring out how to neutralize and trivialize FNC —
    and incoming president Obama is the star of that game.

    poor fnc must be getting nervous … especially when the news that their “business channel” (which is actually an entertainment channel featuring classy strippers defending trickle down economics) has come out of the starting gate like yesterday’s broken down mule. soon, they’ll have a intelligent belligerent in the white house to deal with, instead of a compliant pygmy.

  • timeoutofmind said:
    “for God’s sake drop it. this is fuel for the show, and fuel for the channel. ”

    Oh, please, let his producers cite us. That would be just too funny, and proof of their intelluctual decline 😉

  • O’Reilly is an asswipe, but he is not stupid. He works for Murdoch’s channel, Fox. Murdoch has history — in the UK his newspapers were rabidly Conservative under Thatcher and Major, then in 1997 they flipped and crawled so far up Labours ass that Murdoch could tell you what he had for lunch, while dumping a bunch of the more blovivating right wing journos — I mean The SUN endorsed Tony Blair!!! the Times!

    Murdoch was a staunch supporter of freedom in China, ’til his satellite business needed access — then he started crawling and censoring any anti-Chinese government stuff in any newspaper or TV channel he owned.

    Murdoch is a rat, but he is also a businessman who sees that it is in his interests to stay “in” with those in power. He has form … and if you want to frighten a Murdoch journo on Fox or anywhere else remind them. Watch this space, but O’Reilly is vulnerable — he is less valuable as a media asset than Homer Simpson, and Murdoch will sacrifice him in a heartbeat if there is a Democratic administration, along with Roger Ailes.

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