Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

MUSLIM CALLER: There's a lot of anti-Islamic rhetoric on there. For instance, you know,
you compared the Koran to Mein Kampf. . .
O'REILLY: No, I didn't. That's a total lie.
Actually, it wasn't. The caller had been referring to a July 7, 2002, Factor regarding a controversy
at the University of North Carolina. The school had assigned its incoming freshmen a
book entitied, Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations. O'Reilly was outraged:
I don't know what this serves to take a look at our enemy's religion. See? I mean, I
wouldn't give people a book during World War II on the emperor is God in Japan,
would you? ... I wouldn't read the book. And I'll tell you why: I wouldn't have read
Mein Kampf either. If I were going to UNC in 1941, and you, Professor, said, "Read
Mein Kampf," I would have said, "Hey, Professor, with all due respect, shove it. I
ain't reading it."
The Muslim caller tried in vain to explain his question. "Can I just finish, sir? Can I finish my
question?"
"Whoa! Hold it. Hold it." O'Reilly interrupted. "No, you can't finish. Because once
you lie, you're out of the box. That's the No Spin Zone. Get it? You can't say on national
television, even if it is C-SPAN, `You compared the Koran to Mein Kampf! That's a lie, all
right? So you're out of the box."
As distinct from Ann Coulter, whose lies are painstakingly crafted to serve her radical
political agenda, Bill seems to lie for two reasons. One, to polish his own apple (Peabodys).
And two, to attack anyone who's critical of him (Koran). Often, the two are related.
Take, for example, my favorite moment at the BookExpo luncheon. I questioned him
about a claim he had made three minutes earlier about having "started out with nothing." See,
O'Reilly always likes to crow about his hardscrabble childhood in working-class Levittown;
Long Island. As he once told the New York Observer, "You don't come from any lower than I
came from on an economic scale."
Trouble is, an inside source (O'Reilly's mother) tells a different story. Mrs. O'Reilly
proudly told the Washington Post that the family regularly took vacations in Florida, and that
little Billy attended private school, a private college, and that their home was in the affluent
suburb of Westbury, not blue-collar Levittown.