I thought about it, but not for long. I like doing TV. I’m not terrible at it. I criticized him, I should have the guts to repeat it to his face. I also need to say that when I announced I’d said yes, every one of the doubters, and more, sent me great advice and good wishes. (Thanks to Media Matters who, unbidden, just had staff start sending me clips to watch, about O’Reilly’s lies. And if you’re not on Twitter, well, Twitter rocked for me.) My daughter coached me; so did my litigator ex-husband, so did my friend and Salon co-conspirator Kerry Lauerman. It takes a village to debate Bill O’Reilly!

His producers also helped by doing that thing they do: “Hey, Bill really respects you for coming on the show! He wants to have a conversation! It’ll be fine!” (And they promoted my appearance on the show by identifying me on the Web site as “Joan Walsh of Slate.com.”)

Well, it was so not fine. I think the high or low point was when he shrieked at me, “You have blood on your hands!” At one point he also either told me to “Shut up” or “Be quiet,” I can’t remember. (If I’m wrong about that, when I see the clip, I’ll correct it. UPDATE: Actually, he shouted “Stop talking!”) He called me “vile.” I think I said he was vile, too. There were a couple of “I know you are but what am I?” moments that I’m not totally proud of. It was a kaleidoscopic nightmare, a TV acid trip, and I don’t do acid. It almost seems like O’Reilly does, but I don’t think so.  The man is driven by demons. God bless him and save him.

Now all I can really do is wait for the edited, taped version to air at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET. And as one media friend, urging me not to do it (while sending me great newsy tidbits of O’Reillyisms that I used), explained, I’m not likely to feel good about it: “This is not about debate nor offering an alternate point of view. This is the Harlem Globetrotters, and if you’re too good to be the Washington Generals, he will make you into them by editing and lying.” I grew up loving the Harlem Globetrotters, so man, that really hurt.

But actually I can do one more thing besides wait: I can lay out what I remember saying (I should have taped it) so we can compare the final, edited show. Which may differ significantly, or it may not.

(UPDATE: I’m going to give “The O’Reilly Factor” credit here: The show was pretty much how it went. Exactly how it went, as I can recall. I will post it later)

First of all, he wasn’t Genial Bill O’Reilly, grateful to have a left-wing critic to spar with. From his opening words he was curt. He instructed me to answer his very simple questions directly. (I got a Guantánamo kind of vibe; do I have to?) And basically, like at Guantánamo, he just asked the same loaded question over and over seeking the same answer: Do I think there should be any protections for late-term fetuses?

I started calm. I acknowledged that late-term abortion is the most angst-producing of all reproductive rights issues, but it only accounts for 1 percent of the abortion in the U.S. — and most of the women who do it have heartbreaking reasons. I tried to make the point, repeatedly, that it’s sad that there are two versions of reality on this: the O’Reilly version, where Tiller is a killer, and worse, a profiteer, and the feminist version, where Tiller is a hero, because he performed this legal but rare procedure in dire circumstances for women who were diagnosed late in pregnancy with aggressive breast cancer; for a 9-year-old girl, raped by her stepfather, who didn’t know she was pregnant; for women who found late in their pregnancies that their babies had brain and heart deformities that would kill them early in their lives, but not without a lot of surgery and suffering.

If I’m sorry I did the show — and I’m not yet sure I am — it’s only because of one thing: He used me to try Dr. Tiller again, postmortem. He brought out uncorroborated stories he claimed he’d never shown before: a 13-year-old girl (I couldn’t see her or verify her story) who claimed Tiller killed her baby and had her deliver it in a toilet. He featured psychiatrists who from a distance challenged Tiller’s findings that women were in danger if they delivered late-term babies. He continued his “profiteering” charges, claiming that Tiller charged $6,000 per abortion; I said, “Bill, you’ve always said it was $5,000, so that’s interesting! And I know he did some for less and pro-bono.” I think that’s when he cut me off and denied that, but I’m not sure. But, jeez, it did get worse. He also accused me of calling him “a vile accomplice” to Scott Roeder, and I jumped in, “I called you vile, but I never called you an accomplice.” On both these recent shootings I’ve made clear the responsible parties are the shooters, I told him. Woo-hoo! We’ll see if it airs.

What else do I remember? It’s getting lost in a haze of post-adrenaline marveling at the surreality of the whole thing! I told him that he was within his rights to think late-term abortion should be illegal, and that he should work to make it so. But right now it’s legal.  I compared his position to that of gun opponents. We can legally, under various circumstances, own guns. But some gun opponents would  like most guns, especially handguns, to be illegal. What if those folks started a crusade against gun dealers, maybe picking out one in particular, saying he had “blood on his hands,” “he should be stopped,” all the O’Reilly Tiller quotes? 

