Here’s the transcript, via Media Matters:

O’Reilly: “[W]e researched” and “[n]obody” on Fox “ever said you are going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance.” On the April 13 edition of Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly told Sen. Coburn: “[Y]ou don’t know anybody on Fox News — because there hasn’t been anyone — that said people will go to jail if they don’t buy mandatory insurance.” He added: “[W]e researched to find out if anybody had ever said you are going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. Nobody has ever said it. What it seems to me is you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn’t qualify there … you were wrong to do that, Senator, with all due respect.”

Let’s consider the video evidence, clearly proving Bill O’Reilly an out right liar:

It’s said that history is written by the victors, thus they draw the outlines of how events are remembered and retold. Well, I think that’s not quite right or, at the very least, something has gone wrong when it comes to The War of Northern Aggression — otherwise known as The American Civil War.

I may be stereotyping, but it seems that many of the people that support American militarism and unapologetically celebrate what some critique as American imperialism, prefer to stand with the losing and treasonous side of the American Civil War, rather than with the Union.

I’m offended every time I see the so-called rebel flag plastered on bumpers, t-shirts, caps or unfurled in the median of a New England highway (or in the middle of any highway, for that matter). Do the people proudly displaying this treasonous symbol not realize that it’s akin to flying the Nazi flag? Do they not realize that, in spite of the misguided and romanticized version of the Confederate South that still lingers, that that flag represents an odious enemy of America — the country that many of them would claim to love?

Not only is the Confederate flag the symbol of a declared American enemy, it is also the anti-thesis of a founding American value: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The apologist for America’s enemy will likely respond, Well, the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about economics.

To them I say, Bullshit. The American soldier — the Union solider — does not fight and die for the nation’s GDP, or for the promotion of an industrial versus an agrarian economy. No, the American soldier fights and bleeds for their fellow citizens and for the common values that bind us.

The Confederacy, its army and its supporters everywhere — all declared enemies of America — not only committed acts of treason against the American government; but, by turning their back to the call to form a more perfect union, rejected America, its values and their fellow countrymen.

Amazing that to this day, America’s enemy is still celebrated, even by elected government officials:

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia’s governor has brought Confederate History Month back to the state for the first time since 2001.

Gov. Bob McDonnell designated April to commemorate the secessionist, slaveholding South. His two Democratic predecessors had refused issue the proclamation sought each year by Confederate descendants.

Richmond was the Confederate seat of government.

McDonnell’s 368-word declaration does not mention slavery. The Republican governor said Tuesday that his intent was to honor the sacrifice on Virginia soil and promote tourism.

Since then the Republican governor of Virginia has gone on to include mention of slavery in his commemoration of the Confederacy. However, again, celebrating the Confederacy is akin to celebrating Nazy Germany. Thus, I ask, would mere acknowledgment of the concentration camps be sufficient to permit the commemoration of Nazism? Of course not. Therefore, how is mention of slavery sufficient excuse to carry forward with the celebration of the Confederacy?

[T]he language lately on air has grown particularly fierce and apocalyptic: President Obama called a dictator and sympathizer with terrorists. His policies called socialist, Marxist, Bolshevik, dangerous. Americans called to rise up in revolt. All this while the economy tanks and gun sales surge.

That last line is the operative and, frankly, scary one: while the economy tanks and gun sales surge. Let’s not forget that conservative right-wing blowhards animated, if not inspired, two recent terrorist incidents: 1. A gunman that opened fire at a church for its liberal views, 2. A second man in Pennsylvania ambushed police officers because, he thought, they and Obama were coming to take his guns away.

I wish Tom Ashbrook, the host of On Point, had been unabashedly critical of the vile rhetoric being spewed by conservatives on Fox News and talk radio; but, like a good “journalist,” Tom maintained his objectivity and largely agreed that liberals were guilty of similar offenses during the Bush years. To which I simply respond: bullshit! When was the last time any liberal went on TV or radio to call for armed revolution against the US government? Tom Ashbrook’s default fallback of journalistic objectivity is simply weak, and irresponsible in this instance.

What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon.

One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’ resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club. There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.

And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier.

And, again, Krugman poignantly asks the bottom line question:

Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.

Yeah, I know, I didn’t want to hear that either. It’s going to be a bumpy ride from here until election day.

Clearly, it’s time that we elect more “tax & spend Liberals,” because America can’t afford another fiscal conservative.

Cartoon by Steve Greenberg.

A lot has been written about Scott McClellan’s — the Bush loyalist and former White House spokesperson — tell all book. Of course, conservative apologists and Bush supporters are already gunning for their former colleague. Bush apologists don’t particular like this claim by the former White House spokesperson:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Writing in The Corner, a blog from the conservative National Review magazine, Seth Leibsohn takes issue with McClellan’s claim:

The evidence I’ve seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn’t do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.

Conservatives have long labored to caricature the press as liberal — which has served conservatives well, as they use this now conventional wisdom as bludgeon against submissive journalists if they don’t parrot conservative memes and talking points. Therefore, conservatives are not about to concede that, if anything, during the run up to the war, the media did as they were expected: they unquestionably parroted the Bush administration’s talking points, and claims about the threat that Iraq posed to our national security.

David Kurtz, over at TPM media, will be taking Seth’s challenge. However, I here offer Judith Miller and the New York Times subsequen apology as exhibits A and B, in response to Seth.

McLaughlin: Look Americans — particularly Republicans like you [referring to Tony Blankley] — they love authoritarianism.

Blankley: I don’t love authoritarianism. Even though I love you, John.

McLaughlin: Keep quiet now. They don’t want a President. They want an imperialist.

I think John McLaughlin has it right.