Bill O'Reilly: Did Whitney Houston Want To 'Destroy' Herself?

To be fair, we could've have expected that he'd mince words.

What Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly has to say below will piss people off. There's just no getting around it. Amid the outpouring of emotion and grief from Whitney Houston's peers and fans both following her unexpected death this past weekend, O'Reilly made some rather . . . "pointed" remarks during his most recent "The O'Reilly Factor."

The 48-year-old Houston was found submerged and unconscious in her Beverly Hills Hilton hotel room bathtub Saturday evening, hours before she was to attend a pre-Grammy Awards party thrown by friend and mentor Clive Davis. After a reported 20 minutes of CPR and attempted resuscitation by paramedics, she was declared dead at the scene.

Though it's reported that no illegal drugs were found at the scene and police confiscated multiple bottles containing prescription pills including Xanax, Houston had struggled for years with admitted drug and alcohol addiction. The night before, she'd been photographed cut, bloodied and looking dazed leaving a nightclub. Houston had previously entered her third stint in rehabilitation in May 2011.

"Nobody takes drugs for that long if they want to stay on the planet," O'Reilly remarked, noting that "everybody knew" that Houston had substance abuse issues. "She follows in the footsteps of Elvis, Janis Joplin, Michael Jackson, and scores of other entertainment figures. The hard truth is that some people will always want to destroy themselves, and there's nothing society can do about it."

O'Reilly did conclude his thought by acknowledging Houston's death as a legitimate tragedy and saying that he said a prayer for her and her family.

I'd express outrage, but really . . . why? It's Bill O'Reilly. The people who tune in to him know what to expect. There's some numbness to it going on there by now. Fox News knows their audience, and their audience identifies with him and the fact that there's really no filter upstairs of which to speak.