Answer: not at all. O’Reilly is only right once a year.
But that rare event may have happened recently.
George Will is in a kerfuffle because in “his” latest book, O’Reilly claims that Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease was affecting him during his presidency to such an extent that his advisers were thinking of invoking the 25th Amendment to replace him.
Now, far be it from me to claim that O’Reilly’s latest is anything but fiction (or actually written by him, for that matter), and I have no reason to believe that O’Reilly’s theory that Hinckley’s bullet accelerated the process of the disease has any validity. But the core claim, that Reagan was losing it during his presidency, is, in the humble opinion of this leftist for whom O’Reilly is now carrying water, more likely than not to be true.
I remember watching Reagan’s very early press conferences, and being amazed at how out of it he was. During one of his debates with Mondale, he clearly lost it on camera, when he told a meandering and pointless story about a drive he took near the California shore. And can we forget that part of the claim pushed sub silentio to absolve him of responsibility for the sale of weapons to Iran was that he was not aware of what was going on around him. I’m not saying he was totally out of it; I am saying that the disease was creeping up on him, which made it easier for his handlers to pull his strings, as they’d been doing during his entire presidency. Anyone who listened to him objectively could see that his mind was wandering more than a president’s mind ought.
Of course, this runs counter to the Reagan was god meme pushed by the Republicans, so naturally they’ll go after O’Reilly. The fact that his book is probably poorly sourced will make that easy, which is a shame, because someone really should take an honest look at the underlying question O’Reilly raises.
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