Thursday, May 26, 2005

How to lie like Bill O'Reilly, if you must.


It's always fun to see what shenanigans BIll O'Falafel has been up to lately and Media Matters has a clip of typical Bill here, with guest Col. David Hunt lying about how long it took before the military knew the real facts behind Pat Tillman's death. It's not Hunt's lying that's interesting, it's what O'Falafel does with it (all emphasis added):

BILL O'REILLY (host): All right, so let me get this straight. The Ranger unit itself engineered the cover-up. Is that what you're saying?

HUNT: Absolutely right.

O'REILLY: When did the Army brass learn the truth?

HUNT: About a month or so afterwards. The Rangers are a storied unit. This is --

O'REILLY: OK, wait, wait, wait, but let's walk through this.

HUNT: Yes, OK.

O'REILLY: So about a month or two after it happened, the Army learned the truth.

HUNT: About a month.

And, sure, you can see exactly what's happening. Hunt describes the delay as "about a month or so", which Bill casually transmogrifies into "about a month or two", a larger value being more beneficial for his claim, of course.

Note, though, how Hunt immediately corrects the record. Hmmm ... why would that be? I'll just speculate that Hunt figured he had enough wiggle room to get away with "a month or so" but no more than that, and that he knew that O'Reilly would start attributing to him (Hunt) the figure of "a month or two", and possibly even embellishing on that, perhaps like:

O'REILLY: So there you have it. My previous guest, Col. David Hunt, describing how it was at least a month or two before the facts about Pat Tillman's death were discovered.

And I'm thinking Hunt didn't want to get dragged into O'Reilly's lies so he made sure he had deniability on the record if it came to that. Poor Bill. Even his own guests have to keep their distance from his lies.

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