Boor war: the latest stage of Bill O'Reilly's self-parody.

• Author: Waldman, Paul
• Position: Culture Warrior - Book review

Culture Warrior By Bill O'Reilly $26, Broadway

For a certain kind of conservative, life lived in anything other than a state of war is hardly worth living. War clarifies things. War divides the world neatly between us and our enemies. War offers a kind of moral cleansing that makes one's own transgressions meaningless in the face of the other side's abominations against all that is right and good. War strips the world of messy, uncomfortable ambiguity.

And nowhere is ambiguity less welcome than in the world of conservative broadcasting, where Bill O'Reilly is king. So while pundit after conservative pundit proclaims that we are in the midst of World Velar III, battling for the survival of civilization itself, this season brings the arrival of Culture Warrior, O'Reilly's latest transposition of his television show (and radio show, and syndicated column) to the pages of a book.

The more important war, O'Reilly tells us, is being fought here at home. "On one side of the battlefield," he writes, "are the armies of the traditionalists like me, people who believe the United States was well founded and has done enormous good for the world. On the other side are the committed forces of the secular-progressive movement (also known as the S-P crew) that want to change America dramatically." His goal "is to expose and defeat people who have the power to do you great harm. My weapons will be facts and superior analysis based on those facts."

Because let's face it, the War on Terror just doesn't cut it. After all, with an all-volunteer army and a president who encourages us to keep shopping in the face of fear, there isn't much the average citizen can do to join the fight against Islamofascism. If you really want to do some righteous smiting, the best place to aim is at your neighbors.

And smite O'Reilly does, lashing out not just at plump targets like George Soros, the ACLU, or the standard collection of Hollywood liberal boogey-men, but at almost anyone who has ever criticized him. Indeed, the book is a tribute to bile; it would have more properly been titled, "God Damn I Hate Liberals." He refers to those he doesn't like as "radical-left guttersnipes," "far-left fanatics," or "vermin."

Nonetheless--in what is just one among many cases of what psychologists call projection--O'Reilly writes, "I mean, what I don't get about Susan Sarandon and her fellow S-P travelers is the constant anger." Yet anger is the fuel that drives virtually every episode of...