O’Reilly On Obama Administration: “We Want Them To Not Like Us”

Fox News star Bill O’Reilly showed up in costume as Count Dracula on a special Halloween episode of ‘The View‘ this morning to promote his book ‘A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity,’ but he showed a vampire’s talent for finding the jugular by addressing the ongoing controversy between Fox News and the Obama administration, most notably the recent comments from the White House claiming that Fox News operates as an “arm of the GOP.”

“I sent Barack Obama a fruit basket for that comment because our ratings were up 20% since he made it,” O’Reilly said. “It’s great. We want him to not like us.”

O’Reilly challenged the President’s criticisms of the network, saying “I don’t know what he’s trying to accomplish. He’s fighting us harder than the Taliban. If he has a beef with us, then he should come on the show and tell us what the beef is.”

Conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who was dressed in an oversized cereal box as “Countess Chocula,” asked O’Reilly if he found it scary that the White House would boycott Fox News.

“There’s no boycott,” O’Reilly asserted. “There’s two commentators on Fox that really don’t like Barack Obama: Glenn Beck and Shawn Hannity, but the rest of us - Greta, Shepherd Smith, Bret Baier - we’re willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.”

O’Reilly confessed to finding the whole controversy a bit silly. “It’s so dumb to do this,” he said. “All you have to do is send your guys in, send them on The Factor, and lets have a conversation about it.”

When talk turned to ailing cable news network CNN, O’Reilly had a simple response for what’s gone wrong: “the reason CNN’s numbers are going down is the pizazz factor. They don’t have any pizazz,” he claimed.

“There was a great moment last night on CNN. Nobody saw it unfortunately because nobody watches CNN,” he quipped. “Campbell Brown asked senior advisor Valerie Jarett ‘Whats your beef against Fox? Don’t you have a beef about MSNBC? And Jarett went ‘uhhhh.’ It was brilliant. These people have to cover the other side as well,” he said.

“Maybe both sides need to grow up and get to the business of running the bloody country,” Whoopi Goldberg retorted to cheers from the audience.

O’Reilly’s response? Addressing Barbara Walters he joked of Goldberg “she’s much better than the person you had on before her,” referencing former ‘View’ co-host Rosie O’Donnell, who is an outspoken critic of O’Reilly and Fox News.

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