From Bill O’Reilly, responding on the air to Canadian viewer Peter Gillies, who noted that Canadians have higher life expectancies under their healthcare system than we do under ours:
Well that’s to be expected, Peter, because we have ten times as many people as you do. That translates to ten times as many accidents, crimes, down the line.
Note that this wasn’t just an off-the-cuff howler. O’Reilly chose to air Gillies’ letter and had his response all teed up on the prompter. Here are the alternatives for how this happened: (a) Not a single person on his staff noticed that this was nonsensical. (b) Someone noticed but didn’t have guts to tell O’Reilly he was wrong. (c) Someone noticed, told O’Reilly, but was unable to convince him that he’d flubbed his fourth grade arithmetic. (d) O’Reilly does this stuff all by himself and doesn’t show it to anyone before airtime. I’m going with (b).
