To Bill O'Reilly the oil crisis is merely a "thing"

Bill O'Reilly of Fox News is provoked. OK, so that's an oxymoron. O'Reilly overreacted recently, (OK, so that's an excessive oxymoron) to a statement made in a commencement speech in which Brian Williams of NBC News said to the freshly minted graduates of Ohio State University: "We need you to fix the country.... And I'm deadly serious..."

To those not so casual observers of the world scene, or better yet, those with no ax to grind, Williams' petition might not seem so odd.

Though O'Reilly is no casual observer, we may yet identify him as a tendentious media man. O'Reilly responded roughly that Williams didn't know what he was talking about.

What was Williams proposing to be fixed? Well, he highlighted: "Energy, politics, diplomacy, science, education, military, transportation...(and) climate." Who would disagree who reads the news or has any feeling left for contemporary history? The response: Fox News, and its main man Bill O'Reilly.

Marginalizing all except the energy problem facing the world, O'Reilly, deferring to "energy" as "fix worthy," bleated something like, "OK, there is the oil thing."

As we spoke earlier, (8 May 2008) employing the word "thing" as a replacement for otherwise perfectly useful, specific nouns is acceptable in normal daily speech, but certainly not in any discussion respecting specificity and clear communication. That is, when we're getting down to serious business. Most average people would say the price of fuel counts as serious.

Certainly, Mr. O'Reilly counts not as an average person, nor is he a run-of-the-mill propagandist. He may be more fairly described as a tendentious media type posing as a news analyst who makes millions each year striking his surly poseur stance.

The phrase "Oil thing" works just fine for those making millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. They who wouldn't flinch if the price of fuel were to climb to $8/gallon. The phrase does not work for the millions who struggle daily just to makes ends meet. These folks might speak more expressively saying instead of "oil thing": oil dilemma, or oil catastrophe.

The savvy observer will correctly say, those damned oil speculators operating in the New York Mercantile Exchange, (NYMEX). What goes on in that unregulated trading environment where the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been kept from enforcing margin requirements is the "artificial manipulation of oil prices by hedge funds and speculators resulting in ever higher gasoline bills." --Deborah Fineman, president of Mitchell Supreme Fuel Co. in Orange, New Jersey

"Oil thing," Mr. O'Reilly! You'd better stay away from using the word "thing" in any commentary unless, of course, you happen to be Keith Olbermann who takes care in his use of words.

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