The feud between conservative commentators Bill O’Reilly and George Will is just heating up.
The Fox News host and the newspaper columnist Friday duked it out on-air over O’Reilly’s new book on President Ronald Reagan, a universally beloved figure on the right.
{mosads}Will, who is a Fox News contributor, penned a scathing column Thursday about O’Reilly’s book, titled “Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency.” Will argued it would “distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could.”
The columnist disputed one of the central claims of “Killing Reagan” — that a 1981 assassination attempt on the president accelerated a mental decline that caused some of his top advisers to consider using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove him from office.
O’Reilly duked it out with Will on his show Friday night, calling his book “laudatory” of Reagan and accusing Will of not giving him a chance to respond to the column.
“It is not a laudatory book,” Will replied. “It is doing the work of the left which knows, in order to discredit conservatism, it must destroy Reagan’s reputation as a president. And your book does the work of the American left with its extreme recklessness.”
“You’re a hack,” O’Reilly responded to Will. “You are in with the cabal of the Reagan loyalists who don’t want the truth to be told.”