The Dark Underbelly

If you have four minutes and forty-four seconds to spare, you may want to check out Bill O’Reilly as he pontificates, supposedly, on the degenerative effects of San Francisco values. He opens this segment, entitled the “Unresolved Problem,” with the question, “Where will the new Obama administration take the country?” The video ends with the following illuminating exchange between O’Reilly and his producer, Jesse Watters:

WATTERS: Well, I found in Central Park at night now, at least after Rudy Giuliani, you can go out at night and walk around and feel safe. But in San Francisco, you don't even go near some of these parks at night.

O'REILLY: No, you wouldn't go to the Presidio at night in San Francisco. I wouldn't. So you felt that New York, or you feel that New York is much more under control than San Francisco?

WATTERS: It is. In New York, you know, you have your pockets of bad places. But in San Francisco, it's prevalent throughout a lot of the city.

O'REILLY: So wherever you went, Fisherman's Wharf and all that, you saw these guys?

WATTERS: Almost every single neighborhood has this dark underbelly that seeps into their regular society.

Here are my immediate observations:

1) I’m confident that Jesse Watters would be raped if he strolled through Central Park at night, perhaps even in the late afternoon.

2) I have no idea what this broadcast has to do with San Francisco, Barack Obama, or values—of any kind.

3) Given the deliberately selected cast of caricatured stereotypes depicted in the video, if I was one of “these guys,” to borrow O’Reilly’s code, I’d be very pleased with my decision not to vote Republican.