News Munchies
... Just One Sheep
Originally Posted
Updated
Fox News has this one-year-old hit show, "The Five," with Democratic operative and Fox News employee Bob Beckel as one of five -- five, get it? -- co-hosts. The show is like "The McLaughlin Group," without the overbearing John McLaughlin.
Beckel is a short-tempered, quarrelsome (we've heard him called cantankerous, irascible, and worse), pull-no-punches old-time political operative. In his own charming (?) way, he provides knowledgeable background information, political campaign commentary, and sometimes thoughtful and often funny views on the items covered in each of the show's six discussion segments. If the topic isn't related to politics -- more particularly, if the topic is related to pop culture -- Beckel usually doesn't have a clue.
He also doesn't seem to have a functioning self-control chip installed.
This afternoon, in the midst of a discussion about Rep. Paul Ryan's reform plan for Medicare and Obamacare, Eric Bolling, a co-host and former major league baseball player, hit Beckel on the shoulder. It may have been a jock's locker-room love-tap, but Bolling has done this again and again as the season has progressed, and today, it was a bit too hard, a bit too much ... and Beckel had had enough.
"If you do that one more time, you're fu@#ing toast!" snarled an angry Beckel -- who then did an immediate ohmygod embarrassed take and covered his mouth with his hand.
Earlier this year, on "The Sean Hannity Show," also on the Fox News Network, Beckel told Neal Boortz, "You don't know what the fu@# you're talking about," when he thought the Hannity show still was in a commercial break.
On the Hannity show, it took Beckel several seconds and quite a bit of on-air prompting to realize that the show actually was live; today, the recognition was instantaneous.
Beckel apologized almost immediately and twice more during the show, as did Bolling, who took the blame for hitting Beckel too hard and instigating the incident.
Coming out of the show's halftime news break, news anchor Bret Baier joked about rejoining "The Five," "apparently with a seven-second delay."
At least we think it was a joke.