TODAY’S WORRY
Earlier today my daughter, Sarah, alerted me to the fact that Bill O’Reilly had made some very unpleasant remarks about San Francisco. In the recent elections, San Franciscans had voted against military recruiting in public schools and to ban handgun ownership. O’Reilly thinks that SF should no longer receive federal funds over the military issue and perhaps just become its own country. Further, he suggested that every other place in the U.S. is off-limits to al Qaeda but that San Francisco is fair game.
Truly, many of us in northern California have thought about at least divorcing ourselves from southern California, but, be totally out of the U.S? Hmmm. Definitely we have an economy what with Silicon Valley, wine country and agriculture. And of course there’s the whole tourism industry. Perhaps we could really jack up the price of SF logo sweatshirts that the visitors need when they think it’s going to be warm here in the summer. Maybe we could get Oregon and Washington to go along with us. We could be our own little smug tolerant country out here on the west coast. But, of course, this will never happen.
O’Reilly speaks with hyperbole. The more outrageous the comment, the better. Just like we know that Jon Stewart doesn’t really believe that Vice-President Cheney is a emotionless, bloodsucking robot (yeah, I know, questionable), O’Reilly just wants people to react, maybe even think. I’m not saying that this is a guy worth listening to, just that when it comes to over-the-top comments, you always have to consider the source.