There’s an amusing squabble afoot between blowhard Bill O’Reilly and conservative columnist George Will. The two have taken shots at each other in recent weeks, both in print and on air. The dispute is over O’Reilly’s latest book (if we can call it that), “Killing Reagan.”

On Will’s view, O’Reilly slanders the conservative icon by suggesting he was mentally incompetent for much of his presidency. Indeed, O’Reilly implies that “the trauma of the March 1981 assassination attempt somehow triggered in Reagan a mental decline, perhaps accelerating the Alzheimer’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 13 years later.  “I think we were pretty clear,” O’Reilly says in a recent interview, “that by every account, Reagan had his good days and his bad days. On his bad days, he couldn’t work. On his good days, he was brilliant.”

O’Reilly’s book orbits around a memo authored by an aide of Howard Baker, Reagan’s Chief of Staff. Prompted by concerns about the President’s mental health, the memo states – according to O’Reilly – that “a lot days” Reagan was too disoriented to leave the second floor of the White House, choosing instead to watch “soap operas all day long.” Alarmed, the story goes, Reagan’s senior staffers considered invoking the 25^th Amendment, which outlines the procedures for removing a president from office when he or she is no longer capable of doing the job.

Will disputes all of these claims.

In a Washington Post column, he attacked O’Reilly’s methods: “The book’s pretense of scholarship involves 151 footnotes, only one of which is even remotely pertinent to the book’s lurid assertions…At the Reagan Library, where researchers must register, records show that neither O’Reilly nor Dugard [O’Reilly’s co-author], who churn out a book a year, used its resources.” Will also notes that O’Reilly failed to interview Reagan’s closest aides – Ed Meese, George Shultz and James Baker – all of whom “would have shredded the book’s preposterous premise.”

Will has a point. O’Reilly isn’t a historian or a scholar or even a serious author, and so his scribblings are hardly authoritative. But this doesn’t mean the book’s premise is “preposterous,” even if O’Reilly fails to substantiate it. The fact is, there are plenty of reasons to think Reagan was mentally unfit during his presidency. The man said and did curiously stupid things all the time, and apologists continue to dismiss it as part of Reagan’s “everyman” shtick.

If you’re not committed to the mythology of Reagan, however, this isn’t very convincing. Reagan often sounded like a dishonest and disinterested dolt. “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” he once asserted. He claimed the Russian language had no word for “freedom” (it’s svoboda, by the way). He spoke openly and enthusiastically about the imminence of “Armageddon” and End Times Prophecy. During a 1983 Congressional Medal ceremony, he told a story about an act of military heroism that, in fact, never happened (It was later found that the story was part of 1944 film, “A Wing and a Prayer.” In 1985, he lauded the apartheid regime of South Africa for ending segregation (It didn’t end officially until 1994). And let’s not forget that his administration used profits from drug trafficking and illegal weapons sales to fund a genocidal and extraconstitutional war in Nicaragua, and Reagan’s excuse was that he was too distracted (or dim) to know about it.

And the list goes on.

The argument about Reagan’s intellectual fitness is only part of this story, however. The most interesting aspect of the O’Reilly-Will quarrel is Will’s assertion that O’Reilly is “doing the work of the Left, which knows in order to discredit conservatism, it must destroy Reagan’s reputation as a president.” I doubt O’Reilly’s intentions are so lofty. As Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, once said, O’Reilly is a “book salesman with a TV show.” O’Reilly has always used his platform on Fox to peddle shit books to credulous viewers, and his attention-grabbing thesis is easily understood in that context.