Who's Looking Out for You?

While there's off-the-charts, brimming-drool-cup lunacy on nearly every page of Who's Looking Out for You?, the penultimate work in the O'Reilly oeuvre, it's perhaps most remarkable for its flat-out terrible writing.

Reading The O'Reilly Factor for Kids, one got the impression that O'Reilly was dumbing down his writing to appeal to youngsters. One is stunned to discover after just a few pages of Who's that it's just the way he writes. Indeed, this "adult" book is basically the same as the children's drivel, only with more politics, more on Clinton's blow job, and, bizarrely enough, less advice on how to avoid cataracts.

After Who's Looking Out for You? had spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, O'Reilly made much of the Times's lack of interest in reviewing it. No doubt O'Reilly imagines that the Old Gray Lady ignored his magnum opus because of some institutional left-wing bias. Please. Three pages into Who's, you'll realize that the Times chose not to review it for the same reason they don't send a food critic to Chili's or an art critic to check out a potato chip that looks like Dale Earnhardt.

The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life

Now here's what I don't get. They didn't make a sequel to Showgirls, Germany didn't decide to give Nazism another try, the Hindenburg II is not shuttling small children around America's theme parks, and yet O'Reilly has written five books. And I've read three of them. So who's dumber, O'Reilly or me?

While this is the first nonfiction book O'Reilly wrote, it's the third I've read, and ironically, it's a lot more of the same. Indeed, for someone with nothing to say, he sure repeats himself a lot. Yeah, yeah, Bill, I get it. Clinton got a blow job, the elite media are pinheads, your father was mean and loud, you write like an eleven-year-old. How about something new?

Of course, along with the customary tedium, there's also plenty on O'Reilly's wild sexual exploits in The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, The Bad, etc. Indeed, the number of references to O'Reilly's inappropriate sexual conduct are exceeded only by the number of references to Bill Clinton's inappropriate sexual conduct.

He has two chapters, "The Sex Factor" and "The Dating Factor," which he offers as sage advice but which are actually thinly disguised chronicles of what a player O'Reilly used to be during his leisure-suit, Ron Burgundy disco days as a local TV reporter. Following is an excerpt. If you happen to be reciting this as part of a reading at a bookstore or a library, you may want to cover the first two rows of your audience in plastic sheeting. They will get sprayed. I myself have lost every lunch from circa 1979 to the present. Here's Bill:

My thing was the music: I was a dancing machine. Sock it to me, Donna Summer! Let's shake this place, Gloria Gaynor! Get down! Now, this was the lad of a quarter century ago, okay? But I make no apologies. I loved the all-out dancing, and quite a few girls loved to dance with me. The dancing got me dates. The dancing said (since you couldn't hear any words in those places under the rotating mirror balls), Hey, let's have some fun and see what happens next. Even Catholic girls had their inhibitions lowered by the howls of the Bee Gees or Sylvester. A few hours at clubs like Septembers or Shenanigans and most of my dates wanted to extend the evening at their place or mine.

Of course, this was written in 2000, four years before O'Reilly was accused by one of his producers of making inappropriate small talk with her over the phone while he masturbated. In fact, reading this kind of stuff now is a little like reading a 1975 John Wayne Gacy article on how to be a clown at children's birthday parties.

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