WAS THAT REALLY YOU, GERALDO?

by Steve Young

Once he was the man who seemed to be the young Mike Wallace in waiting, heroically stalking the corridors of Staten Island's Willowbrook State School to expose the horrors surrounding the neglectful abuse of mentally retarded patients.

That Emmy-awarded investigator has been pretty much MIA ever-since. Some say he went on to more sordid and highly lucrative missions. Others think it was more a simple case of simple-mind-napping.

Over the past thirty-some years, with the trail growing cold, the missing Geraldo -brain case had long been filed away along with Dennis Miller's, Tammy Bruce's and the other unsolved brain-thefts.

Many were written off to the "after 9/11 I turned to my liberal friends and realized they hated America" outbreak that swept the nation when coincidentally Regenry Publishing needed authors and Roger Ailes was handing out lucrative political Foxpert jobs.

But on Thursday evening, an old (much older) Gerlado sighting was reported on Bill O'Reilly's "The Factor." At first it could be written off as just the same brain-missing Geraldo who in recent years has climbed Brokeback Mountain many times with Bill.

But how appropriate during Passover did the somewhat Jewished Geraldo make this night different from any other night.

Like a pair of aggrieved bears, O'Reilly and Geraldo roared at each other over a recent drunk-driving fatal crash in Virginia. Bill had already turned the tragedy into a political hammer to nail illegal aliens. Geraldo took eye-popping-out umbrage that Bill would take advantage of someone else's misery to make political hay.

Perhaps Geraldo had never watched Bill's show before or actually listened to the words coming out of Bill's mouth when he was a guest.

Still, Bill was at the top (bottom?) of his game:

Geraldo: Don't obscure a tragedy to make a cheap political point!
O'Reilly: If I'm the father...!!
Geraldo: It's a cheap political point -- and you know it!!!
O'Reilly: No it isnt! This is justice!!!!

Ah, no number of exclamation remarks can do this classic lesson for the kids on how serious debate works today. Y'just got to see it to believe it. Turn up the sound LOUD to get the full effect.

If National Lampoon doesn't jump on this one to create the ultimate Fox News Japanese Monster movie (of course they'd have to come to me to greenlight it), then they should close their doors tomorrow. They can call it...I dunno, maybe "Billdzilla vs Mothravera."

Catching himself towards the end, the Willowbrookless Geraldo used the moment to offer Bill and their hi-decibel'd, macho moment as just another example of Fox's fair and balanced style. See kids. Hollerin' over one another and shoving your finger in the face of your balance would never get past the unbalanced purveyors of lies at CBS and NBC.

I don't know if Geraldo's refusal to accept Bill's usual tawdry attempt to spin every news (or near-news) item into his "Independent" dagger to the heart of the evil far left loons -- i.e. every Democrat left of Zell Miller -- was a call for help by what's left of the old Rivera's brain.

But I would hope that he would soon sit alone and watch this past Thursday's Factor tape and listen closely to what he heard from Bill and realize that this was far from the first time the no spinster has obscured a tragedy to make a cheap political point.

This might just be the last chance for what's left of the old Geraldo's brain to escape and dig up the Willowbrook Geraldo to once again do the work that actually advances humanity. If not, he might as well order the epitaph on his tombstone (or at least his Wikipedia bio) right now.

"It was always for a cheap political point -- and I knew it!!!"