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3Hillary Clinton, Living History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

1In an elementary school playground during a Minnesota winter.

2 Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close to Call: The Thirty-six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election. New York: Random House, 2001, p. 69: “You have to bring this election in for a landing.” (Other dialogue is pure conjecture.)

3Ibid., p. 68.

4Ibid., p. 72.

5Ibid., p. 72.

6Bill O’Reilly, Those Who Trespass, p. 153.

7Toobin, p. 69.

1The quotes are real. The Times’s mass wedding is unconfirmed.

1I hate to break this to Paul, but I doubt my publisher will be building the promotional campaign for the book around the Franken-Gigot incident.

2Not “violent crime,” but “crime.” Since roughly 43 million crimes were committed in 1993, this means that, using their logic, assault weapons were used in up to forty-three thousand crimes that year. Even assuming that in, say, half of those forty thousand crimes, the assault weapon was merely brandished and not fired, that’s still a lot of scary shit going down. (Their logic is wrong—assault weapons were used in less than 1 percent of gun crimes.)

3Senator Clinton met with victims’ family members on eleven separate occasions between September 11 and when O’Reilly made this claim on November 15. On September 15, Senator Clinton attended and spoke at the funeral service for Fire Chaplain Mychal Judge, whom she had known. On October 6, she spoke at the funeral of a friend in Boston who had been on one of the planes that had struck the WTC. Senator Clinton said she didn’t attend other funerals because she didn’t want to inject herself into someone else’s private grief or to cause a distraction. Which is what she was accused of doing at the Madison Square Garden event.

1In his acceptance speech at the 1852 Free Soil convention in Pittsburgh, presidential candidate John P. Hale grossly overstated the incidence of flogging in the United States Navy. His running mate, George W. Julian, falsely charged that Whig standard-bearer Winfield “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott had personally flogged dozens of soldiers under his command during the Mexican War. This was particularly insidious given Scott’s commitment to professionalizing the military.

1Okay. I made up the whole Morris Temple story. Everything else here is true.

1All names have been changed to protect me.

1The only time I’ve ever been assaulted was at the Christian Coalition’s “Road to Victory” celebration in D.C. in 1996. I’ll explain. When Ralph Reed introduced William Bennett, Reed assailed then Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for “advocating the legalization of drugs,” something she had most certainly not done. At a National Press Club luncheon, in response to a question about whether the legalization of drugs might reduce violence, Elders responded that it should be studied. I’d seen Reed do this a number of times when introducing Bennett, because at one time Bennett had been drug czar. Bennett got up to the podium and said about Bill Clinton, “We don’t have a president who understands what truth is.” After Bennett spoke, I approached him and said, “Bill, I’ve seen Ralph Reed introduce you several times, and he always says ‘Joycelyn Elders advocated the legalization of drugs.’ And you’ve never corrected him. Why do you hold Ralph Reed to such a low standard?” Bennett literally harrumphed for a few seconds, and then a large Christian shoved me as hard as he could. Let me just say, however, that most of the Christians at these events are extremely nice. And let me also say that Bill O’Reilly repeats this lie about Joycelyn Elders on page 21 of the paperback edition of The No Spin Zone: “She advocates the legalization of hard drugs as way to ‘reduce the crime rate.’ ”

2The incident Bush was referring to is a funny one. In an early Republican presidential debate, Bush was asked what book he was reading. A biography of Dean Acheson (Truman’s secretary of State), he answered. Twelve days later, in the next debate, moderator Judy Woodruff asked him