Some Monday Night Lying from Bill O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly was a cornucopia of bizarre factual errors (aka. "lies") Monday night. There were two particularly bullshitty ones within his Talking Points Memo segment. During his usual top-of-the-show rant, O'Reilly blasted President Clinton's call for the Republicans to suspend the Bush tax cuts in order to finance the Katrina recovery efforts and to curb the cancerous growth of the federal budget deficit.

Then he introduced his Memo guest Dick Morris, former Clinton campaign manager (current Hillary-basher) and one of Fox News' "liberals". During the one-sided chat with Morris about Katrina, tax cuts, Clinton, and the deficit, O'Reilly ebulliently praised President Bush's fiscal policies and noted two dubious factoids which O'Reilly must've either heavily spun (in the No Spin Zone) or just outright fabricated.

First, O'Reilly had the falafel-sized gonads to say that the poverty rate in this country is lower under President Bush than it was under President Clinton. According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of people living below the poverty line DROPPED from around 15 percent in 1993 to just above 11 percent by the year 2000. That's a 4 percent drop in Clinton's eight years.

That number has INCREASED under George W. Bush from around 11.5 percent in 2001 to almost 13 percent by the end of 2004.

Simply put, the number of people living under the poverty line has GROWN under Bush. Clinton's first term: down 2 percent. Down another 2 in his second term. Bush's first term: up 1 percent. (It's worth noting that, if you're like me and find these ups and downs rather small, the overall poverty rate has hovered within a relatively shallow margin of around 11 to 15 percent in the last 30 years.)

Almost in the same breath, O'Reilly noted that because of Bush's tax cuts, tax revenue has somehow increased. He justified it with a half-baked O'Reilly For Idiots version of supply-side economics. The only reason tax revenue under Bush appears to be higher is because it started high at the end of Clinton's term. But since Bush's tax cuts in 2001, tax revenue has steadily declined, with only 2004 seeing an ever-so-slight increase from the year before.

From U.S. Treasury Department figures found here:

It's not breaking news that O'Reilly tends to fabricate information or bend the truth in order to justify his chewing gum talking points, but tonight's foray into the absurd was too much to ignore. And when we're headed into a period of time in which Bush's tax cuts will continue to reward the wealthiest Americans while the rest of us are asked to make sacrifices, O'Reilly's butchering of reality is only hurting his audience's understanding of what's really going on. Shut his mic off.