Sadly, Bill cut me off and derided that comparison as stupid, and went back to asking me his one apparent question: if late-term fetuses deserved any protection. I hemmed and hawed — I hate that I did that, but as I said, though I’m ardently pro-choice, I’m Irish Catholic, and I was raised to think abortion was wrong — but in the end, I support the law as it is. My overriding principle is that I believe this very tough choice can only belong to women. It might have been then he said, “You have blood on your hands!” Not sure; we’ll watch the video.

Shortly after that he started badgering me about whether I’d call Dr. Tiller a hero, and I strangely bobbed and weaved until reality beckoned, and I said, “Yes, he’s a hero!” Well, it was over then. He had what he wanted. His audience could see what I was (you fill in the blanks there). I believe he repeated that I have blood on my hands, but I’m not sure. I might have said he has blood on his hands. It wasn’t pretty.

At the end, I threw several things at him I expect will be cut, but I’d be thrilled to be wrong.  (UPDATE: I was wrong.) They are all factually correct.  I mentioned O’Reilly’s attacks on liberals like Rosie O Donnell, Janeane Garofalo and Michael Moore for whipping up possible violence against the right. I also talked about O’Reilly’s tragic previous connection to the slaughter of liberals, almost a year ago, by wingnut Jim David Adkisson. It’s chilling. Just like Scott Roeder, unbelievably — is there really a God? I believe there is but sometimes there’s precious little proof — Adkisson shot his prey in a church. He’d railed against “liberals,” repeatedly — and police found the collected works of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage in his house.

O’Reilly shut up as I made those last two sets of points, and so if I had to bet what would be cut, it would be that. Oh well, I tried.

Watch O’Reilly yourselves tonight, and weigh in here. Maybe he’ll run the uncut version! If he does, I’ll apologize. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the probably really pathetic uncut version of the “Talking Points” I had prepared for O’Reilly, almost none of which got used. I’m a little embarrassed because they make me look like a liberal Pollyanna, a lamb ready to lie down with the lion — to be eaten! Live and learn.

Thanks for having me Bill, maybe this is the first step in what I talked about on my blog: Dialing down the extreme rhetoric and hate. If we can sit here and talk calmly, maybe we’ll set a good example for others.

My basic issue is that we are a nation of laws, and abortion is legal. Late-term abortion is legal. It’s heart-wrenching, and it gets a lot of attention, but we should note that only 1 percent of all abortions in the U.S. are after 21 weeks.

What bothers me, Bill, is that you started a crusade against a doctor who was doing his legal job. You have an enormous audience, the top show in cable, and I think you have a responsibility to think about the impact of your words. And on the issue of abortion, there’s a terrible history of violence in this country. At least four doctors have been killed, multiple clinics have been bombed. Dr. Tiller himself had been shot twice in 1993, Bill. His clinic had been bombed and repeatedly vandalized. He was in clear danger, and yet you attacked him, 42 times over four years, and at least 24 times you called him a “baby killer.” (That’s from the nonpartisan fact-checker Politifact.) You accused him of “murder,” “you said he had blood on his hands,” you said he “had to be stopped,” and the people of Kansas were a “disgrace” for not stopping him — even though he was acquitted by the courts multiple times of various legal charges against him.

I know you have decried vigilante justice, and I believe you mean that, but we saw vigilante justice in this case. Every time I’ve written about it, Bill, I’ve been sure to say you did not cause it.  The only person responsible at this point is Scott Roeder, unless we find he had formal accomplices, no word of that so far. I’m just saying that in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s tragic murder in a church, no less, you might have expressed some remorse. Instead, you turned your show into a pity party, and made yourself the victim, and honestly, Bill, I don’t often agree with you, but I thought you were better than that. I was disappointed. That’s what I said.

If you really wanted to be fair and balanced, you could have said in every segment, “Some call him Tiller the baby killer, others call him Dr. Tiller, the hero, because he has performed this legal but rare procedure for women in dire circumstances: Women who were diagnosed with breast cancer; for a 9-year-old girl raped by her stepfather, who didn’t know she was pregnant, for women who found late in their pregnancies that their babies had brain and heart deformities that would kill them early in their lives, but not without a lot of surgery and suffering. The two sides probably can’t meet, Bill, but there is another side. And again, only 1 percent of abortions are late-term abortions, taking place after 21 weeks. One percent, Bill.

