Bill O’Reilly re-ignited his feud with colleague George Will last night after Will dared to criticize Donald Trump’s deal with Carrier as “socialism.” It just so happens that Will also dared to pan Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Reagan” book last year.
You may recall that Will and O’Reilly verbally duked it out on The O’Reilly Factor in November, 2015, after Will shredded O’Reilly’s book in The Washington Post. Among other things, Will called the book a “no-facts zone” and said it "slanders" Reagan.
Apparently, O’Reilly has been holding a grudge ever since. Or, maybe, O’Reilly was just using his platform to look out for his BFF Trump.
In January, O’Reilly singled out Will as the epitome of what was wrong with the Republican establishment after Will engaged in what O’Reilly called “harsh, personal attacks against” Trump.
Will has since left the Republican Party because of Trump. Apparently, he hasn’t warmed up to The Donald since then, either.
O’Reilly played a clip of Will on Special Report the night before (transcript via FoxNews.com):
WILL: The problem is when you have in the Carrier case, political power used to bring pressure upon a privately held corporation that has fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value and drive them off with political pressure from making economic decisions about economic assets, you are, in effect, at the end of the day, getting the federal government involved in capital allocation. There is a name for that, it’s called socialism.
I don’t see anything personal in that critique. But Dr. Freud O’Reilly somehow “knew” it was driven by “personal animus.”
O’REILLY: Will despises Trump, feels that he is an intellectual inferior and even left the Republican Party because of Trump’s nomination.
Now it is certainly George Will’s right as both an American and a journalist to criticize not only Donald Trump, but any powerful person.
We have no beef with that.
What is troubling, however, is that much of Will’s negative analysis is driven by personal animus.
And it is here that he does his readers and viewers a disservice.
[…]
Memo to George Will: Drop the personal stuff.
Got irony?
Watch it above, from the December 8, 2016 The O’Reilly Factor.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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