Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday, and my beloved Seattle Seahawks stunned the world with a performance for the ages, delivering an upset victory in the greatest moment in Pacific Northwest sports history.
But you already knew that. What you probably don't know are these five crucial things about something that made it on the air several hours before the game even began: Fox News comedian Bill O'Reilly interviewed President Barack Obama.
Drum roll please.
- Bill O'Reilly interviewed the president during the pre-pre-pregame show. Okay, I'll admit you probably knew this, if only from the title of this post. But I didn't know about it until today, because even though I'm a political junky, for me, yesterday was about the Super Bowl and nothing but the Super Bowl. And I think most people watching the Super Bowl were the same way. The interview aired something like three hours before kick off and while it was fodder for political geeks, it wasn't exactly a ratings barnburner, even though it almost certainly reached a larger audience than Fox's typical ~2 million viewers.
- The interview was actually more about Bill O'Reilly and Fox than the president. The interview was fairly short, and a review of the transcript reveals that more than 1 in 3 words delivered during the interview were uttered by none other than O'Reilly himself. President Obama can be famously longwinded; to manage to speak for 35 percent of an interview with him is a remarkable display of self-infatuation that I think only Donald Trump could rival.
- Speaking of the devil, Donald Trump thought the president looked "sloppy" because he didn't wear a tie. Even better, Trump thought the reason Obama should have worn the tie is because O'Reilly wore one. Because clearly you must do what The Bill O'Reilly does if you're president. Sure, George W. Bush didn't wear a tie during a Super Bowl interview. But as Trump's pal Mitt Romney might say, nobody ever asked to see George W. Bush's birth certificate.
- #Benghazi, #IRS, and #Obamascandal really are hashtags that only the right cares about. In the middle of grilling the president about allegedly not calling Benghazi a terror attack, O'Reilly said to the president: "I've got to get to the IRS." Which of course was true, because Fox Nation would never forgive him if he didn't press the president on yet another bogus scandal. The president, for his part, understood this, saying to O'Reilly: "I mean these kinds of things keep on surfacing, in part because you and your TV station will promote them."
- President Obama is the nicest dictatorial tyrant ever. In most countries with brutal dictators like President Obama, political critics like Bill O'Reilly and Fox News would be summarily executed. But not only does Leader Obama not use his Unlimited Power to put Fox out of business (if not in jail), he actually granted this interview to the relatively low-rated Fox News network simply because tradition says that's what presidents are supposed to do. If the rest of the world's tyrannical thugs were as nice as President Obama, the world would be a better place.
