Does Bill O'Reilly have a Brian Williams problem?

I can definitely help on this one.

I once saw Al Franken trying to make an issue over O'Reilly's bio -- and true to form (way more even than the piece in your link), rather than just leaving it at, "He was trying to puff up his man of the people bio" he ended up overstating it way more than O'Reilly has (even though O'Reilly is guilty of gilding the lilly). It's where people who hate him enough to try to endlessly discredit him seem to always go wrong. O'Reilly exaggerates something or bends the truth in a technical way, and then they end up overstating the exaggeration so much that they end up as guilty as he is.

O'Reilly grew up in the same neighborhood I did, but two decades before. He was definitely working class (and definitely not poor). I grew up with a ton of people like him. Irish Catholic (there were a lot of Italian Catholics, too), dad working a good trade, mom staying at home. He would have gone to the same high school I did (he did go to the same elementary school), except his parents did the Catholic school thing for him (I had a ton of friends who headed off to the same Catholic school after elementary school).

It's an area of Long Island where the villages differ subtly, but they overlap. There is Levittown, Hicksville (Where Billy Joel grew up), East Meadow and Westbury. Levittown is the best known of those to people who don't know the area, and O'Reilly has said that that is where he grew up, even though where he grew up is a part of the village of Westbury -- this is what Franken tried to pounce on.

The reason he may not be technically lying is that when his family moved there in the 1950s, these areas were potato fields and were still being laid out. And the exact development that he grew up in was a Levitt community -- even though it is in what is now the village of Westbury. His childhood home was a Levitt home built by William Levitt (those familiar with the area will understand -- they were relatively inexpensive, box homes built by one developer to give affordable housing to ex GIs). It may have even been considered Levittown then. I am not sure.

Most of what is actually called Levittown now, was more working class than where O'Reilly (and I) grew up, but the differences are very small -- and not nearly as much as the people who would like to make this into a huge issue think. There are people around where I grew up who were no better off than the typical family from Levittown, and some families in Levittown better off. A few of my best friends grew up in Levittown (their part of Levittown fed into my high school -- there was huge overlap), and socioeconomically there was no difference between us. We weren't rich and we weren't poor. There were a lot of places not far from where we grew up where people had a lot more money. That is where you saw the differences.

In any case, I am certain I know exactly what is going on with O'Reilly's BS. He is definitely calculating and conniving, but trust me, he's not really creating as much of false biography as people who hate him want it to be.

To people who are familiar with that area, if you say, "Levittown" they automatically think working class, box homes. If you say, "Westbury" there is a good chance they are going to think ridiculously wealthy. That is because there is an area of Westbury (not as close to where I grew up as East Meadow, Hicksville or Levittown) called Old Westbury that has some VERY wealthy people -- huge mansions, old money, etc. And that is what a lot of people automatically think of when they hear Westbury -- not the all-African American, really poor part of Westbury (at least by the time I was growing up) that was right behind the part where O'Reilly and I grew up, or our area which was mostly indistinguishable from East Meadow, Hicksville and Levittown.

I dealt with this a lot when I first got away from there. People would hear, "I grew up in Westbury" and think I grew up wealthy. Because to them Westbury meant mansions (They just didn't know that the areas nearby that are a part of Westbury aren't actually East Meadow of Hicksville or Levittown).

So my best guess, and I'll bet with 95 percent certainty that I am correct, is that O'Reilly wanting to puff up his "man of the people" act does the Levittown thing -- even if he technically grew up in Westbury -- for that reason. He technically didn't grow up in the village of Levittown (at least it wouldn't have been by the time I was growing up). But he grew up in a Levitt home in the same exact kind of community to the developments in Levittown.

To me, he's conniving and calculating. ... just not quite as full of shit as the people who hate him so much want him to be.

 

I'm not rationalizing. He's a conniving blowhard. I was trying to explain why he would have gone to such lengths to say he is from Levittown -- it would seem incomprehensible if you didn't actually grow up there and need to convince people you grew up working class.

He may actually be technically telling the truth, for all I know. I have no idea what that area would have been called in the 1950s when his family would have moved there. But I just looked at the wikipedia page for Levittown, and while it confuses me, it says:

There is what became the village of Levittown (later on). And then there are the developments built by William Levitt, which I guess some people call Levittown and range into Hicksville and Westbury. O'Reilly definitely grew up in one of those -- the "Westbury, NY 11590" mailing address referenced above.

All of these homes were exactly the same. They were built out of a kit.