Scott Brown Does His Best Bill O’Reilly Impression

Former Senator Scott Brown took a turn hosting “The O’Reilly Factor” while Papa Bear Bill O’Reilly took vacation Monday night, and if you closed your eyes and ignored the stronger Boston accent, you might not have noticed a change. Brown, who until quite recently actually worked in Washington, did his best crotchety O’Reilly impression by acting enraged with pretty much everything that goes on there. His opened the ‘Talking Points Memo’ monologue with a laundry list of complaints, most of which you’ve probably heard about from O’Reilly (or one of his viewers):

I find it ridiculous that we are grateful when gas prices come down just a few pennies. We shouldn’t feel lucky to pay $3.63 a gallon for gas. And while we’re talking about April Fools jokes, here’s another one: our energy policy, or lack thereof. It’s also a joke that there’s no effort to address the long lines and other cuts at our airports being brought on by sequester the joke is also on us that there is no effort to reel in our out of control debt…

… And on and on. To these complaints he adds the Senate’s “sham budget,”  the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare in order to conclude that “Every day is April Fools’ Day in Washington.”

When Brown first signed on to act as a Fox News contributor, there was some debate about whether this took him out of the running for another political campaign in the state. It takes two different skill sets to succeed as a talking head and a politician. As a politician, you try to talk to appeal to a broad section of voters. In the latter, you speak to your fairly narrow, ideologically homogenous audience. Brown probably gave O’Reilly viewers exactly what they wanted, but he seems to be eliminating any confusion about where his priorities lie in the medium term.