On Friday night Bill O\u2019Reilly had George Will on his program. The purpose was to \u201cdiscuss\u201d O\u2019Reilly\u2019s new book, Killing Reagan, and a column Will wrote criticizing it. In the column, Will took apart O\u2019Reilly\u2019s thesis that, as a result of the 1981 assassination attempt on him, Ronald Reagan suffered from developing dementia during the rest of his presidency. He concluded that Killing Reagan was a \u201cfact free zone.\u201d<\/p>\n
You have probably heard that the Fox News host came unhinged on air, ranting that Will, one of America\u2019s most respected and even revered columnists, was a \u201chack.\u201d It was a shocking performance, but in keeping with a trend regular viewers \u2013 myself included \u2013 have seen developing for months. O\u2019Reilly once ran a debate program. In the past year, he has transformed it into a harangue program, with guests serving primarily as props for whatever topic O\u2019Reilly wanted to declaim on. On Friday night, he tried to make it a bully program, except the bespectacled gentleman he intended to pummel knocked him out of the ring without breaking a sweat.<\/span><\/p>\n I won\u2019t go through every part of the Will critique to which O\u2019Reilly took such bellowing exception. Powerline\u2019s Scott Johnson has done a good job of that, as have Commentary\u2019s Peter Wehner and a number of others. A quick Google search will pull up the list.<\/p>\n But here is one example. It turns out that O\u2019Reilly and his co-author never visited the Reagan Library to check documents they cited and never interviewed or even sought interviews with Reagan\u2019s closest aids. The aides \u201chad skin in the game,\u201d O\u2019Reilly shouted on the program. To which Will coolly replied, \u201cThey had knowledge of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n But the fact is that it is hard to find any president for whom anyone involved in the life of the nation does not have skin in the game. We talk about how divided the country is today, but most of those division go back in one form or another to the late 19th century and even to the American founding. Presidents achieve the top office by taking positions on those issues. And, as most of most of us have our own views on the same questions, we retain a stake in those men long after they have passed from the scene.<\/p>\n To me the question is, how can it be that O\u2019Reilly has morphed from the spirited debater of the past to the knuckle dragger that showed up on Friday night?<\/p>\n Part of it may be his age. He doesn\u2019t seem as sharp as he once did. He may fear he\u2019s losing his edge, unable to prevail if he actually engages.<\/p>\n Perhaps, too, he fears he is losing his audience. For years he was untouchable at the top of cable\u2019s nightly ratings poll. Then in August Megan Kelly bumped him for the month. He is back in the lead now. But even the a brief loss must have shaken him. On Friday night he acted like an adolescent hiding self-doubt.<\/p>\n And perhaps weakness behind the curtain of confidence is why Mr. O\u2019Reilly seems to find any criticism intolerable. When he reads critical letters on air, his replies can be sharp, even nasty. He comes off as particularly touchy about his books, even though many are on the best-seller list, thanks to his relentless on-air hawking.<\/p>\n But now, judging from George Will\u2019s column and Mr. O\u2019Reilly\u2019s over-the-top response, it is fair to say that Killing Reagan, at least, is in no way a work of history. It is a slapped together entertainment \u2013 reporting on the level of Dan Rather, which is to say fiction dressed up as fact for the circus parade.<\/p>\n Yes, the Friday Night Fight went to George Will by a knockout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Friday night Bill O\u2019Reilly had George Will on his program. The purpose was to \u201cdiscuss\u201d O\u2019Reilly\u2019s new book, Killing Reagan, and a column Will wrote criticizing it. In the column, Will took apart O\u2019Reilly\u2019s thesis that, as a result of the 1981 assassination attempt on him, Ronald Reagan suffered from developing dementia during the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1902,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions\/1902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}