From Publishers Weekly
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.
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From Booklist
The title says it all. There's definitely no love lost between O'Reilly, host of the FOX Channel's
The O'Reilly Factor, and Amann and Breuer, founders of a Web site for which this book was named. Fashioned as an intervention to prevent O'Reilly from being any more outraged and outrageous than he already is, Amann and Breuer explore the myriad ways that O'Reilly attacks liberals but denies his conservatism, and disregards civil liberties and the simple truth. O'Reilly's claim of "no-spin" objectivity is the primary target, as the authors cite numerous excerpts from transcripts of O'Reilly's show to demonstrate his constant spin, contradiction, and misstatement. "The problem with simply calling Bill a liar is that one has to be aware of one's lies for them to really be considered lies. We're not sure Bill qualifies." The charity ends there as the authors take O'Reilly to task for his sexual appetite (he settled a lawsuit by an associate producer who charged him with sexual harassment), his egomania (he makes constant references to his earnings, his ratings, his book sales versus those of his favorite targets, Al Franken and Hillary Clinton), and his outrageous statements (the nation's poor should take a lesson from Hurricane Katrina and avoid poverty). Fans of O'Reilly will not be amused, but all other readers will find the book hilarious, though some may find the language occasionally offensive.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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