The other day The Daily Beast featured video from the O'Reilly Factor where one of O'Reilly's lackeys accosts The New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg and demands an apology for what O'Reilly deemed an insult to Newt Gingrich.  Sound like an overheated episode of Desperate Republicans, doesn't it? 

Hertzberg, in his most recent New Yorker piece associated Gingrich's claims on the O'Reilly Factor regarding "gay and secular fascism in this country" with "anti-gay bigotry," but did not, as O'Reilly's lackey claims in the video, call Gingirch "a vicious bigot," the insult for which O'Reilly was demanding an apology from Hertzberg.

What Hertzberg really said was:

Like a polluted swamp, anti-gay bigotry is likely to get thicker and more toxic as it dries up. Viciousness meets viscousness. “Look,” Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, said the other day (on the air, to Bill O’Reilly), “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence. . . . I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact.” For diversity’s sake, he added that “the historic version of Islam” and “the historic version of Judaism” are likewise menaced—which is natural, given that gay, secular, fascist values are “the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.”

Of course, it doesn't matter to O'Reilly or his audience what Hertzberg actually wrote.  All O'Reilly wants is a reaction.  And Hertzberg delivers.  Strolling down the street apparently running his morning errands, he's so taken aback by O'Reilly's ambush, that it takes him awhile to collect himself. 

An incredibly able and eloquent commentator in print, he stutters and stammers, blusters and blows hard when confronted on the street.  He seems not to know what he himself wrote (although he seems to suspect at one point that he might be being misquoted). Peevish and petulant, Hertzberg never has the good sense to simply say, "please have Mr. O'Reilly contact my publicist" and duck into the nearest convenience store or jump into a passing cab.  The result is pure gold for O'Reilly, who proudly ran the segment on his show.

O'Reilly is where he is not because of IQ.  It's his EQ that matters to Fox. He's all about getting a reaction.  And it's surprising how easy it is when you don't mind playing dirty.  I think it's safe to say that Hertzberg is hardly ever I.D.'d on the street, and has never been chased down the sidewalk by a Fox News crew.  Because he refused to appear on O'Reilly's show where he would likely simply have been told to shut up and go home, O'Reilly, who admits to having bodyguards whenever he goes out in public, stalked and struck on Hertzberg's home turf. 

After all that, it's not a major victory for O'Reilly, and no major blow to Hertzberg.  They travel in different circles.  But you could definitely chalk up the encounter as a teachable moment for Hertzberg.  His flailing, sputtering, caught-in-the-headlights moment was rich enough to make the rounds on the internet and end up on the Daily Beast.  (One wonders: could Tina Brown, The Head Beast herself, who also ran the New Yorker for a time, have it out for Hertzberg?) 

What I think makes the video compelling is that it seems to encapsulate the two poles of our politics at a particular point in time.  Increasingly shrill and deluded drama queens on the right hunting down more and more obscure figures on the left and seeking retribution for imagined assaults on American values, and haughty intellectuals on the left demanding apologies for having their ordinarily delightful morning strolls interrupted by the aforementioned right-wing zealots.  The spectacle is in how absolutely out of touch, how enmeshed in their own insular realities both sides can seem.

I've long admired Hertzberg's eloquence and insight even when I've not completely agreed with him, so it was fascinating to see him in the video, sucker-punched and then sucked into the hectoring so obviously designed to get a rise out of him.  Even if he had politely declined, and hailed a cab instead, he would have come off as haughty, or hiding something, and O'Reilly would have gotten his footage.  But at least Hertzberg would have admirable extricated himself in the eyes of his fans without looking like he'd been punk'd.

Still, it was a little like watching a guerilla cream pie squad attack.  Whatever your sympathies with the speaker who gets a pie in the face in front of the cameras it's fascinating to see them react.  I don't think it's fair play, although in some cases — Anita Bryant and Ann Coulter, who dodged hers but whose reaction is still priceless, come immediately to mind — it seems well-enough deserved.    Something is always revealed in the chaos that ensues.  Bill O'Reilly is basically a one-man, high-tech, far-right pie squad.

Note to Hertzberg:  when someone pies you, it doesn't really do any good to argue with them.  A bon mot and be on your way.  If Anita Bryant had stopped at "at least it was a fruit pie" she would have walked away with some degree of dignity.  But what was revealed in the fervent prayer she offered for the pie squad after the assualt was not only the ridiculousness of praying for the soul of someone who's just pied you, but the victory of vanity over the pretense of virtue in her tearful breakdown.  Nothing exposes a fake like a moment of truth.

I'd love to see O'Reilly pied.  But he's barracaded himself in his undisclosed location with his ever-lasting lufa supply.  Steven Colbert, who paraodies O'Reilly on a daily basis on the Colbert Report comes as close as you can get to it.  His brilliance lies in laughing in the face of the laughable likes of O'Reilly.  Once you take someone like O'Reilly serious, even for a moment, you're lost.  His continued existence raises the question: what if he threw a culture war and no one came?