Cord Jefferson:Hugo Chavez::Bill O'Reilly:Barack Obama

“And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?"

- Bill O'Reilly, Election Night 2012.

"Throughout it all, glimpses of Chávez's benevolence—gifts of new refrigerators and apartments to poor voters around election time, thanks to the state's oil riches—were generally enough to keep the president's ratings afloat and his head off a coup's chopping block."

- Cord Jefferson, yesterday

O'Reilly's position was, rightly, declared exceptionally ugly, an statement of bigoted condescension that insisted that  Hispanic people, black people, and women couldn't possibly vote for Obama for any reason other than the fact that he was going to "give them stuff." Cord Jefferson is here employing precisely the same logic: the people of Venezuela could not possibly be smart enough to actually believe in the socialist policies of Hugo Chavez, so they must merely have supported Chavez out of bribery. The thinking is identical. Absolutely identical.

Of course, Bill O'Reilly knows who he is. Jefferson believes himself to be some sort of a progressive. But when push comes to shove, he's more than happy to sneer down at the people in Venezuela and insist that he knows better than they do what they want and what is good for them. In the language of Jefferson's milieu, that would be called privilege. I would simply call it bigotry, and in Jefferson's case, bigotry of the most hypocritical kind.