Whatever Happened to Bill O’Reilly’s Loofah?

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN, COUNTERPUNCH

AT LAST we live to witness the downfall of Bill O’Reilly, as repulsive a tower of excrement as ever blighted the media landscape in America, and God Knows there are quite a few contenders for that distinction. Of course scum of this prominence never get their proper comeuppance, maybe at best a passing humiliation soon balmed with more millions paid meekly in compensation for their departure, all in the spirit of good business, which knows no shame to begin with and only cares about lost sales. Since this is America, a land that never learns, and that O’Reilly for all his blowhard buffonery still has zilllions of idiots who not only admire him but, far more dangerously, believe his inane analyses and opinions, it’s likely he’ll land another profitable gig somewhere else. Still, it pains my heart he did not fall from his ludicrous pedestal on account of flat ratings, which is what he richly deserved. Yea, rejection. No, like Capone who fell due to something mundane, unheroic and insulting, like tax evasion, the Fox star was blindsided by fate, via the irate attack of a well-heeled bourgeois feminist constituency. After all, the Twitterer in Chief has the pink pussyhats in an uproar, so the moment is risky for over-reaching idiots like Aisles or O’Reilly who imagine themselves truly above the law, or beyond the retaliatory perimeter of middlebrow social mores. So let’s call this a moment of small celebration, for “something was rotten in the state of Denmark” before O’Reilly was ambushed by his own hubris, and something will still be rotten long after this vainglorious fool has left the stage. —PG

BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Thanksgiving brought us the one-month anniversary of Bill O’Reilly’s disclosure on his show that “to protect my family” he had settled with Ms Andrea Mackris and her lawyer Benedict Morelli, thus cutting off what millions of O’Reilly haters had hoped would be a protracted season of public humiliation for Fox’s apex bully. The settlement established that all parties agreed there had been no wrong doing and as an earnest of good faith O’Reilly (if you believe the New York Daily News) had paid anywhere from $2 million to $10 million to Mackris, nice money if true, though not as nice as the $60 million Morelli had originally suggested to O’Reilly as a satisfactorily round figure.

But there remains the mystery of the transmuted loofa, about which I had been hoping for some pleasing courtroom exchanges. Let’s pick up the thread in the court document lodged in Nassau county, N.J., by Morelli on behalf of Mackris.

11.06 pm September 1, 2004.

O’Reilly calls Mackris, a 33 year-old innocent from the Show Me state, working as a producer on the O’Reilly show. She, poor lamb, says she thought it was about business and told him she’d call him right back. At this point, we surmise Ms Mackris may have activated a recording device and with the tape rolling, dialed the boss, who promptly gets down to business, launching into what the complaint harshly stigmatized as “a lewd and lascivious, unsolicited and disturbing sexually graphic talk”, about how he imagines he would handle business if they were in the West Indies.

First he’d get two wines into Ms Mackris, “maybe intravenously”. Then, “You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I’d join you and you would have your back to me and I would take the little loofa thing”

A loofa! This is no Motel 6, though it’s not the Ritz either, where loofas would scarcely be “little”, though admittedly size doesn’t come up in the description of loofa offered by the The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

SYLLABICATION:
loo·fa

VARIANT FORMS:
or loo·fah also luf·fa NOUN:
1. Any of several Old World tropical vines of the genus Luffa, having cylindrical fruit with a fibrous, spongelike interior.

2. The dried, fibrous part of the loofa fruit, used as a washing sponge or as a filter. Also called dishcloth gourd, vegetable sponge.

ETYMOLOGY:

Arabic loof singulative form of loofa.

And what is O’Reilly, so strong, so masterful, planning to do with this thing of Arab origin? “I would take the little loofa thing and kinda’ soap your back and rub it all over you, get you to relax, hot wate rand um You know, you’d feel the tension drain out of you and um you still would be with your back to me then I would kinda’ put my arms–it’s one of those mitts, those loofa mitts you know, so I got my hands in it and I would put it around front, kinda’ rub your tummy with it and then with my other hand I would start to massage your boobs, get your nipples really hard ‘cuz I like that and you have really spectacular boobs.”

