A Darkness, Revealed.

If you do one thing and do it well enough, eventually people stop asking questions.

This is no secret to any eight year old who’s been bullied by the same kid more than twice. There is no point in asking why; it serves no purpose. It will not edify you and will likely earn you another meaty punch to the head.

Eventually, people stop asking questions.

Like all of you, I have a few stupid people in my life. Some are friends, but most are circumstantial and accidental beings who have fallen into my life through the carelessness of others. Now that I think of it, had I not allowed someone I knew in high school to talk me into going to a specific party, I’d never even have met three of them. If I refused to speak to my in-laws the number would also drop like a stone, but that’s neither here nor there.

It must be noted that dumb guys are generally all right people. In some respects, a good group of dumb guys is even preferable to a group of your peers. Your peers will question you incessantly as they try to whip out their own intellectual credentials. You’ll all twist and thrust to sound like Chris Hitchens or Noam Chomsky and come off like the Alpha Brain.

On the other hand, dumb guys will be genuinely appreciative when you explain the way that lasers work, or that socialism doesn’t. Years later, a dumb guy will thank you for telling him not only that Jupiter has rings, but also for explaining why those rings do not fall inward and kill the Jovian Blimp People.

But as will so often happen in Star Wars, The Matrix or those really bad Tolkien rip-offs by Robert Jordan, there will be a Chosen One who will rise up from amongst the Dumb Guys.

Obviously, I’m making reference to Bill O’Reily.

I could unoriginally recount that O’Reilly is a megalomaniacal fraud who is disingenuous, paranoid, volatile, menacing, threatening, insecure and ridiculously wealthy. But I won’t do this since there’s a far greater issue here that needs to be uncovered. It needs to be made known that Bill O’Reily is the first comic book super villain to cross over into our world.

Up until quite recently, I was content to pigeon-hole Mr. O’Reily as described in the paragraph above and think no more of him. I saw him on David Letterman’s show where he was sadly one-upped by a largely indifferent comedian for ranting like a loon about the war on Christmas. I was lulled by O’Reily and his Dumb Guy manifesto.

We were, all of us, deceived.

Here’s my proof;

1. Big Head – True both in metaphor and in actual volume, O’Reily has a huge, almost monstrous head. This has been the idiom of villains from the original Braniac all the way forward to the newer version of Braniac. He also wears a lot of makeup, far more than you would need to if you weren’t disguising your freaky alien melon as the braincase of a human.

2. Secret Lair – In addition to keeping his private residence a secret of the highest order, O’Reily also has nearly military security around the studios for both his radio and television platforms. It’s rumored that Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo were both beaten senseless by these goons, but I’m actually with Bill on that one. The only thing worse than an actual O’Reily is someone jealous of him.

3. Nemesis/Love interest – Apparently, after doing battle, O’Reily and Katrina Vanden Heuvel have really hot grudge sex.

4. Charisma – He’s better than everyone else. Bill is a natural leader. You suck.

5. Henchmen – In a recent spat with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (motto: “Yes, we’re still on…”), O’Reily claimed to be able to command the forces of FOX security to go and mete out punishment to those who dared to even mention Olbermann’s name. If none of the other points I’ve outlined here convince you (and lord knows they shouldn’t) then this one is still impossible to ignore. This is really only one step away from having chairs at the conference table that dump underlings into a pool of electric eels for speaking out of turn.

O’Reily has the power to have you whacked by the unitard-clad legions of FOX Security for merely mentioning the name of an adversary. In regards to one such caller – a man named Mike – Bill openly had the guy murdered.

“Mike,” Bill said “is a done guy.”

Chilling stuff.

But since this is ultimately a Dumb Guy, we underestimated Bill and stopped asking questions. Even now that he’s sending out minions a la Goldfinger, we just sit back and joke around. He killed poor Mike and we did nothing.

If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and warm up the Bat Signal.