I am a pro-choice Irish Catholic. I have agonized for years, but I am pro-choice. I have one Catholic aunt who works at Planned Parenthood, escorting women past clinic protesters. I have another Catholic aunt who loved Obama’s economic policies but couldn’t vote for him because of abortion. I love them both, and they love me. After prayer and soul searching I came to believe the only answer is that this is the woman’s choice. We live in a pluralistic country, Bill, people disagree. People don’t agree on when life begins. They’re not sure the right course here. So abortion stays legal. People stay uncomfortable with it, for sure. It’s true. But it is legal, and if you don’t think it should be legal, work within our great democracy to change the laws.

Finally, Bill, you yourself have demonized folks on the left for saying things that you believe could lead to violence: You’ve railed against Hollywood, you’ve railed against Rosie O Donnell and Janeane Garofalo and Michael Moore for saying things you believed were irresponsible and could foment violence. Just last month, you criticized Google Maps for making it easy to find the homes of people who gave money to Prop. 8, because they might get hurt. Antiabortion crazies regularly published the address of Dr. Tiller’s home, church and clinic. So I think you’re inconsistent on these issues, you call out the left if you think their speech could endanger conservatives, or just Americans, but I’m a pariah for raising the same questions about your Tiller speech? I don’t understand it, but I hope we’ve improved the terms of the debate tonight.

Epic fail! What was I thinking? I’ll be back after I watch the final clip with a reaction.

Oh, and while you’re waiting: Media Matters has clips of O’Reilly calling Dr. Tiller a “baby killer,” without any attribution, which he denies doing.

Update: Watch the segment here.

I’ve tried to make the same points: What if Catholics didn’t believe in child labor laws? Would we let church-run agencies flout them? Boies used the example of a religion that believed people shouldn’t work after age 60: Could they legally ban older people from employment? Of course, they could do neither. This is indeed an issue of religious freedom: the freedom of non-Catholics not to be bound by the dictates of the Catholic Church in the workplace.

But Boies, fresh off his 9th Circuit victory defending gay marriage, brought the legal knowledge. Watch below.

Of course, the very same night, the re-surging Rick Santorum offered the most shrill and hysterical reaction to the White House ruling, and in a week of shrillness and hysteria, that’s saying a lot. Santorum actually said that President Obama’s contraception ruling meant we are “headed down [the] road” to the French Revolution and the “guillotine.” That’s below, too.

If you watch the entire seven-minute clip, you’ll understand why, despite Santorum’s latest surge, I do not believe that even today’s Republican Party, though it’s been hijacked by the ultra-right, is capable of nominating him for president. Like so many right-wingers, he absolutely mangles what the Founders believed about religion. He says one problem with the French Revolution is that its slogan of “liberty, equality and fraternity” substituted fraternity, or “brotherhood,” for “fatherhood,” a reference to God the father, but also his right-wing belief in the centrality of male control to family and national stability. But his absolute craziness is best displayed in his remarks about the guillotine:

They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Although Santorum said we’re “a long way from that,” he insisted that with the Obama presidency “we are headed down that road.” But watch the whole thing. Boies first, then Santorum. Reason before crazy. I’ll be talking about all of this on MSNBC’s “Hardball” today at 5 p.m. ET.

Reason:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now crazy (h/t Crooks & Liars):

Predictably, the GOP presidential candidates are whacking Obama on the issue; fittingly, Rick Santorum is surging again, as this latest battle in the culture war rages. As always, the biggest hypocrite is  Mitt Romney, who is attacking the president’s decision even though he went along with the same regulations in Massachusetts. And when the state enacted the universal health insurance law he used to be proud of, it covered the same “family planning services” as the new HHS regulations.

I knew the president’s decision would be controversial, but I underestimated the firestorm he would face. Since 98 percent of Catholics practice forms of contraception forbidden by the church at some point in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control, I assumed many of them would speak out in favor of the new regulations. How could they expect the president to follow church teachings if they did not?

I was wrong. Too many Catholics are insisting that while they may personally disagree with the church on contraception, they defend the bishops’ opposition to the HHS moves as a matter of “religious liberty.” Others are silent. But silence lets the most right-wing forces of reaction prevail. It’s time for the 98 percent to speak up.

This is indeed a matter of religious liberty – the liberty of non-Catholic women who work for Catholic employers to have the full spectrum of healthcare coverage, regardless of what the church believes.

