Andrew Sullivan: Debate Me, Bill O'Reilly

When Andrew Sullivan read (in this profile) that other Fox News reporters considered Glenn Beck “embarrassing,” he was perplexed. Aren’t all Fox hosts roughly as bad? To prove the point, he flipped on Bill O’Reilly—and quickly regretted it. O’Reilly delivered a rant that “was so full of meaningless clichés about ‘big government’ and ‘progressives,’ so divorced from any coherent engagement with reality … that it beggared belief,” Sullivan writes in his blog at the Atlantic.

Sullivan’s complaints with the segment (see video) are numerous. Really, Obama, who escalated the war in Afghanistan, wants “peace at pretty much any cost”? Obama’s soft on immigration, despite this? The list goes on. “There is no other description of this than a travesty of the truth,” Sullivan writes. “Beck is in many ways a clown. … O’Reilly, meanwhile, is a propagandist.” Sullivan says he’s banned from Fox News, but challenges O’Reilly to have him on anyway. “I think your version of this president is a caricature so unfair it deserves a real thrashing out on air, in public.” (More Andrew Sullivan stories.)