Bill O'Reilly Finally Proved That Obama Has 'Secret Muslim Ties'

For a while there, it seemed like Bill O'Reilly was among the last prominent conservatives refusing to climb aboard the U.S.S. Batshit. Granted, he had been holed up on the gangplank for years as everyone else streamed on by him. But he was not yet out to sea. For one thing, he rejected some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories about President Obama, like birtherism, and even took a swipe at old pal and frequent Knicks game companion Donald Trump on the issue.

But that changed last night. You see, it's not merely enough to say President Obama's ISIS strategy is not working. The narrative must also include that President Obama is actively refusing to do anything to confront terrorist threats. The more advanced way to do that is to imply he won't—or can't—fight his friends in the Muslim community.

The starting point for this is always that the president does not use the magic refrain ("radical Islamic terror!") when discussing the issue. "The president of the United States does not define the terror issue clearly," O'Reilly told us, before launching into that familiar spiel. But then he set off on a grand journey, an Odyssey of questionable sourcing and suggestive pictures.

"Barack Obama's father, who abandoned his family, was a Muslim who eventually turned atheist," O'Reilly explained. "Then his mother married another Muslim, moving Barry to Indonesia where he was exposed to the Islamic world, even though he did attend a Catholic school in the first grade."

So, Obama spent four years in a Muslim country, but still got his Catholicism on. But wait—he also went to a wedding! Explaining the details are "very difficult to verify at this point," O'Reilly explains he "believes" that Obama attended his Islamic half-brother's wedding in Maryland in the early-'90s and may or may not have been the best man. Then he showed the photos.

How, he seems to ask, could any man have the heart to order a drone strike on an Islamic terrorist when he once went to an Islamic wedding and wore an Islamic hat? "What we can tell you with certainty," the Fox host said gravely, "is that Barack Obama has deep emotional ties to Islam."

So, to recap, O'Reilly explicitly said that he doesn't know if all these details are true, but he is certain they prove something else is true.

Really, though, all this is besides the point. Even if Obama is a secret Muslim sympathizer who can't accept ISIS militants are Islamic terrorists, and that's why he won't say the "magic" words that would get rid of them, there is little doubt that he is "engaging" the problem of ISIS. He dropped more than 23,000 bombs on majority-Muslim countries last year and has launched 473 drone strikes against terrorist leaders since 2009 (with, it should be noted, severe collateral damage).

Ultimately, this boils down to the same tired stuff about the president's vocabulary, the go-to for critics unwilling or unable to offer an actual alternative to his terrorism strategy. (Bill once had an interesting one: hire mercenaries. Perhaps he thought better of introducing another plan this time.) But it is startling to see O'Reilly dabble in this kind of InfoWars theorizing based on evidence that's "difficult to verify." The end result is easy to predict: Anyone tuning into The O'Reilly Factor will have been transfixed on that image of Obama as the ultimate Other, something they've felt in their bones from the minute he looked like beating John McCain.

Maybe the lesson here is to think twice about that friend's wedding invitation you just got in the mail. That toaster you planned on getting them might expose your deep, emotional ties.