Super Bowl Stats Show OIP Derangement Syndrome

In 2011, Bill O’Reilly interviewed President Barack Obama before the Super Bowl. The taped conversation lasted a little more than fourteen minutes. Wonkette counted O’Reilly breaking into the President’s remarks 48 times. Ryan Witt at PoliticalExaminer.com counted 22 interruptions that stopped Obama’s statements.

Witt also numerically documented a clear contrast with how O’Reilly treated President George W. Bush in an earlier interview.

This Sunday, O’Reilly again interviewed President Obama. The sequence was only ten minutes long, or two-thirds of the earlier interview. Dana Millbank of the Washington Post wrote:

Along the way, he interrupted the president 42 times, by my count — although, given the amount O’Reilly spoke, it may be more accurate to say Obama was interrupting him. Sometimes he argued with Obama as though the president were a guest on The O’Reilly Factor. Of the 2,500 words uttered during the interview, O’Reilly spoke nearly 1,000 of them.

It appears the count of O’Reilly’s interruptions (or, as his network’s transcript put it, “overlaps”) per minute had gone up.

After Millbank’s column ran, O’Reilly called him “a weasel,” “lying,” and “beneath contempt.” (Earlier in the same appearance, he declared, “I never attack anyone personally.”) Neither O’Reilly nor his employer has offered any refutation of Millbank’s statistics, however. In fact, O’Reilly had promised network viewers that he would interrupt the President.

This footage shows O’Reilly obviously in the grip of OIP Derangement Syndrome. It also offered yet more evidence of the same mental condition affecting Donald Trump, who criticized President Obama for not wearing a tie on Super Bowl Sunday without having made the same complaint about George W. Bush in 2004 or Bush on Sixty Minutes in 2007.