He has had politicians explain it to him, he has had economists explain it to him, he has had oil industry experts from all levels of the industry explain it to him and just last night John Stossel tried to explain it to him but he couldn't get a complete sentence out before 0bloviator shut him down.
Even critics of the oil industry look bewildered at his irrational hatred of "Big Oil" and end up defending the oil industry trying to talk some sense into his concrete skull.
On oil prices, O’Reilly’s a pinhead.
You go back to his childhood days I will bet you find Bill surrounded by a family of NYC union employees, who as I can attest would be virulent anti big business. And the biggest business of all in the early portion of the century was Standard Oil. They would have been the poster boy for everything union hate.
“I have never seen anyone work so hard to be so ignorant on a subject as Bill 0’Reilly has on the oil industry”.
I’d kind of want to put the occupier of the White House up against Mr O’Reilly on this one.
“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.