Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wanted to chime in on the whole Bill O’Reilly sexual harassment issue brought up by the Smallholder.

Your Maximum Leader agrees that the alleged behaviour of Mr. O’Reilly is repulsive. Your Maximum Leader further hopes that Mrs. O’Reilly chooses to leave Bill and get some lawyers to suck him dry.

That said… Your Maximum Leader feels he would have to point out that were Fox News to fire O’Reilly they (Fox) would be in the wrong and potentialy on the line for a big payout to O’Reilly. Why? Well, first off, Ms. Mackris never complained formally to Fox about the alleged behaviour. She went straight to the courts. So, Fox presumably hasn’t investigated any claim on their own, because none was ever made.

Next off, thanks to the settlement no one has done anything wrong. So how could Fox fire O’Reilly when both O’Reilly and Mackris are saying no one did anything wrong. A payment to one party from another is not legally admission of anything. And can’t be used as such. So, your Maximum Leader doesn’t think Fox is on the hook to do anything.

Your Maximum Leader will also quibble a little with Smallholder’s characterization of O’Reilly as a conservative. Your Maximum Leader has watched O’Reilly’s show enough to know that O’Reilly is not a liberal or conservative per se. Bill O’Reilly is a bully bomb-thrower. (And your Maximum Leader is not using “bully” like Theodore Roosevelt would.) O’Reilly is a self-promoter who doesn’t care who’s Wheaties he pees in to get attention. He has gone after just as many liberals as conservatives. He claims to be out to expose wrong-doing and lying. Which he does most of the time. But he is just after the big story in many cases and isn’t really easily identified with one or the other side in a political argument.

Now, there is the point of what hasn’t been said in this non-case. Ms. Mackris may have had tapes of O’Reilly saying things that could have gotten him in more trouble than he wound up getting in; but wedon’t know anything about the circumstances leading up to the tapes being made.

Who is to say that Ms. Mackris wasn’t a willing participant in some dallience at first. And then changed her mind and decided to get some money? Who is to say that she didn’t want O’Reilly to massage her large breasts in a shower at one point; but later feel wronged in some way and want revenge?

We’ll never know because both Ms. Mackris and Bill O’Reilly have signed a legally binding agreement. In that agreement they will both agree that no one did anything wrong and that both parties will keep their mouths shut about whatever wrong didn’t occur.

So it is an open question what did or didn’t happen. As is so often the case in a sexual harassment lawsuit. And ultimately that is why O’Reilly’s ratings will not suffer. No one will really know and both sides can honestly spin it however they want (within the confines of their agreement saying no one did anything wrong).

Carry on.