Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [28]
So, O’Reilly had lied to cover up his “mistake,” and he had called an honest reporter a liar.
The entire crowd seemed to enjoy all the ironies of the story. With one exception. Bill O’Reilly, sitting three feet to my right, had become so angry he had developed another splotch. As I was telling the story I could see him stewing, gripping his pen with seething fury. My wife, watching on television three thousand miles away, thought that Bill was going to jam the pen through my eyeball and into my brain.
But I was having fun. Not because I enjoy attacking people gratuitously. But because O’Reilly is a bully and he deserved it. Everything I had said was true. On his show, O’Reilly cuts off anyone who disagrees with him. If they stand up for themselves, he shouts them down. But this wasn’t his show.
When I concluded my remarks, O’Reilly went nuts. First, he called me an “idiot,” fulfilling his earlier promise to “elevate the discourse.” Then the King of the No Spin Zone, where spinning is prohibited, started deliberately mischaracterizing what everyone in the room and watching at home had just heard me say. “All he’s got in six and a half years is that I misspoke, that I labeled a Polk Award a Peabody. He writes it in his book, he tries to make me out to be a liar . . .”
Of course, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was what he did once he was confronted with his “misstatement.” He went on the attack and lied. And here he was doing it again. “No, no, no,” I tried to interject.
“Hey, SHUT UP! You had your thirty-five minutes.” (I had spoken for twenty.) “SHUT UP!!!”
Tempers flared. A moment later, O’Reilly was spinning like Ari Fleischer’s dreidel. “This guy accuses me of being a liar, ladies and gentlemen, on national television, because I misspoke and labeled a Peabody a Polk.” Vintage O’Reilly. I had accused him of the ultimate sin. As he had said on a C-SPAN call-in earlier that day, “Once you lie, you’re out of the box. That’s the No Spin Zone.”
He had said it to a Muslim caller who criticized The Factor.
MUSLIM CALLER: There’s a lot of anti-Islamic rhetoric on there. For instance, you know, you compared the Koran to Mein Kampf . . .
O’REILLY: No, I didn’t. That’s a total lie.
Actually, it wasn’t. The caller had been referring to a July 7, 2002, Factor regarding a controversy at the University of North Carolina. The school had assigned its incoming freshmen a book entitled, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. O’Reilly was outraged:
I don’t know what this serves to take a look at our enemy’s religion. See? I mean, I wouldn’t give people a book during World War II on the emperor is God in Japan, would you? . . . I wouldn’t read the book. And I’ll tell you why: I wouldn’t have read Mein Kampf either. If I were going to UNC in 1941, and you, Professor, said, “Read Mein Kampf,” I would have said, “Hey, Professor, with all due respect, shove it. I ain’t reading it.”
The Muslim caller tried in vain to explain his question. “Can I just finish, sir? Can I finish my question?”
“Whoa! Hold it. Hold it.” O’Reilly interrupted. “No, you can’t finish. Because once you lie, you’re out of the box. That’s the No Spin Zone. Get it? You can’t say on national television, even if it is C-SPAN, ‘You compared the Koran to Mein Kampf.’ That’s a lie, all right? So you’re out of the box.”
As distinct from Ann Coulter, whose lies are painstakingly crafted to serve her radical political agenda, Bill seems to lie for two reasons. One, to polish his own apple (Peabodys). And two, to attack anyone who’s critical of him (Koran). Often, the two are related.
Take, for example, my favorite moment at the BookExpo luncheon. I questioned him about a claim he had made three minutes earlier about having “started out with nothing.” See, O’Reilly always likes to crow about his hardscrabble childhood in working-class