Bill O’Reilly has been working as a NewsmaxTV host since he was canned from Fox News after details of millions of dollars in settlements for sexual harassment allegations against him came to light, and yesterday he shared his empathy with former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been accused of behaving inappropriately toward women.
In a clip of a NewsmaxTV broadcast uploaded to YouTube yesterday, O’Reilly said that Biden posed “the stiffest challenge” to President Trump in the road ahead to the 2020 election because Biden has the most name recognition among the general public compared to other Democrats eyeing the party nomination. Biden has not formally announced a 2020 bid, but The Wall Street Journal reports that Biden has been lining up major donors so that he can quickly raise millions of dollars for an impending campaign.
In the last week, two women have alleged that Biden touched them inappropriately. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that two more women made additional allegations of inappropriate behavior toward them by Biden. Criticisms of Biden’s behavior toward women and the nickname “Creepy Uncle Joe” have circulated for years, but the recently reported allegations have inspired many on the progressive left to criticize and question the former vice president. To critics voicing concerns, Biden’s behavior demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between the potential candidate and modern conversations about how men in power should behave toward women.
But to O’Reilly, Biden is “under attack” simply because he’s “one of the few moderates in the Democratic Party,” which O’Reilly would lead his audience to believe is sharply pivoting toward radical causes. O’Reilly went on to say that he has known Biden for years, although Biden never granted him a public interview.
“The progressive wing, the far-left wing of the Democratic Party, doesn’t want any part of Joe Biden, for a number of reasons. Number one, he’s white. They don’t want a white candidate if they can get a person of color. Number two, he’s a capitalist. Whoa! They don’t want that. This is the far-left progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Number three, he’s not politically correct. He says stuff like, ‘Oh, Vice President Pence is a good guy,’ and they went wild because Pence is a very religious man who doesn’t believe in gay marriage,” O’Reilly said.
He continued, “So you had to derail Joe Biden, now how could you derail him? He’s got a pretty good reputation within the Democratic Party. President Obama likes him. Well, you’ve got to bring out the playbook. And what does the playbook say? You want to attack somebody and destroy them? ‘MeToo, MeToo.’”
O’Reilly was fired from Fox News, where he hosted a primetime show, following a New York Times investigation that found $13 million had been paid out in settlements to quash sexual harassment allegations against him while he worked at the network. The women who alleged O’Reilly sexually harassed them reportedly “complained about a wide range of behavior, including verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating.”