Twenty-eight states already require church-run agencies to cover contraception in the health insurance they provide employees. Catholic Charities sued to oppose the regulation in New York, and lost. The world didn’t end; Catholic agencies in New York and those 27 other states now cover contraception. And they should: Women who have access to family planning services have lower infant mortality rates and healthier babies than those who don’t. Others take the birth control pill to deal with endometriosis or other reproductive system issues. Contraception has to be part of comprehensive healthcare for women.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod left the door open to a compromise with the bishops. That sounded dangerous. The worst move for the administration would be to take a courageous stand, rile up the right wing and Catholic bishops, and then cave and demoralize the women’s health advocates who are mobilizing to support the president. Later on “Daily Rundown” liberal Catholic E.J. Dionne suggested possibilities for compromise on the issue, while ultra-conservative George Weigel shot him down. There will be no “compromise” that leaves everyone happy. Either this is a matter of equity and the right approach to women’s health, or it’s not. And Catholics who ignore the church’s teaching on this issue have a special duty to speak up.

Karl Rove heard echoes of Obama’s rhetoric too, and implicit optimism about the direction of the country, and cried foul.

“I was, frankly, offended by it,” Rove said on Fox News Monday. “I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”

Rove wasn’t the only Republican who tried to cast the Chrysler ad as essentially payback to the president for supporting the bailout that kept the domestic auto industry alive. Michelle Malkin tweeted her horror Sunday night: “Agh. WTH? Did I just see Clint Eastwood fronting an auto bailout ad???”

Now, Clint Eastwood is no Democrat – he voted for John McCain in 2008, has been a Republican for most of his life, and now describes himself as having “libertarian” leanings. It’s hard to imagine he’d lend his name to an openly and intentionally pro-Obama ad. Chrysler has denied any political motive behind the Eastwood ad.

The flap over the ad confirms the GOP’s serious branding problem: The problem for Rove and the rest of the GOP is that their party’s narrative has become relentlessly negative, pessimistic and uninspiring. They’ve left the language of optimism and resilience, higher ground and common ground, to the Democrats, and lately President Obama has grabbed every opportunity to employ that language.

Rove is essentially complaining that anyone using rhetoric of resilience and tenacity, or suggests “we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one” sounds like a gosh-darn … Democrat.  That’s good news for Democrats. There’s more good news in recent polls showing that Obama is winning back at least some white working-class voters with his feistier message of economic populism. The president’s approval/disapproval ratings have been dismal with whites who make less than $50,000, with his approval dropping into the low 30s and disapproval up in the mid-60s regularly over the last two years.

Now those numbers stand at 43-54, about where they were when Obama was elected. He may not carry that cohort, but holding the share he had in 2008 will make his reelection chances much better. There’s also good news with those same voters in some Rust Belt states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and, yes, Michigan, home of Chrysler.

Karl Rove is angry because he sees the numbers, too, and he’s got to explain them away with dark allusions to “Chicago politics.” But the fact is the president saved the auto industry at a time when Republicans, most notably Mitt Romney, urged him to let it die. If he gets credit for that unpopular decision, that’s because he deserves it.

And if Clint Eastwood sounds like a Democrat when he talks about American ingenuity and optimism, that’s because increasingly it’s Democrats who sound that way – and Republicans who don’t. Ronald Reagan co-opted buoyancy and hopefulness for a generation, painting Democrats from Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis through Al Gore and John Kerry (with a break for Bill Clinton) as Negative Nellies, whiners and complainers always finding fault with America.

Now it’s Republicans who bad-mouth the American people, warning that lax morals and laziness are behind the problems of the poor and working class (including whites), and who paint scary dystopic pictures of America under its Kenyan anti-colonialist socialist black president. Karl Rove’s hissy fit over the Chrysler ad underscores exactly how bleak his party’s vision has become.

I’ll be on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 p.m. ET to discuss Rove and the angry GOP.

No one expected women’s lives to be an unbroken series of pregnancies and births anymore. It was better for women that way – but also for children. (Not to mention for husbands, who no longer had to confine sex to the times of the month when women weren’t ovulating if they wanted sexual pleasure without a special bonus nine months later.) The church was a wonderful institution, my parents said, but it was very old, and it sometimes took a while to catch up with the times. Kind of like the way Grandma still said “icebox” for “refrigerator.”

That was at least 40 years ago. Far from catching up with the times, the leadership of the Catholic Church is trying to drag the rest of us backward.

I was disappointed to see the progressive Catholic E.J. Dionne, whom I really admire, accuse President Obama of throwing his Catholic allies “under the bus” by insisting that federal health insurance regulations requiring contraceptive coverage apply to Catholic institutions, if they employ non-Catholics. Note that the administration is OK with church-run institutions that only employ Catholics prohibiting contraception coverage. It simply won’t let the church impose its teachings on non-Catholics. This shouldn’t be a controversial decision.