At this point, in the document filed in the court house in Nassau County, which would indeed appear to be a transcript right down to the ums, there’s an ellipse.

“So anyway I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind and then the other hand with the felafel thing”

NOUN:
1. Ground spiced chickpeas shaped into balls and fried.

2. A sandwich filled with such a mixture.

What happened to the loofa?

Maybe Abe Foxman called him on the other line to warn about “going Arab on us”.

And what is O’Reilly planning to do with the falafel?

“I would take the other hand with the falafel thing (sic)and I’d put it on your pussy, but you’d have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business.”

According to the courtroom document available for inspection on Smoking Gun, the quality of the conversation goes down hill from there on in. It may be that O’Reilly’s tour of Arab commodities was proleptic, as he began to shift gears through the vowel sounds. For an interesting discussion of the processes involved I recommend Sebastiano Timpanaro’s philological investigation, published in translation years ago by Verso, entitled The Freudian Slip. From loofa to felafel to Well, let Ms Mackris and her lawyer tell it their way. O’Reilly “suggested he would perform oral sex” on Ms Mackris and she would “perform fellatio on his ‘big cock’ but not complete the act”, maybe to conserve his energies for further deployment of the little loofa or the felafel, though the lifespan of a felafel in a shower is surely limited in duration. After the exciting fa-fel-fell monologue and what to Ms Mackris’ “repulsed” ear sounded like the hum of a vibrator and acoustic intimations of satisfactory climax O’Reilly launched into a discussion concerning how good he was during a recent appearance on “The Today Show”.

Mind you, though O’Reilly may have thought he was on safe political ground with presumptively Israeli falafel, the word and indeed the snack is also of Arab origin.

Thank you Ms Mackris. It must have been just horrible for you, but it was in a good cause. You gave us a bright moment in a dark year.

This article originally appeared in the November 2004 edition of CounterPunch

About the author

Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.

WHAT TO DO? With Trump now following the Clinton script and the Wall Street/MIC push for constant confrontations with powers that refuse to do Washington’s bidding, the world is literally hanging by a thread, and nuclear war could start any moment.
(If you haven’t yet, be sure to read this: Experts: “In a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die.”)

If a nuclear war is to be avoided, the US should not set any preconditions for direct talks with North Korea.

Yea. What to do? There's no quick fix to the damage inflicted on the US population by decades of passivity, massive ignorance, runaway jingoism and constant lies. Gross mendacity issuing practically from the entire political class and the corporate media will not stop tomorrow—or ever. The whole damn corporate system has to be liquidated for that to happen. In fact, it is possible to imagine that even in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war, the old lies and liars will still be in power. Wars do not exactly bring sudden political lucidity to severely brainwashed people.

That said, it is imperative that those who do see what is going on, what is at stake, try and do something to derail the mad rush to Armageddon. There's no time to organize Third Parties or a new party by normal processes. So we are stuck with the existing whores in the political class, and these abject people respond only to one thing: their own political and (maybe) personal survival. If these bastards see a mighty surge of people calling and demonstrating with clarity in their demands and anger on their lips, they may grow enough of a spine to stem the warmongering and actually begin to isolate the main carriers of this disease, sociopaths like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, the Clintons and their cliques, and of course, the Liar in Chief and his clique of insane billionaires and militarists.

So call, fax, write and demonstrate, and support the long overdue growth of an antiwar movement. Stopping a nuclear war is the foremost issue of our time. Call your Congress buffoon and state in clear terms that you are fed up, and that you want change or else, and that you won't put up with any votes for more wars—anywhere. This may sound counter-intuitive for us, to be advising you that you call your representative in a false democracy, a person obviously most likely doing the bidding of the plutocracy, those who brought humanity to this pass. But for reasons already mentioned, their own sense of short-term political self-preservation and opportunism, they may actually screw up the courage to do the right thing, for once, something these characters should have been doing all along without needing anyone to tell them to do the obvious. While you are at it, and if you can stomach it, also contact MoveOn.org and similarly pseudo democratic orgs, and challenge them to do the right thing or get lost. Please do this today. Or as soon as you can. Time is precious. Start by finding your Congressional (so-called) representative: http://www.house.gov/htbin/findrep

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