For the record, I’m not a communist and I don’t secretly adore Karl Marx.

Ordinarily I don’t bother repeating anything Bill O’Reilly says. But this particular whopper is significant because it represents what O’Reilly and Fox News, among others, are doing to the national dialogue.

They’re burying it in doo-doo.

O’Reilly based his claim on an interview I did last week with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, in which I argued that because America’s big corporations were now global we could no longer rely on them to make necessary investments in human capital or to lobby for public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D. So, logically, government has to step in.

Since when does an argument for public investment in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D make someone a communist or a secret adorer of Karl Marx?

But obviously, O’Reilly has no interest in arguing anything. Ad hominem attacks are always the last refuges of intellectual boors lacking any logic or argument.

This is what’s happening to all debate all over America: It’s disappearing. All we’re left with is a nasty residue.

In Washington, Democrats and Republicans no longer even talk. They just vent charges and counter-charges.

The 2012 election doesn’t seem likely to clarify any issue. At this moment the candidates and their surrogates are debating the treatment of dogs.

Across the nation, conservatives right-wingers and liberal or progressive lefties have stopped debating their respective views, or even listening to anyone they disagree with. They just find broadcasters and bloggers who confirm their views.

We’re even sorting by belief according to where we live. Today your neighbors are more likely to agree with your politics than disagree. We’ve settled into like-minded enclaves where we don’t need to think because everyone we meet confirms what we assume we already know.

It’s not that the nation is more polarized than it’s been in the past. America has been through searing conflicts, some within the living memories of most of us. The communist witch-hunts of the 1950s were followed by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, battles over womens’ reproductive rights and gay marriage.

What makes our current conflicts remarkable isn’t their severity but our utter lack of engagement debating them.

So many Americans are so angry and frustrated these days – vulnerable to loss of job and healthcare and home, without a shred of economic security – they’re easy prey for demagogues offering simple answers and ready scapegoats. Take, for example, Bill O’Reilly and his colleagues on Fox.

But people can only learn from others who disagree with them — or at least from witnessing debates between people who respectfully and civilly disagree. Without respect and civility, it’s not a debate – it’s just back to name-calling.

A democracy depends on public deliberation and debate. Without it, the members of a society have no means of understanding what they believe or why. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were notable not because they solved anything but because they helped Americans clarify where they agreed and disagreed on the wrenching issue of slavery.

Hence the danger today – when deliberation has stopped.

This morning I left a message on Bill O’Reilly’s office phone asking him to invite me onto his show to debate whether public investments in education and infrastructure are needed.

What are the odds he’ll invite me on?

“[Obama's] out there running against himself now,” Clinton said. “Soon as he gets an opponent, it will be about the next four years — who do you think is going to take us in the right direction.”

Clinton also weighed in a few of the Republican candidates, saying of one-time nemesis Newt Gingrich that he respected the man’s ability to “think and do.” The former president was, however, momentarily lost for words when O’Reilly followed up by asking if he respected Gingrich “as a man.” Clinton tip-toed around the answer, then spent the next few moments criticizng the former speaker’s “scorched-earth” political approach.

When questioned about Mitt Romney, Clinton damned the former Massachusetts governor with praise for his Massachusetts health reform legislation. He stopped short, however, of issuing any endorsements for the Republican primary, saying only that he would vote for Barack Obama regardless in the general election. In fact, the closest he would get to voicing support for any of the candidates was when he mentioned that he liked Jon Huntsman — though he then quickly poked fun at the Utahan’s meager support in the polls.

You can find the full, 40-minute interview here.

To which O’Reilly responded:

I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police. Particularly at a place like U.C. Davis, which is, you know, a fairly liberal campus, and they’re not running around. They camp to the point where … the Chancellor said “Look, you gotta get them out of there. We can’t operate a college like this.”

Here’s the video of the segment via Media Matters:

The controversy started after Salon reported that the official National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre had rejected O’Reilly’s book because of “the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.” A second review in a leading Civil War magazine identified another 10 or so alleged errors.

A separate gift shop at Ford’s, which is not subject to the same rigorous review standards as the National Park Service bookstore, has decided to sell “Killing Lincoln.”

O’Reilly seized on that fact Monday and elided over the National Park Service’s decision entirely:

Now we have attacks on my new book, Killing Lincoln. The The Washington Post says the bookstore at Ford’s Theater in Washington where Lincoln was assassinated is refusing to sell the book. That’s not true.

A statement released by the director of the Ford’s Theater says, quote, “I am sure many of you read the article in this morning’s Post, Bill O’Reilly’s book banned from Ford’s Theater. I write to clarify the misinformation. The Bill O’Reilly book Killing Lincoln is available in our shop and has been for the last several weeks.” Unquote.

A couple notes here: the Post report — while it didn’t credit Salon with breaking the O’Reilly story — is, in fact, accurate. The bookstore at Ford’s decided not to offer “Killing Lincoln,” while the gift shop — again, not subject to the same quality standards and not under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service — is offering the book.

O’Reilly also did not mention the rest of Ford’s Theatre Society Director Paul Tetreault’s statement:  ”While we understand the National Park Service’s concerns about the book, we decided to let our visitors judge the book themselves,” Tetreault said.

More important, O’Reilly claimed Monday that “there are four minor misstatements, all of which have been corrected,” as well as “two type set errors” in “Killing Lincoln.”

