Every night at 8 p.m. on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann awards his daily pick for "Worst Person in the World." Some contenders are lucky — or unlucky —enough to be nominated more than once.
The bronze goes to Fox News Watch, the only program on Fox News Channel that tries to live up to the network’s otherwise ironic slogan, fair and balanced. Analyst Cal Thomas named me his journalistic turkey of the year for my observation that his hair may have been colored. No complaint about that, but they misspelled my name on the graphic. And you know, you always look like less of a journalistic turkey calling somebody else a journalist turkey if you don’t spell the alleged turkey’s name wrong.
Our runner up, the Christian Coalition of America. It had elected a new president, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter of Florida, but he has now resigned after the board told him his agenda was not its agenda and it would not speak to their base, included in his agenda, increasing the Christian Coalitions’ efforts to reduce poverty. Yes, Christian Coalition needs to stay away from that or people might begin to think its leaders have actually read the Bible.
But the winner is Bill-O. And this is a classic. He has brought up that war on Christmas crap again and trashed the retailer Crate and Barrel because a spokeswoman was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "We would definitely not say, Merry Christmas." Reaching perhaps his paranoid peak, O’Reilly has said that the imams who were yanked off the U.S. Air flight last week, "Wouldn’t get handcuffed in Crate and Barrel if they started chanting and stuff."
Only one problem, the spokeswoman was asked if employees there were required to say Merry Christmas to customers. She said no, they weren’t required. They could if they wanted to. Crate and Barrel didn’t think it was any of their business to tell their employees what they could or couldn’t say. And oh, by the way, Crate and Barrel has its own special Christmas section listed on its Web site, under the decidedly secular progressive name Christmas Ideas. Bill-O, you do realize your elevator doesn’t go to the top floor anymore, right. Bill O’Reilly and his annual war on sanity, Tuesday’s Worst Person in the World.