Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly is the conservative pundit liberals love to hate, and he gets a thrashing in this book-length ""intervention"" that, in debunking many claims O'Reilly has made on his television and radio shows, relies on the same dubious rhetorical weapons O'Reilly is despised for wielding: mudslinging, name calling and character assassination. Amann and Breuer, who launched sweetjesusihatebilloreilly.com in 2004, are more often clumsy (""... the light of reason is violently bent to the black-hole-dense whims of O'Reilly's rage"") or witless (""Bill O'Reilly is really quite dumb"") than they are biting. The surfeit of venom distracts from the list of distortions and inaccuracies they expose: O'Reilly calls the pope senile and later denies it; he misrepresents the 9/11 Commission's final report; he cites a nonexistent publication to show the economic devastation his pet boycott has wreaked on France. While the authors condemn O'Reilly for putting the facts in a spin cycle, their humor does little to raise debate from the abysmal level at which they accuse O'Reilly of operating.