Bill O’Reilly and George Will in ugly shouting match
A few weeks ago Bill O’Reilly released the book “Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency
The book’s perfunctory pieties about Reagan’s greatness are inundated by its flood of regurgitated slanders. This book is nonsensical history and should come with a warning: “Caution — you are about to enter a no-facts zone.”
George Will appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show where they really got into a lengthy battle. O’Reilly accused Will of not calling him as he promised before publishing his scathing op-ed. He then attempted to defend his book.
“You were supposed to call me, and did you not call me,” O’Reilly said. And by writing a provocative column like this, you had an obligation as a journalist to do that. Alright, page 245 in ‘Killing Reagan’ is what your real beef is about. It’s a meeting on March 2, 1987, the meeting was called by Howard Baker, then the new chief of staff for Ronald Reagan. Before the meeting took place, Howard Baker asked his assistant, James Cannon to investigate Ronald Reagan, to investigate him. Are you denying any of that is true?”
“Of course not,” George Will replied. “You say that that memo he wrote is the centerpiece of a book. It’s a memo that you have never seen. It’s a memo that you didn’t even ask to try to see from the Reagan library, until after the book was in print. It’s a memo that the Reagan library doesn’t have, and you should know it doesn’t have, because the author was not a member of the White House staff. … The memo was presented to Howard Baker, Howard Baker took one look at it and said to the man who wrote it ‘This is not the Ronald Reagan that I know,’ and that was the end of influence the memo ever had.”
“You are not telling the truth,” Bill O’Reilly said. “You are actively misleading the American people, you are lying.”
The two conservatives continued arguing. So how did the discussion end?
“That isn’t a lie,” Bill O’Reilly said. “And we can prove it, and you are a hack.”
The reality is that nobody cares about the veracity of O’Reilly’s book. What most people would like is an honest assessment codified of the destruction Reagan’s policies continue to have on the middle-class and the poor.