Let’s make a couple of things clear here. Obviously, the law won’t force Catholics to use contraception. And 98 percent of Catholics already practice birth control (and not the “natural family planning” kind), according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. It’s not as though Catholics are an endangered minority of true believers being forced to transgress a fervently held and widely practiced church rule. This battle is over a Catholic Church teaching that even Catholics ignore almost unanimously.

The administration’s requirement comes from the Institute of Medicine within the National Academy of Sciences, which considers contraception access part of a total healthcare plan that brings down maternal and infant mortality rates. The government sets minimal basic standards for the benefits and safety conditions employers must provide to employees. What if Catholic hospitals and universities and public agencies objected to occupational safety rules for doctrinal reasons? Child labor laws? Would people argue they should be exempt from those regulations? Of course not.

Now Catholic bishops are urging priests and parishes to rise up against the Obama administration’s alleged violation of religious freedom. It’s bad enough that men with no credibility on the issue of sexuality get to tell their fellow Catholics what to do. They do not get to tell the American president what to do.

Paradoxically, Dionne chides Obama for his contraception decision given the great lengths the president went to in order to make sure that his healthcare reform legislation wouldn’t fund insurance that covered abortion in 2010. But as Dionne himself notes, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops continued to dissemble anyway and insist the bill still provided abortion funding, despite a very public compromise by the president that angered many pro-choice Democrats. As the president has learned the hard way on many fronts, the politics of placating extremists only leads to more extremism. Obama was absolutely correct to draw a line in the sand here.

I think it’s particularly important for Catholics – for all of us, actually  — to take a stand on this, because of a related controversy in the news: The Susan G. Komen Foundation’s deplorable decision to cut the funds it gives Planned Parenthood to provide breast cancer screening. Foundation head Nancy Brinker worked for the Bush administration, and the organization’s pink-washing politics and business practices have come under fire before. But this latest decision is outrageously political, the result of an organized right-wing crusade against Planned Parenthood over the fact that a legally separate wing of the organization provides abortion services.

Of course, only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities have anything to do with abortion. In many communities, the agency is the sole health provider for poor and/or uninsured women, offering screening for breast and cervical cancer along with basic female health services. In the past five years, Planned Parenthood has provided 4 million breast exams and referrals for 70,000 mammograms.  The Komen funds paid for 170,000 breast exams and 6,400 mammogram referrals over five years. Since this post started out personal, I should also note that in my Brooklyn-Long Island-Albany based family, my mother, my grandmother, three aunts and four cousins have been diagnosed with breast cancer; my mother and two of my cousins died, all between 45 and 52.

Unfortunately, Komen’s relatively new vice president for policy, Karen Handel, is a right-wing Republican endorsed by Sarah Palin (cover your ears before you click the video) in her unsuccessful bid to become Georgia’s governor. Handel describes herself on Twitter as a “lifelong conservative Republican, formerly Georgia Secretary of State.” She made opposition to Planned Parenthood part of her failed gubernatorial platform, and Komen knew exactly what it was getting when it hired her. It’s tragic the organization decided to get involved in the culture wars, particularly on the wrong side.

Right-wingers like Handel have tried to convince Americans that Planned Parenthood is about nothing but abortion, but increasingly it’s obvious that the real goal is to criminalize birth control as well. I’d note the irony of people who oppose abortion working so hard to cut off funding for contraception, except to the doctrinaire Christian right and Catholic base, there’s no irony. Sex is intended for reproduction. Rick Santorum has called contraception “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” None of the rest of us want to live in a country where such a narrow worldview is enforced. So let’s remember: Every time a prominent organization or politician compromises on these issues, it doesn’t mollify the forces of reaction, it emboldens them.

Planned Parenthood raised a stunning $400,000 in the day and a half after the Komen decision became public. You can donate here. It also got an additional $250,000 donation from the family foundation of Dallas philanthropist Lee Fikes and his wife, Amy. That is getting close to matching the almost $1 million Komen funds lost for this year, but they’re not there yet. Do what you can.

Catholics have a special responsibility to speak out and defend President Obama’s contraception decision. (And tell Komen to keep screening poor women for breast cancer, while you’re at it.) We need to preach what we practice: Catholics like sex as much as the rest of y’all, and 98 percent of us plan our families. The president shouldn’t be punished politically for doing the right thing. He should be praised.