Bill O'Reilly has done it again.

Why doesn't the world understand him? He's just a simple, understated fellow who wants to be heard by more people watching evening TV talkers. Oh, and btw, he has a new book called "Pinheads and Patriots."

So there he was on Wednesday's "The View" chatting with Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg and the misnamed Joy Behar. And this being New York City and daytime television and not a Charlie Rose interview, producers wanted some heat.

So, naturally, the conversation got around to 9/11 and the plans to build yet another Manhattan mosque in the neighborhood of the demolished World Trade Center towers. O'Reilly suggested that was "inappropriate," not because a neighborhood of bars and strip joints is a strange place to want to build a new place of worship in the name of cultural understanding. Although someone might ask that question someday.

He thinks it's inappropriate because the 9/11 site is where nearly 3,000 people were killed in homicidal plane crashes. Whoops noted 70 Muslims were also killed in the attacks, demanded to know the religion of domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh and disputed the word "inappropriate."

"Seventy percent of Americans," O'Reilly asserted, "don't want that mosque down there. So don't give me the 'we' business." (Audience applause)

Pressed on why building a mosque near the 9/11 attack site was inappropriate, O'Reilly leaned toward Goldberg and said, "Muslims killed us on 9/11."

"This is such barnyard excrement!" Goldberg said. Except she actually used an eight-letter word for male bovine droppings.

And she and Behar walked off.

Later, after Walters criticized their action during a live show and O'Reilly stated he wasn't denouncing all Muslims, they both returned. Thank goodness.

It's a similar strategy to that used by the Obama White House in 2009 to help Fox News become the most-viewed cable outlet, openly criticizing it by name and driving more curious viewers to check it out.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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