Hopes for broadcaster slap-down dashed, as fundamentalists stage attack on holidays

The weather outside is frightful, and I'm nursing a cup of cocoa along with a profound sense of embarrassment, having believed that the Bill O'Reilly and Howard Stern Broadcaster Death Match on Fox tonight might have been worth DVR'ing. It wasn't. What had I been smoking?

Sometimes I'm too optimistic for my own good. Either that, or my standards are pretty low. But if someone wanted proof that the world would be a nicer place without Bill O'Reilly, this episode would be confiscated as evidence. I knew it the moment he barked, "Abu Ghraibs are going to happen!" to the soft-spoken law professor from George Washington University.

It's the same mentality that inspired other crimes against humanity. Pol Pot probably used to sit around joking with his friends, "Genocide is going to happen!" So much for moral authority.

And yeah, I should've snapped the TV off right there, but didn't. Instead, against my better judgment, I sat through the stories about the debacle at Miami International Airport, the Tookie Williams controversy, and the latest on the Iraqi abortion. Joe abandoned ship during the story about some former CIA captive, knowing full well that the exchange between Stern and O'Reilly would be a dud.

"You're not going to watch this with me?" I asked, a pleading tone creeping up in my voice. I needed an accomplice, someone who'd share the shame of having tuned into Bill O'Reilly for more than two minutes.

"Nah, they're just two different turds floating in the same bowl," he shrugged, as World of Warcraft beckoned him from down the hall.

Now, I'll admit having not tuned in to Stern for eons, but I did enjoy reading Private Parts and remember some pretty heavy-hitting interviews on his show when it aired here on KEGL. I even still have my Howard Stern bumper sticker from the time they took him off the air back in late '95 or early '96. That was a pisser, but 105.3 brought him back to the DFW airwaves a few years later. By this time, though, it seemed to be a different show altogether, and I began to miss the days when Stern was actually provocative – back when he'd really push the limits and the buttons of people who deserved to be slapped around a bit, back when his conversations carried more weight than the usual "Were you molested as a girl?" battery of questions he now asks of his favorite Penthouse Pets and starlets. Don't get me wrong – Penthouse Pets make the Playboy girls look like blow-up dolls and congratulations to the newly-crowned 2006 Pet of the Year Jamie Lynn, by the way – but maybe I'm just too old or have become completely spoiled in my public radio cocoon. People joke that it’s radio for teachers and librarians, but what they don't know is that in the provocative stakes, programs like Fresh Air and This American Life make Howard Stern look like the proverbial two-year-old flinging feces across the room.

Hey, speaking of three-year-olds flinging feces, does anyone remember that interview Terry Gross did with Bill O'Reilly? Hilarious.

Maybe that's the kind of show I was hoping for, but Bill O'Reilly’s interview with Howard Stern was exactly what everyone else but me knew it was going to be: a big cross-promotional opportunity and ad revenue coup. After all, Howard is launching his Sirius Satellite Radio show and O'Reilly has seized this opportunity to create a brand new diversionary tactic this season: whining about how the left-wing nuts are trying to do away with Christmas. Sounds to me like someone needs to grow up already and shove that new line of Fox News ornaments right up his rigid ring-piece.

And before you stash that away in your Bitch, Are You For Real? file, keep in mind that the damage has been done. O'Reilly’s fellow Fox viper John Gibson has a brand new book out called The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. It's guaranteed to be a bestseller among the elementary school theology email set, the types who waste precious bandwidth with their mega-KB files forwarded thirty times over – the ones containing massive GIF and JPEG images of fluttering angels, the sad-eyed Jesus and rosy-cheeked Santa, and instructions to send it on to five other people so your prayers for a big-screen TV will be answered.

Personally, I'm not bothered if someone tells me to have a merry Christmas. I'll happily return the greeting, and mean every word of it. But those who are mindful of the fact that there are other holidays being celebrated at this time shouldn’t be treated like they're pissing on the plum pudding, either.

And with that, I wish everyone peace on Earth, and goodwill toward my fellow Earthlings. Even Bill O'Reilly, I suppose.