Fox News blowhard Bill O’Reilly loves to pretend that he knows something about history. He’s also fond of pretending to be a journalist and a decent human being, but he fails on those counts, too.
Last night on his show “The O’Reilly Factor,” the loudmouthed moron O’Reilly decided to take issue with something First Lady Michelle Obama said as part of her speech to the Democratic National Convention Monday evening. Specifically, the First Lady remarked that she lived in a house (the White House) “built by slaves.” But O’Reilly tried to argue that those slaves were treated well as they constructed a home for the President.
Those slaves, O’Reilly insisted, were “well fed” and “had decent lodgings provided by the government.”
Excuse me just a moment here, Bill, but they were still SLAVES!! It wasn’t exactly like they could complain about the food and lodging, which I somehow doubt was nearly as nice as the food and bed their masters were afforded.
O’Reilly, unlike many on the right wing, did agree that slaves did participate in constructing the White House:
“Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well.”
But to hear many Republicans yesterday, the First Lady had just told a gigantic lie as part of advancing a larger political motive. Some even said the notion that the White House was built using forced labor was a fabrication. But Politifact jumped into the fray and rated Mrs. Obama’s speech “True.” They also wrote:
“Journalist Jesse J. Holland also discussed the role of slaves in building the White House in his 2016 book, The Invisibles: ‘The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House.’
“With the invention of steam shovels still several years away, these slaves dug for the clay on site with hand shovels, working day and night to get the raw material to the skilled brick makers and at the same time, opening up ground on the site for the space that would become the White House’s foundation and cellar,The identity of these slaves and where they came from has been lost, he wrote.
“Obama’s statement is ‘true, Holland told PolitiFact.”
Truth, it should be noted, is something O’Reilly, Fox News, and most Republicans are not familiar with.
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