Fox host Bill O’Reilly can’t stop talking about last week’s Mother Jones article calling his purported Falklands “war zone experience” bogus. Mother Jones concluded O’Reilly, a young CBS correspondent at the time, was stuck in Argentina with the rest of the CBS crew, instead of being in the Falklands as he later claimed in his books and on air.
O’Reilly has responded to the expose with name-calling and angry rhetoric, but no factual rebuttal of MJ writer David Corn’s analysis of O’Reilly’s whereabouts and activities during the Falklands conflict.
Public figures like O’Reilly get a lot of flak, much of it preposterous, and typically ignore it. (How do you argue with a fact-deficient nutjob?) But Corn is no whackjob, he’s a seasoned journalist, and Mother Jones isn’t Mad Magazine, it’s a serious muckraking publication. O’Reilly has decided they can’t be ignored.
That’s because Corn’s article in MJ doesn’t fall apart; it holds up. It hasn’t been refuted; witnesses confirm it. It can’t be ignored because it has substance. And O’Reilly isn’t ignoring it; he’s acting like a dog trying to shake a cat off its back, which tells you he feels the cat’s claws digging in.* Corn and MJ have him dead to rights.
Now, when is Fox going to fire him?
(* I owned a cat like that once. All the dogs in our neighborhood were terrified of him. Once he got on a dog’s back, there wasn’t a damn thing the dog could do to get him off. Dogs quickly learned to give him a wide berth. Once, I saw him chase a German Shepherd down the street. The cat eventually got sick and died; no dog could kill him.)
Video: Don’t mess with the cat!