Fox News host and best-selling author Bill O’Reilly on Monday disputed conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh’s contention that liberals are the dominant political ideology in the United States.
“We are now in a struggle to define America,”
O’Reilly said in his “Talking Points” segment of his top-rated program. “The left has powerful agents in the media and pop culture. The right is disorganized and lacks leadership.”
O’Reilly’s nightly show — “The O’Reilly Factor” — is the highest rated cable news program in the country.
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But on his Friday radio show, Limbaugh said: “The purpose of this program has been to create as large a body of informed voting citizens as possible. While we
’ve been largely and profoundly successful at that, the left has beaten us. They have created far more low-information, unaware, uneducated people than we
’ve been able to keep up with.
“If a majority of people are educated and informed and know what
’s going on, liberalism and these powerful forces that have ill intent to the country can be defeated,” Limbaugh added. “Yet despite overwhelming success in creating more and more people who are informed and active and involved, the left has control of the education system, control of the pop culture, movies, TVs, books, music. We
’ve just been outnumbered.”
Limbaugh’s remarks on Friday expanded on those he made the previous day on his show in which he said that he was “ashamed” of the United States because of Congress’ inability to avert the $85 billion in cross-government cuts scheduled to take place Friday under sequestration.
“Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country,” Limbaugh said on Thursday. “To have our common sense and intelligence insulted the way it’s being is — it just makes me ashamed.”
On his Monday program, O’Reilly did not dispute Limbaugh’s claim that the media and pop culture wield massive influence among Americans. “But I do not believe that liberal thought is dominant in the USA,” he said.
“However, the country is changing quickly into an entitlement society. It’s not so much that apathetic Americans are embracing the tenants of the left. It’s just that they’re selfish and they want money for nothing,” O’Reilly said.
He pointed to some instances of growing liberalism on certain social issues — including gay marriage, with 35 percent in favor in 2001 compared with 48 percent in favor now, and on the legalization of marijuana, 34 percent in 2003 versus 40 percent now.
But O’Reilly then cited the results of Gallup polls regarding government-sponsored health care: 62 percent backed it in 2002, compared with only 44 percent a decade later — “most likely because most people don’t like the Obamacare law.
“That is not — not — a liberal trend,” O’Reilly added.
The key to changing this malaise in American society is, he said, “a charismatic conservative leader” who can “fight off the media jackals.”
“That person can turn the country to the right,” O’Reilly said, “because America is inherently a place of achievement. We’ve always been that.
“It’s true that more Americans today want handouts more than ever before, but that can be reversed because of self-interest,” he added. “Once Americans understand that if the government becomes a nanny state, with high taxation everywhere, it’ll be 10 times harder for anyone to succeed on a grand scale.
“There’s no question that President [Barack] Obama and the Democratic Party want to take things away from successful Americans. That is not an attractive proposition to most people, as the polls say.
“But the right has not been able to articulate the danger of the nanny state and a socialistic philosophy,” O’Reilly added. “There’s always been selfish Americans. There’ve always been people who see themselves as victims — and want to be paid for their perceived suffering. We’ve always had that.
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“Now, those people are in a comfort zone, because their victimization is not being challenged. It’s being encouraged — by the Obama administration.
“But once the nanny-state victimization mentality begins to get hammered in an effective way, it will quickly fall apart — as fair-minded, hard-working Americans will reject it.
“Therefore, the left has not won in America,” O’Reilly declared. “Not yet.”
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