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

So I asked Bill where he grew up. Was it Westbury or Levittown? Seemingly a hard
question to spin. Backed into a corner, he replied with a crazy lie, saying that he had grown
up "in the Westbury section of Levittown."
There is no Westbury section of Levittown. They are two separate villages several
miles apart. It was like saying he had grown up in Brooklyn—the Manhattan section of
Brooklyn.
O'Reilly's innumerable lies and distortions all feed a Big Lie: that he is a no-nonsense,
bare-knuckled, working-class straight shooter who sticks it to the phonies and sticks up for
the little guy. I ain't buyin' it.
In reality, O'Reilly is as phony as his Peabodys. Under the guise of his angry everyman
persona, he uses a shopworn inventory of boorish tactics-bluster, bullying, and belittling-in
order to advance a thinly disguised conservative agenda. It's not that O'Reilly is a Republican
hack like Sean Hannity, whom we will meet in the next chapter. His position on issues
is not doctrinaire movement conservative, and every once in a while I find myself in
agreement with him, like when he says the government should stay out of the bedroom or
when I'm drunk.
But his constant protest that he is an impartial observer and not an ideological conservative
is just another lie. And it's another lie that he's had to lie about.
From the 1996 launch of The O'Reilly Factor, part of Bill's credentials as a nonideologue
was that he was a registered independent. Lie! NPR's Mike Pesca refuted this in his
January 2001 profile of O'Reilly for On the Media, reporting that O'Reilly had been a registered
Republican since 1994.
Calling the story "a hatchet job," O'Reilly claimed, "I've never heard of NPR's Mike
Pesca."
In fact, Pesca had talked to O'Reilly for an hour and used portions of the taped conversation
in the profile.
What about the party registration?
"Their accusation on my voting record is simply a lie," O'Reilly lied. "And I'm not
surprised, since we've done a number of stories on NPR's left-leaning ways." Yes, O'Reilly
admitted, he had been a registered Republican since 1994, but he had not been aware of it. It
seems that there had been an innocent mistake. "When I registered in Nassau to vote in 1994,