Don’t you just love it when proven liar Bill-O shakes his finger at you with a sermon on truth and righteousness? Appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last night, the most prominent fibber on Roger Ailes’s fib-filled Fox News defended Brian Williams, the NBC anchor now coming under fire for a number of past stories that he has told on the air which turned out to be untrue.
“Anybody who is enjoying the destruction of this man, you gotta look at yourself,” said Bill O’Reilly, who has relentlessly tried to destroy the careers of numerous people. “There’s a lot of people saying that they’re really happy his career is going down the drain. That disturbs me.” But perhaps what actually disturbs O’Reilly is the thought that there might be consequences for lying about people and events on the air.
After all, O’Reilly has told too many lies to count.
PolitiFact has listed ten of them here, but an exhaustive accounting would require a very large website, for Bill-O’s entire career has been erected on a foundation of hypocrisy. Take his classic ‘war on Christmas’ trope, a fabrication that he repeats every holiday season in an ever-expanding crusade. Not only does he tell lies, but whenever he is exposed, Bill-O then lies again about having told his lies in the first place — for example, see his recent role in the conservative debacle over nonexistent ‘Muslim no-go zones’ in Europe.
By comparison, Brian Williams is an avatar of truth and virtuous reporting.
Unlike Williams’s lies, which are just self-inflating, O’Reilly’s falsehoods are usually aimed at upholding his own cultural, racial, and economic privileges. He has blamed the #BlackLivesMatter protests on George Soros and unions, upheld bigoted stereotypes about black youths and drugs, denied the depth of American poverty, and accused Senator Elizabeth Warren of hating capitalism. But O’Reilly’s favorite lies are the ones that combine the personal and the political: take his weird obsession with singer Beyoncé, who he blames for unwed black motherhood, or his deranged accusation that Vox.com writer Amanda Taub “may even be a terrorist sympathizer.”
Nevertheless, O’Reilly has a legendary ego, and he’s not above self-inflation. Remember his false claims that his former show Inside Edition had won Peabody Awards? And just like Williams, there seems to be an element of stolen valor in O’Reilly’s CV. On his radio show last week, Bill-O — who attended a school in London and took a Florida teaching job to avoid the draft during Vietnam — claimed combat experience:
I tell you what, I’ve been in combat. I’ve seen it. I’ve been close to it. And if my unit is in danger and I got a captured guy and the guy knows where the enemy is and I’m looking him in the eye, the guy better tell me. That’s all I’m gonna tell you. If it’s life or death, he’s going first.
Leave aside the fact that he’s excusing torture, a form of political violence which produces false intelligence, and claiming some special understanding of military interrogation techniques to do so. This is apparently not the first time that Bill O’Reilly has let people think he has military experience — a long-term pattern at least the equal of Williams’s. No wonder he doesn’t want to set a precedent where TV news liars get punished for that sort of thing.