In the opening of every show, Bill O’Reilly points his finger at the camera and delivers this warning to his viewers: “Caution, you are entering THE no spin zone.” While it is obvious to sentient beings that O’Reilly’s pretense of being spin-less is preposterous, we should be grateful for the disclaimer advising caution. You can’t be too careful when watching anything on Fox News, and O’Reilly is particularly hazardous.

However, he has recently outdone himself (which is saying something) with comments he made regarding an interview of Bill Ayers on RT, an English-language Russian television broadcaster. In the course of the interview, Ayers said…

“We have to get the United States to participate in the world. The idea that we have been a force for good for the last six decades is nonsense.”

That caused O’Reilly’s head to spin. He began his retort by declaring his desire to slap Ayers. To O’Reilly, if someone expresses their opinion, that is sufficient cause to assault them. Way to honor the First Amendment, Billo. Then he continues with an utterly absurd attack on RT’s reporter, Anastasia Churkina:

“You saw the Russian interviewer nodding off like this. She had no idea. She didn’t even speak English. I mean that’s what she was doing. They assigned a Russian interviewer to interview that pinhead who didn’t even speak English. Because they knew what he was saying was so stupid they didn’t want to hear it. So if you don’t speak English, you don’t know how stupid it is.”

This criticism, aside from being immature, is laughably false. Churkina conducted the entire interview in better English than O’Reilly is able to summon. What’s more, she also speaks French, Italian and Spanish, in addition to her native Russian. I wonder how many languages O’Reilly speaks. He actually asserted that Churkina couldn’t speak English twice, in case his first lie went unnoticed by his indolent audience. If O’Reilly can lie so brazenly about something that is so easily proven to be false, how can anyone take anything he says seriously? The fact that this is all there on the videotape illustrates just how ludicrous O’Reilly’s “no spin” sloganeering is. He clearly has no qualms about deliberately misinforming his viewers with fabrications disguised as commentary. It is also clear that both Ayers and Churkina offer commentary on the media that far exceeds O’Reilly’s dishonest ranting:

Ayers: I think the best place to get the news is The Daily Show, Comedy Central, The Onion. Those places, they’re trustworthy, they’re honest, they strip the mask off the hypocrisy. They do what the media is supposed to do.

Churkina: The mainstream American media: Crusaders of truth, pathological liars, or just scary clowns? […] As Americans begin to wake up to the thought that what their mainstream media says is often detached from reality, the question rises as to whether the US media’s ever-increasing attention-grabbing tactics could cause its credibility to fly out the window.

So now we’ve seen O’Reilly being exposed as less credible than the pinko Ruskies he surely despises. That’s gotta hurt. And as far as O’Reilly is concerned, closing the window now wouldn’t do much good. His credibility has long since flown away. In fact, there have been reports of a flock of credibility heading south from the windows of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, and the rest of the bird brains at Fox. It’s a migration of immense proportions.