“Remember when she said, ‘well who cares how this happened,’ in a rather emotional way?” McCain asked guest host Martha Raddatz. “A lot of people care.” It’s too bad Raddatz didn’t tell the senator that no, she didn’t remember that – because Clinton never said it.

Remarkably, I’ve seen no one follow up on McCain’s misstatement today either. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.) Instead, reporters are breathlessly parsing each new GOP charge on Benghazi (while also decrying the very real abuse of the IRS overscrutinizing the tax-exempt status of conservative groups.) The National Journal’s Ron Fournier tweeted “Welcome to the 90s,” with no apparent irony or self-awareness about the role of the media in ginning up that decade of phony scandals that paralyzed our last popular second-term Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

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O'Reilly blasted David Sirota again at the 5:12 mark in the segment below, saying Sirota hopes it's a "right wing militia, neo-nazi nut" who perpetrated the bombings to push Sirota's own personal political agenda:

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In honor of the Los Angeles Lakers retiring Shaquille O'Neal's No. 34 tonight, HuffPost Live hosted a conversation today with Shaquille O'Neal, Kurt Rambis and The Big Aristotle himself. About halfway through the conversation, a viewer posed a question about homosexuality in sports:

"I'm wondering if you think that organizations and players and athletes could be or need to be more inclusive of gay athletes and more welcoming to the gay community in general."

Host Marc Lamont Hill, best known for playing Bill O'Reilly's foil on Fox News, tried to distance himself from the question with a dismissive, "Who wants to take that one?"

Jackson responded:

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“The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals,” O’Reilly said. “That is where the compelling argument is. We’re Americans, we just want to be treated like everybody else.” He continued: “That’s a compelling argument, and to deny that you’ve got to have a very strong argument on the other side. And the other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the Bible.”

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"Now, this would be much ado about nothing, if not for the fact that trivial attacks on President Obama are obscuring serious problems in this country," O'Reilly said, also noting that "every other president in history has lived in comfort, and it looks like President Bush the younger had a bigger White House budget than Barack Obama does."

"This is a trivial pursuit, and Michelle Bachmann made a mistake pursuing it," he added.

Bachmann had slammed Obama last week in her CPAC speech for his presidential "perks" that waste taxpayer money, specifically citing the Secret Service, the White House dog-walker, and movie nights.

Watch:

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The hip, bespectacled journalist is preparing to take over the covetable 8 p.m. time slot vacated by Ed Schultz's "The Ed Show" — network executives have moved Schultz to Saturday and Sunday evenings. Hayes has hosted "Up With Chris Hayes" since September 2011, and established quite a following in less than two years of carrying a show.

"Chris has done an amazing job creating a franchise on weekend morning," network president Phil Griffin said in a statement. "He’s an extraordinary talent and has made a strong connection with our audience. This is an exciting time for MSNBC."

Griffin is banking on Hayes -- and possible Hayes's morning slot replacement Ezra Klein -- to make MSNBC a household name. Well, a liberal household name, at least. “Our awareness level, people who can define who we are, is much lower than Fox and CNN,” Mr. Griffin told the New York Times. The network president has been building out a brand identity through the steady recruitment of ever-younger, ever-more progressive on-air talent. Of the network's gravitation to the left, former President Bill Clinton remarked, “Boy, it really has become our version of Fox.”

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But both came under serious fire. As former Salon politics editor Jefferson Morley pointed out, O'Reilly fabricated a story in "Killing Kennedy," saying he heard an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald commit suicide when, in fact, O'Reilly did not. And Justin Elliott has noted that O'Reilly's Lincoln assassination account was so grossly inaccurate that the historic site, the Ford Theater, refused to sell the book on its premises “because of the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.”

It remains to be seen how O'Reilly will spin what publisher Henry Holt and Co. describes as the retelling of "the story of Jesus of Nazareth as a beloved and controversial young revolutionary brutally killed by Roman soldiers," adding that "O’Reilly will recount the seismic political and historical events that made his death inevitable, and the changes his life brought upon the world for the centuries to follow.”

The book is due to hit shelves on Sept. 24.

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Persistent rumors have surfaced recently that Judd, a woman whose career highlights include humanitarian work in the Congo, campaigning for Barack Obama and making a movie with Dwayne Johnson, is mulling a run against Kentucky Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014. She reportedly met recently with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and has begun privately researching campaign strategy. Last month, she told reporters the people of Kentucky "need a fighter."

