“I have never seen anyone work so hard to be so ignorant on a subject as Bill 0’Reilly has on the oil industry.”
Yes - yes - yes.
O’Reilly is actually really good on things he *knows something about* - like public education (since he spent some time in the trenches as a high school teacher).
But when he takes that same certainty to things on which he is completely ignorant, the result is embarrassing, even sad.
My favorite is when he rails about “record profits” for the oil companies, cited in absolute dollars. That’s like screaming how much money my local McDonalds makes relative to my kid’s lemonade stand - in itself it means nothing because of the difference in scale. Oil companies are enormous in size - any year they make a profit it’s likely to be huge in absolute terms. The only measure that really means anything is profit margin, and even that has to be averaged over time since the price of crude (and the economy) oscillates so much.
O’Reilly also seems to be of the impression that the oil companies set the price of crude. Someone needs to introduce him to OPEC.
O’Reilly has a lot of influence - if the wanted to do something “for the folks” he’d actually get off his high horse and try to find out how economics actually works in the energy sector.
Part of O’Really’s problem is he can’t separate crude oil and refined product during his thought process. Last night he actually said oil is America’s number 1 export.
“like public education (since he spent some time in the trenches as a high school teacher).”
add, while evading the draft.
There is the bottom line. He doesn't want to. He wants to pontificate and in his case I think his pontiff-envy is very literal.