Smoke gets in your lies

They asked me how I knew

None of this was true

Oh I of course replied

It cannot be denied

Bill O'Rielly lied

 -With apologies to Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach-

Newspapers have long been chastised for either getting it wrong or just plain lying on the front page and apologizing or retracting on the last page.  And then there's Fox News where the lies never stop, the lies never die -- ever.

On a recent Thursday night, Lyin' Bill  O'Reilly told us he'd found a "smoking gun" of some unspecified sort because  former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had visited the White House 157 times between 2009 and 2012. One has to wonder what kind of smoke it was or into what orifice it was being blown since in actuality, as it came out the following day, the story was fake, Shulman having only attended 11 events having to do with health care, far fewer than he had been cleared to attend and having nothing to do with any kind of scandal, real or imagined. 

"You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions."

 Not much need to actually, Shulman had been cleared, as the public record shows, to meet, mostly in other venues than the White House with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill.  Still he did not attend 146 of them. Is it possible, under oath or not to explain what one was doing at a place one was not?  Perhaps Lyin' Bill would like to explain what he was doing in North Korea 157 times.  What?  He wasn't there?  Now there's a smoking gun for sure.

But it's too good a story for Fox to let go, even if it's not true, so although the debunking was thorough, Lyin' Bill was at it the next day saying:

 "We still don't know much about former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visiting the White House 157 times.  That's extraordinary."

No, of course we don't know what he was doing there when he wasn't there to do anything and  if anything is extraordinary it's Lyin' Bill's ability to charge about like a bull in the arena with all sorts of facts stuck in his hide like banderillas and  bellowing discredited and debunked charges ad nauseam. Of course we're talking about Fox News here and their garbled and disreputable gospels have a following of the faithful and of course it was picked up as divine word by Investor's Business Daily and metastasised through the drainage system of the Blog world where, at least in the minds of the Right, it became true.

You know we still don't know about Bill O'Reilly meeting 157 times with Kim Jong Un to discuss an attack on Hawaii.  I think he needs to explain under oath just what he was doing there don't you?