Bill O’Reilly fired back Tuesday against Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who panned the Fox News host’s Super Bowl interview with President Obama.
“Probably not,” O’Reilly told radio host Hugh Hewitt when asked if he would have Milbank on his show, “The O’Reilly Factor.” “He is a weasel, in my opinion. Beneath contempt. I probably would not invite him on the program. Number one, the audience despises him. And number two, I don’t really care what he says. I care that The Washington Post employs him. That’s what I care about.”
“Whatever he says, doesn’t bother me because I know where it’s coming from,” O’Reilly continued. “But the fact that The Washington Post would employ a guy like that, I mean, it’s really disturbing.”
In his Monday column, Milbank slammed O’Reilly’s Sunday interview with Obama as “hostile from the start.”
“This was O’Reilly’s third such session with Obama — and as such it served as a milepost on the conservative movement’s road to Obama hysteria,” wrote Milbank.
O’Reilly told Hewitt that he would “absolutely” bring up his problem with Milbank if he ever had new Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos on his program.
“But I am not on a jihad against Milbank,” O’Reilly explained. “I am on a jihad — a holy war — against declining standards of journalism. The Washington Post editors if they watched the interview — which God knows if they did or not — had to know that Milbank was lying. And they had to know he was lying for a reason: that he is a far-left zealot. So it’s OK to be a liberal columnist, but once you cross the line into lying to promote what you want than the paper’s got to take action.”