The day Bill O’Reilly got fired was a pretty good day

conservative who was the mightiest oak in the forest of cable news blowhards, was felled by a report in The New York Times three weeks ago that detailed how Fox paid out about $13 million over the years to make multiple accusations of sexual harassment go away. An uproar ensued, and advertisers deserted his top-rated program by the dozens.

Small wonder. The accusations, which O’Reilly denies, read like a manual on how not to behave in a 21st-century workplace. O’Reilly is said to have made unwanted advances, tried to plant an unwanted kiss and backed up his demand for sexual favors by making threats or even taking action to blunt women’s careers. One woman said he called her and described sexual fantasies involving her. She said it sounded as if he was masturbating.

This comes at a bad time for Fox. It’s been less than a year since chairman Roger Ailes left under a similar cloud. But in showing O’Reilly the door, the network makes a strong statement that it has zero tolerance for acts of sexual harassment.

That become public and scare advertisers away.

Otherwise, Fox doesn’t seem to care all that much. What else can we infer when O’Reilly was there for two decades, and Fox repeatedly chose to paper over his alleged misdeeds rather than take action to curb his, ahem, enthusiasm? It’s like people there think it’s still 1968. Indeed, O’Reilly comes across like a guy who just wandered in from one of those old sitcoms where the lecherous boss is always chasing the secretary around the desk.

Back then, no one ever asked the secretary how she felt about it.

Give or take a president or two, we men don’t behave that way anymore. Or at least, we know we’re not supposed to. Last week’s events suggest that some of us have yet to learn.

On the day O’Reilly was fired, Gail in West Palm Beach researched real estate for a potential buyer. Georgina in New Orleans chased down rats in a property she owns. Laura in Hood River, Oregon, prepared for breast cancer surgery. Meanwhile, a man rich and powerful and beyond judgment — or so he surely thought — was finally held to answer for years of allegedly treating women like things. It was belated comeuppance, to be sure, but it was comeuppance just the same. So it went in America on Wednesday, the day Bill O’Reilly got fired. And you know something? It was a pretty good day.

Attempting comprehensive tax reform is like trying to tug many bones from the clamped jaws of many mastiffs. Every provision of the code — now approaching 4 million words — was put there to placate a clamorous faction, or to create a grateful group that will fund its congressional defenders. Still, Washington will take another stab at comprehensiveness, undeterred by the misadventures of comprehensive immigration and health care reforms. Consider just one tax change that should be made and certainly will not be.

The deductibility of mortgage interest payments, by which the government will forgo collecting nearly $1 trillion in the next decade, is treated as a categorical imperative graven on the heart of humanity by the finger of God because it is a pleasure enjoyed primarily by the wealthy. About 75 percent of American earners pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes, and only around 30 percent of taxpayers itemize their deductions. Ike Brannon, of the Cato Institute and Capital