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In an incident detailed in the book (and flagged by media outlets including USA Today) O'Reilly claims he was tracking down an interview with George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian expat with possible CIA connections who was friends with Lee Harvey Oswald. Investigators looking into the JFK assassination were seeking information for de Mohnrenschildt when he reportedly committed suicide in 1977. According to "Killing Kennedy," O'Reilly was on the Russian's doorstep when he heard "the shotgun blast that marked the suicide."

But as Morley pointed out this week, this was pretty much dramatic baloney:

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The channel, better-known for nature documentaries, will debut "Killing Lincoln" next month, and has released a trailer; it's a close-up of what happens after the bulk of Steven Spielberg's recent biopic "Lincoln," and is based on O'Reilly's account of the 1865 assassination. Tom Hanks, who is both a longtime producer of acclaimed historical films for highbrow HBO and a cousin of Abraham Lincoln through his mother, serves as narrator.

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The Daily News:

So what happened to Hannity?

The going wisdom is that viewers who basked in his preelection anti-Obama rhetoric tuned him out when they were stunned to wake up on Nov. 7 and discover that the President had won a second term — a scenario that Hannity had all but promised could never happen.

Before the election, Hannity was riding high in the ratings and topped thought leaders on the right, like Dick Morris, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan and talk radio bulldog Mark Levin, who predicted Obama would lose in a landslide.

Hannity performed even worse in the "money-demo" of viewers aged 25-54. More than half of them deserted his show.

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The New York Times notes that his recently published presidential biographies, "Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever" and "Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot," have been the top two books on the list for the past full week, with the latter having sold about one million copies.

In fact, the Times suggests that O'Reilly might be "the most popular history author in America" in part due to his television fame, and partially due to the sheer volume of work he has pumped out over the years:

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"In New Jersey and the New York area, you don't have as much of a feeling of oppression. We have a very diverse population," says American Atheists managing director Amanda Knief, explaining the group's backing in rural and small-town America. She points out that their 2010 national convention in Newark, which included an Easter Sunday trip to the American Museum of Natural History, attracted few local participants. By contrast, the 2011 850-person Des Moines gathering drew more than half of its attendees from inside the state. "It was the first opportunity in Iowa for people who were non-religious to come together. And it was the first time where it was safe to do so."

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MCGUIRK: The war on Christmas is very, very real, and if you ask me, in addition to some grouchy misanthropic heathen atheists it has to do — at the root of it — it has to do with two things — abortion and the gay rights agenda, because Christianity is against those things. It’s subtle but that’s why it’s so pronounced in recent years, in my opinion.

O’REILLY: Hundred percent agree. I absolutely agree 100 percent that it's the diminishment of Christianity is the target and Christmas is the vehicle because the secularists know the opposition to their agenda -- legalized drugs is in there as well -- comes primarily from the Judeo-Christian traditionalist people.

Watch:

Via ThinkProgress/Towleroad.

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But what about Bill O'Reilly? He had his own meltdown on election night, blaming Obama's reelection on the disappearance of "traditional America" and "the white establishment." A few days later he began an ongoing jihad against "secular progressives" and the "far left" that was as fact-free as it was vicious. I wrote at the time that O'Reilly seemed to be going the way of Glenn Beck, who lost his Fox show after his paranoia and anti-Obama vitriol became too much even for Ailes.

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"I didn't know this, but Fordham University banned Ann Coulter," O'Reilly began breathlessly. In fact, the reason O'Reilly "didn't know this" is that it didn't happen.

Here's what happened: Fordham College Republicans invited Coulter to speak. Fordham president Joseph McShane wrote a letter lamenting their choice but supporting their right to make it. The College Republicans wrote a letter announcing they'd earlier "rescinded" the Coulter invitation, before McShane's rebuke, and lamenting that he hadn't spoken to them before going public with his reservations. Dissident Fordham College Republicans wrote letters complaining that their club had canceled Coulter, but none of them claimed she'd been "banned." I wrote about all of this Nov. 9 when it happened, but it was a Friday night, and O'Reilly was probably otherwise occupied.

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But I kept coming back to U.S. politics anyway. Hauntingly, Kelly repeats the phrase that drove British famine relief (or lack of it): they were so determined to end Irish "dependence on government" that they stalled or blocked provision of food, public works projects and other proposals that might have kept more Irish alive and fed. The phrase appears at least seven times, by my count, in the book. "Dependence on government:" Haven't we heard that somewhere?

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One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.

“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”

We can just about see Fox News sending a camera crew out to interview Skinch, and one of its handsomely paid straight men wrapping up the piece with an offhand, “See, you don’t need government handouts. If you don’t want to work, you can do what this guy does. At least he’s not a taker. The rest of us in this country, we’ll continue to work for a living.”

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