Things got ugly in the "No Spin Zone" Friday night when Fox News host Bill O'Reilly tore into conservative columnist George Will over a column critical of O'Reilly's book "Killing Reagan."
While the O'Reilly Factor is normally a safe zone for conservatives, Will discovered that wasn't the case after the host invited him on to defend a column where he claimed O'Reilly "slandered" the memory of Ronald Reagan.
In the column, Will mocked the book's "pretense of scholarship," writing, "The book’s perfunctory pieties about Reagan’s greatness are inundated by its flood of regurgitated slanders about his supposed lassitude and manipulability. This book is nonsensical history and execrable citizenship, and should come with a warning: 'Caution — you are about to enter a no-facts zone.'"
Face to face with O'Reilly, it didn't get any more pleasant with O'Reilly calling Will "a hack" repeatedly and saying he had libeled him. Will, in turn, did not back down.
"It is not a laudatory book," Will told O'Reilly. "It is doing the work of the left which knows in order to discredit conservatism it must destroy Reagan's reputation as a president. Your book does the work of the American left with its extreme recklessness."
"You're a hack!" O'Reilly screamed at Will. "You are in with the cabal of the Reagan loyalists who don't want the truth to be told!"
Watch the exchange below from YouTube:
