Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [29]
Trouble is, an inside source (O’Reilly’s mother) tells a different story. Mrs. O’Reilly proudly told the Washington Post that the family regularly took vacations in Florida, and that little Billy attended private school, a private college, and that their home was in the affluent suburb of Westbury, not blue-collar Levittown.
So I asked Bill where he grew up. Was it Westbury or Levittown? Seemingly a hard question to spin. Backed into a corner, he replied with a crazy lie, saying that he had grown up “in the Westbury section of Levittown.”
There is no Westbury section of Levittown. They are two separate villages several miles apart. It was like saying he had grown up in Brooklyn—the Manhattan section of Brooklyn.
O’Reilly’s innumerable lies and distortions all feed a Big Lie: that he is a no-nonsense, bare-knuckled, working-class straight shooter who sticks it to the phonies and sticks up for the little guy. I ain’t buyin’ it.
In reality, O’Reilly is as phony as his Peabodys. Under the guise of his angry everyman persona, he uses a shopworn inventory of boorish tactics—bluster, bullying, and belittling—in order to advance a thinly disguised conservative agenda. It’s not that O’Reilly is a Republican hack like Sean Hannity, whom we will meet in the next chapter. His position on issues is not doctrinaire movement conservative, and every once in a while I find myself in agreement with him, like when he says the government should stay out of the bedroom or when I’m drunk.
But his constant protest that he is an impartial observer and not an ideological conservative is just another lie. And it’s another lie that he’s had to lie about.
From the 1996 launch of The O’Reilly Factor, part of Bill’s credentials as a non-ideologue was that he was a registered independent. Lie! NPR’s Mike Pesca refuted this in his January 2001 profile of O’Reilly for On the Media, reporting that O’Reilly had been a registered Republican since 1994.
Calling the story “a hatchet job,” O’Reilly claimed, “I’ve never heard of NPR’s Mike Pesca.”
In fact, Pesca had talked to O’Reilly for an hour and used portions of the taped conversation in the profile.
What about the party registration?
“Their accusation on my voting record is simply a lie,” O’Reilly lied. “And I’m not surprised, since we’ve done a number of stories on NPR’s left-leaning ways.” Yes, O’Reilly admitted, he had been a registered Republican since 1994, but he had not been aware of it. It seems that there had been an innocent mistake. “When I registered in Nassau to vote in 1994, there was no box for an independent. I left all the boxes empty. Somehow, I was assigned Republican status.”
Take a look. Reproduced below is his 1994 voter registration form from Nassau County. I have blocked out his home address and signature so that no one can steal his manufactured identity.
One thing we do know for sure. Bill O’Reilly is a registered Lie-o-crat.
O’Reilly is a right-wing blowhard of the schoolyard bully variety. He’s not the only one. And he isn’t even the worst of them. So when, on his radio show the Monday following our BookExpo panel, he said that if we had been in the Old West “I would have put a bullet right between his head [sic],” I couldn’t resist a little grin. It was just so Bill.
There’s no shame in screwing up a statistic every now and then. People make mistakes. It’s just that somewhere deep in O’Reilly’s psyche there’s clearly a terror of being proved wrong. When he’s confronted with a mistake, the bully comes out, and he bludgeons his guests with incorrect or just made-up facts and figures.
On the February 5, 2002, Factor, O’Reilly told his guest, National Organization of Women president Kim Gandy, that 58 percent of single-mom homes are on welfare. Actually, only 14 percent of single moms are on welfare. When Gandy challenged him, O’Reilly bloviated, “You can’t say no, Miss Gandy. That’s the stat. You can’t just dismiss it . . . it