That claim is at odds with the 15 or so factual errors identified by two expert reviewers — one the Ford’s Theatre official and the other the author of multiple scholarly books about the Lincoln assassination. It’s not clear whether O’Reilly is disputing some of those errors. I’ve asked publisher Henry Holt for details of the corrections and I will update this post if I hear back.

Ed Steers Jr., the author of the “Killing Lincoln” review in North & South magazine, told Salon in an email Monday evening that he stands by his criticisms.

“I was rather careful, as always when writing a critical review. One does not like being negative. It is far more gratifying to praise an historical work than it is to criticize its failings,” wrote Steers, who noted that he has “devoted over 40 years and 7 books to studying Lincoln’s assassination.”

Added Steers: “As I wrote in my review, my deepest regret is that Mr. O’Reilly had a wonderful opportunity to tell the factual story of Lincoln’s assassination to an audience that most historians never reach, and failed to do so.”

Here’s the full transcript of the Fox segment via Media Matters:

You may remember a few years back the dishonest Al Franken tried to discredit me by saying I lied about my upbringing, that I was not raised in Leavittown, New York. My book documents my history and proves Franken a liar.

Now we have attacks on my new book, Killing Lincoln. The The Washington Post says the bookstore at Ford’s Theater in Washington where Lincoln was assassinated is refusing to sell the book. That’s not true.

A statement released by the director of the Ford’s Theater says, quote, “I am sure many of you read the article in this morning’s Post, Bill O’Reilly’s book banned from Ford’s Theater. I write to clarify the misinformation. The Bill O’Reilly book Killing Lincoln is available in our shop and has been for the last several weeks.” Unquote

Unfortunately the statement also says there are inaccuracies in the book. Well, in 325 pages, there are four minor misstatements, all of which have been corrected. There are also two type set errors, one involving a date. Now that’s a pretty good record. Even for nitpickers who want to hurt the book.

We’ve invited the historian who works at the Ford’s Theater on the Factor. I would love to talk with her. Also, the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois has invited me to do a book signing out there. Trying to work that out. By the way there are now more than 1 million copies of Killing Lincoln in print and the book continues selling well.

We well understand our enemies are full of rage of that success. We also know the media lies at will with no accountability. Killing Lincoln in an honest book that you will enjoy and learn from, and that every American student should read.

And all the gutter sniping in the world is not going to change that.

But a Ford’s Theatre spokeswoman sent out a press release today announcing that a separate gift store in the lobby of the historic site will carry the book.

“While we understand the National Park Service’s concerns about the book, we decided to let our visitors judge the book themselves,” said Paul Tetreault, director of Ford’s Theatre Society, according to the release.

Conspicuously silent in all this has been O’Reilly himself and publisher Henry Holt, which has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

UPDATE: Politico has O’Reilly’s response:

The Fox News host told POLITICO that the attack on his book about President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination is “a concerted effort by people who don’t like me to diminish the book.”

…

O’Reilly said he was speaking out about the controversy because “you ignore most of it but we were getting a little bit tired.”

He also shot back at Emerson’s claims about the book’s mistakes, saying there are just four errors in his 325-page work— and two of those are typos.

O’Reilly will also address the matter on his show tonight. A couple things worth noting here: Expert reviewers have identified many more than four errors in the book, including at least one whole passage that an expert reviewer North & South magazine said is flatly untrue. The review in North & South alone lists about 10 errors. Second, the suggestion by O’Reilly that a nonpartisan National Park Service official who works at Ford’s Theatre is out to get him is a bit difficult to take seriously.

The review (which is not online) appears in the November issue of North & South, the official magazine of the Civil War Society.

“The narrative contains numerous errors of people, place, and events,” writes reviewer Edward Steers Jr., author of more than five books on the Lincoln assassination. He goes on to list about 10 errors of fact in “Killing Lincoln,” which O’Reilly co-authored with Martin Dugard and which has been atop bestseller lists for weeks.

A farm where John Wilkes Booth hid after the killing was not 500 acres, as O’Reilly says. It was 217 acres, according to the review.

O’Reilly refers to John Ford’s chief carpenter as John J. Clifford. In fact, according to the review, his name was Gifford.

“Lewis Powell, the man assigned to kill secretary of state William Seward, did not speak with ‘an Alabama drawl.’ He was from Florida,” the review notes.

Steers adds that one entire passage of the book about co-conspirator Mary Surratt is flat-out untrue:

The authors write that she was forced to wear a padded hood when not on trial, and that she was imprisoned in a cell aboard the monitor Montauk, which was “barely habitable.” She suffered from “claustrophobia and disfigurement caused by the hood,” and was “barely tended to by her captors.” “Sick and trapped in this filthy cell, Mary Surratt took on a haunted, bloated appearance.” None of this is true. Mary Surratt was never shackled or hooded at any time. She was never imprisoned aboard the Montauk, but taken to the Carroll Annex of the Old Capitol Prison before being transferred to the women’s section of the Federal Penitentiary at the Washington’s Arsenal.   

Concludes Steers:

“If all of the above sounds like nitpicking, consider this. If the authors made mistakes in names, places, and events, what else did they get wrong? How can the reader rely on anything that appears in ‘Killing Lincoln’?”

I’ve asked O’Reilly’s publisher, Henry Holt, for comment, and I will update this post if I hear back.