Bill O’Reilly Gets Schooled on Jesus and Food Stamps

Tuesday’s “O’Reilly Factor” had Bill O’Reilly looking like the grinch who stole food stamps. In an attempt to discredit the correlation Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., drew between the Christian concept of charity and the need for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Fox News host brought in a Catholic priest and a Pentecostal pastor to his show. Yes, it does sound like the beginning of a bad joke, and hilariously, O’Reilly is at the butt of it.

While Gerald Murray, the Catholic priest, was clearly a conservative nobody who made zero interesting or factual comments, Pastor Joshua Dubois, President Obama’s spiritual adviser, came off as merciful and well informed, showing up the other two as heartless. O’Reilly insisted that Jesus wouldn’t take from one group to give to another, especially when the group that is being fed by SNAP, according to him, is made up of a bunch of lazy drug addicts who will use their food stamps to buy booze.

In just one of the quips Dubois serves up, he says, “With all due respect, there’s a lot of misconceptions in what you just said. The vast majority of that program goes to elderly people, people who are disabled, 46 percent are children and most people are working families.”

As a Daily Kos member puts it, “In [O’Reilly’s] mind and in the mind of so many Republicans, being poor is just exactly what you deserve for having the audacity to be poor. In order to expunge his putrid soul for these uncharitable thoughts, he must convince himself that these people are subhuman addicts not worthy of wiping his shoes on.”

Watch as Pastor Dubois applies the basics of Jesus’ teachings to American government, and O’Reilly continues to bury his head in denial.

—Posted by Natasha Hakimi