Good day all. Last night we had the 4th GOP debate. I’m not going to talk about that. Instead, I want to talk about a far more entertaining cage match, George Will verses Bill O’Reilly.
This fight between to of Fox’s biggest personalities started when George Will wrote a review of O’Reilly’s latest book, Killing Reagan. First, let me say that I won’t be reading this book, and I pay very little attention to Bill O’Reilly. I wrote about why I ignore that bloviating blowhard four years ago and I don’t feel the need to revisit that subject. I also generally ignore George Will. I consider him a total Beltway bonehead and totally out of touch with America. He should stick to baseball these days rather than politics.
That said, these two have started going at each other over O’Reilly’s new book. George Will has written several columns on the book and why he considers it to be something that should be sold in the Fiction section rather than the Biography section. O’Reilly took offense over the initial review and had Will come on his Fox show. Once there, O’Reilly went after Will. The only problem for O’Reilly was that Will fired back and let O’Reilly have it with both barrels.
After George Will left, O’Reilly refused to let the subject go. This has started the second round, and George Will, demonstrating that he’s actually a lot smarter than Billy Boy, wrote a column in the Washington Post titled Bill O’Reilly makes a mess of history. (This is the first column of Will’s I’ve read in over 15 years) George lets fly with this opening paragraph:
Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not. So it is not astonishing that he is doubling down on his wager that the truth cannot catch up with him. It has, however, already done so.
Bill O’Reilly, along with his credited ghost writer, Martin Dugard, decided that doubling down on stupid was a terrific idea.
Recently, the Washington Post published two columns attacking our book Killing Reagan. We believe the hostile criticism is both misguided and disingenuous and is motivated by a small group of Reagan loyalists who are vehemently opposed to any objective look at the 40th President.
George Will has remarked that O’Reilly absolutely refused to talk with any of the inner circle.
O’Reilly “reports” that the trauma of the assassination attempt was somehow causally related to the “fact” that Reagan was frequently so mentally incompetent that senior aides contemplated using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office. But neither O’Reilly nor Dugard spoke with any of those aides — not with Ed Meese, Jim Baker, George Shultz or any of the scores of others who could, and would, have demolished O’Reilly’s theory.
O’Reilly and Dugard respond to Will in their column at length, however it doesn’t fix the original issue. The book is not a true historical tome. If it had been, O’Reilly and Dugard would have talked to everyone involved. They didn’t with this excuse from George Will’s column:
O’Reilly now airily dismisses them because they “have skin in the game.” His is an interesting approach to writing history: Never talk to anyone with firsthand knowledge of your subject.
The two columns go back and forth in this vein, and George Will keeps subtly driving Bill O’Reilly’s head into a wall and Bill O’Reilly keeps throwing poo like a spoiled monkey. From what I’ve read elsewhere, O’Reilly has also been using his show to go after Will, apparently to the point of slander. I’ve also heard that O’Reilly is not held in High Regard within the hallowed halls of Fox. Basically, everyone there thinks he’s a complete ass.
There have been a few calls from various blogs, none of them what I would call “liberal” calling for O’Reilly to be removed from the air, either temporarily or permanently. Unless O’Reilly really steps in it, I don’t see that happening. His show is a cash cow for Fox. Unless the ratings start plummeting, they’re going to keep him on. The management might take him aside and quietly rebuke him, “unofficially,” however I can see the walking ego named Bill O’Reilly going on the air and really going nuts.
Bill O’Reilly’s books, much like Bill O’Reilly himself, leave a lot to be desired. O’Reilly has lost the fight with George Will for several reasons, the biggest one being that Bill O’Reilly is an insufferable jerk. Instead of continuing the fight, Bill O’Reilly should refer to Healey’s First Law of Holes: If you find yourself in one, stop digging.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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