O'Reilly Spins Hard on Homeless Vet Faux Pas

Bill O'Reilly came off looking like an unpatriotic meanie when he dismissed the plight of homeless veterans on his show earlier this month. Fortunately, he has a damage-control plan: lie about what he said and smear the people who called him out on it.

On Friday's O'Reilly Factor, the Fox News host addressed a publicity stunt led by left-wing gadfly Robert Greenwald. "A few days ago, Greenwald announced that he would assemble some veterans who object to my telling John Edwards the economy is not responsible for homeless vets, addiction and mental illness is," he claimed.

But that's a gross distortion. What got O'Reilly in trouble wasn't his explanation of the causes of homelessness among veterans; it was his blithe, unsourced assertion that homeless veterans are few in number. "They may be out there, but there are not many of them out there," he said on Jan. 15.

O'Reilly rounded out his fib with some name-calling, blasting as "corrupt entities" the two media outlets that covered Greenwald's stunt, NBC News and the New York Daily News, which wrote about the incident on the gossip page edited by George Rush and Joanna Molloy.

"Now I feel sorry for those [veterans] and we will help them if we can," he said, "but it's a damned shame they are being used by bad people like Rush and Molloy, notoriously dishonest, who printed a hatchet job about the situation today after sending one of their minions to observe what happened."

What do the bad, corrupt, notoriously dishonest columnists have to say for themselves?

"Being called 'corrupt' by Bill O'Reilly is a badge of honor," Molloy tells me. "I'm just glad he used that picture because it was taken 15 pounds ago."

Here's the clip of the segment, via Gawker.