I’m a little late to the game on this but wanted to comment on it anyway. As ThinkProgress and others have noted, the other night Bill O’Reilly managed to reset the bar for his own stupidity and offensiveness when he “challenged John Edwards’ claim that 200,000 veterans ‘will go to sleep under bridges and on grates’ because they are homeless. O’Reilly said, ‘They may be out there, but there’s not many of them out there. Okay? … If you know where’s a veteran, sleeping under a bridge, you call me immediately, and we will make sure that man does not do it.’” He’s wrong, of course. The Washington Post checked the claim and the number of homeless vets is 195,000.

What’s interesting about this incident is how much it tells us about O’Reilly’s psychology. As I noted (warning: shameless self-referencing ahead) in my review of his book in 2006, O’Reilly’s overarching conceptual framework divides the world into two groups: traditionalists and secular-progressives (S-Ps). O’Reilly loathes S-Ps, who regularly make out with pictures of Stalin or something—I don’t really remember, his definition of them was far too incoherent. But traditionalists, in his words, are “people who believe the United States was well founded and has done enormous good for the world.” In other words, if you want to be in the good club, there’s an element of ritualistic display involved. It’s not enough to love America—you have to regularly proclaim that America Is Good. There’s little wiggle room here; O’Reilly places a bizarre emphasis on outward displays of affection for the U.S (as do many other pundits). Like some sort of peacock with feathers made of American flags, O’Reilly’s M.O. is to publicly exhibit, at all times, his unerring belief that America Is Good.

In other words, he’s a five-year-old. Not because he believes that America is good, but because he’s so unwilling to grant that even good entities do bad things. There’s very little room in his cognitive universe for challenges to the overriding America Is Good thesis, which is exactly what this incident showed.

Sometimes philosophers lay out arguments numerically for the sake of simplicity, putting their premise or premises at the top. For example:

1. Premise: All mammals are warm-blooded.

2. Humans are mammals.

3. Therefore, humans are warm-blooded ([1], [2]).

(Note: No comments about how [1] isn’t always true because blah blah blah. I'm uninterested; it's just an example.)

So finally we have a means of jumping inside O’Reilly’s bloated head. Exciting! I imagine his thought process was something like this

1. Premise: America is a force of good for the world.

2. Premise: Forces of good in the world don’t treat their veterans poorly.

3. This dude says there are 200,000 homeless vets in the country.

4. Therefore, this dude is obviously wrong ([1], [2], [3]).

So you can’t really blame O’Reilly. He’s repeated himself so many times, and made such a habit of getting explosively indignant at anything that whiffs of anti-Americanism, that there simply isn’t room in his brain for a troubling concept like America’s negative treatment of its veterans.