Is Bill O’Reilly fucking with us?

Those of you both of you who read Combat! blog regularly know that we grapple with a perennial question around here: do demagogues like Michele Bachmann or Bill O’Reilly actually believe what they say? It’s an unanswerable question, like the exact velocity and location of an electron. To know whether a Bill O’Reilly’s insane falsehoods are delusions or lies is, first, to know whether they are actually false, or if we are the ones who are deluded. Even if we mustered the certainty for that, we would have to further parse whether his audience believes him, or if they view the O’Reilly Factor as an ideologically thrilling romp along the lines of Taken—and if we think we’ve pinned that down, we incur the sub-question of whether O’Reilly is participating in the joke or trying to deceive them. Uncertainty of uncertainties—all is uncertainty. Then I saw this.

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