Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [32]
I think Bill O’Reilly unquestionably has talent. And not just a talent for lying. And I’ll admit I sometimes find his program entertaining, especially when he runs circles around a particularly inept guest, like a man with a lazy eye and a speech impediment who’s come on The Factor to demand rights for child molesters. That can be good sport.
But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth the emotional capital necessary to try to change Bill O’Reilly.
I believe it is. I dare to hope that Bill O’Reilly can be saved. From himself. Because, frankly, I don’t think Bill O’Reilly likes Bill O’Reilly. Although he clearly has no love for me, I want him to know that I love him, and that when this book comes out, I would be delighted to reach out to Bill O’Reilly by coming on his program and giving him a chance to apologize for his lies and his lies about lies. I know it would be cathartic.
When the last lie had been apologized for, the world would see a new Bill O’Reilly: fair, open-minded, genuinely impartial. Perhaps this new Bill O’Reilly’s TV program would not be as successful as his old one. But the important thing is that if he doesn’t calm the raging storm inside, the man may well be headed for a crack-up.
Oh, one last thing. About the splotchy photo. I’d been planning to have it desplotched by the top guy in the field. But three days after our BEA encounter, Bill’s publisher and agent called my publisher and said that he was threatening to sue if I didn’t take his picture off the cover.
Good move.
So there you are, Bill, in all your splotchy glory.
What was it, anyway? Sun poisoning? A touch of the Irish flu? An allergic reaction to some shellfish you’d eaten at a Heritage Foundation event? Not that I’d believe you if you told me.
14
Hannity and Colmes
As we said before, there’s no better examplar of the Fox News Channel’s credo than its leading left/right debate show, Hannity and Colmes. According to Rush Limbaugh, “Hannity’s vigor and clarity inspires.” As hard as TeamFranken tried, they couldn’t find a similarly glowing quote from anyone about Colmes, but I told them to keep looking and hopefully have one for the paperback edition.
To give you some idea of the show’s fair balance, I picked a representative episode: the broadcast immediately following President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. The point-counterpoint pretty much broke down like this:
“This is a big vision. This is a bold agenda!”
vs.
“President Bush did a magnificent job!”
Quick. Which one of the critical sentiments was expressed by the liberal? If you guessed “magnificent job,” you’re a winner. And you know what’s also a winner? Fair and balanced news coverage.
The show’s first guest that day, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, was struck with how, like Churchill, Bush seemed imbued with a special destiny. Hannity gushed:
HANNITY: There were two lines that we just played that I really loved in the speech. That “we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, other presidents, other generations. We’ll focus on them with clarity and courage.”
NOONAN: We will do it now. We won’t pass off to anyone else. We’ll do it now. I think “do it now” was a strong kind of sub-theme in the whole speech. I got to tell you this was a big and powerful and important speech.
Lost in all the talk about not passing problems off to future generations was that Bush was passing off to future generations a projected ten-year deficit of $1.8 trillion dollars on top of the existing $6.4 trillion national debt. (Since then, the projected ten-year deficit has risen to $4 trillion.) That might have been something for Colmes, representing the liberal side, to comment on. Instead, he asked Peggy if there were any great lines in the speech that might live on in the public memory. Thanks for manning the barricades, Alan.
Colmes