O'Reilly Is An Asshole Watch/ Nothing But Krugmania Edition

This weekend, I finally caught the debate between Bill O'Reilly and Paul Krugman on Tim Russert's CNBC show. To say that Krugman won on points would be to mischaracterize the event. O'Reilly literally went on extended shouting rants with his finger less than a foot from Krugman's face. When Krugman told O'Reilly that he couldn't cut off anyone's mic, I thought the vein in O'Reilly forehead would burst. Agree with him or not, Krugman came prepared with logically valid arguments based on objective economic data; and O'Reilly came prepared with meaningless slogans and decibels to spare.

Somebody at FNC who knows about economics (there is somebody, right?) needs to spend an hour or so with O'Reilly going over basic terms, because it's getting really embarrassing. O'Reilly claimed that Krugman had predicted the Bush tax cuts would cause a recession; and when Krugman pointed out that he had only ever claimed that the tax cuts wouldn't do anything for job growth, O'Reilly demonstrated pretty clearly that he didn't know what a "recession" actually is, accusing Krugman of playing "semantics" in claiming that there is in fact a difference. (This suggests, btw, that O'Reilly doesn't know what the word "semantics" means either.)

However---and now we're getting to the "O'Reilly is an asshole" part---any of O'Reilly's legion of fans who saw the program would have been led around by the nose. O'Reilly's populist defense of the tax cuts ("the folks are getting squeezed") would have been precisely what they were hoping to hear, and they would not have paid attention or even understood Krugman's demonstration that the middle class tax burden has increased under the Bush administration. I'm not joking or exaggerating when I say that every item of data that Krugman cited was met by O'Reilly with either an anecdote (and a dubious one at that, see below), or---seriously now---a supply-sider parable. Evidence? we don' need no stinkin' evidence.

It wouldn't have been a Bill O'Reilly public confrontation without at least one outright lie, and Bill didn't disappoint. He thought to refute one of Krugman's claims about the Iraq war by citing an interview he conducted with Hans Blix. The trouble? Blix never appeared on his program. So uh, that's a lie.

Krugman, btw, has some serious bullshit problems of his own to deal with. His defense of Michael Moore, which is basically that propaganda is okay if it's propaganda for right, is self-refuting.