Lawrence O'Donnell scoffed on his Tuesday show at Bill O'Reilly's threat to end his cable news program if his taxes are raised.
O'Reilly warned on his Monday show that, "if Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50 percent, which is very possible, I don't know how much longer I'm going to do this."
O'Donnell took several minutes to unpack this statement. He first noted that Congress, not Obama, holds the taxation power, and that O'Reilly should have mentioned that body in his threat. "O'Reilly has to lie about everything in that statement in order to make it credible to his audience, whose gullibility he has precisely calculated in the lies that he's loaded into that sentence," he said.
O'Donnell also pointed out that the highest anybody is attempting to get the income tax rate is 39.6 percent, not 50, and that O'Reilly "very happily started doing the O'Reilly Factor and became a multi-millionaire" under that tax bracket. Thus, O'Donnell concluded that, if his taxes were raised, O'Reilly would "do the O'Reilly Factor every night and get richer and richer and richer." The notion that a difference of around $400,000 in his multi-million dollar paycheck would make O'Reilly bolt was ridiculous, he said.
The notion that O'Reilly is a serial liar with a gullible audience is not a new one for O'Donnell. He condemned O'Reilly in almost the exact same terms back in February, when he also called his timeslot rival a "joke."
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