Bill O’Reilly is Still a Lying Sack of Shit
He's still fuming over Tom Coburn calling Nancy Pelosi a "nice lady." But O'Reilly is really mad about Coburn's claim that Fox News says that people who don't pay for health insurance would go to jail. "Nobody's ever said it."
Coburn told an Oklahoma town hall meeting that "the intention is not to put anybody in jail. That makes for good TV news on FOX but that isn't the intention." O'Reilly took issue with that, saying, "we researched on Fox News if anybody had ever said you're going to jail if you don't buy health insurance. Nobody's ever said it."
So Time magazine's swampland blog did a search of Fox News' transcripts and found several instances on the network where everyone from Glenn Beck (surprise!) to Sean Hannity (bigger surprise!) has claimed insurance evaders will face time in Obamacare gulags. Here are just a few examples:
GLENN BECK, November 12, 2009
BECK: They justify the $1 dollar health care plan by saving, you know, money through some magical fairy money. I don't know how they're going to do it. They don't play by the rules the rest of us have to play by, because they make them up as they go! But if you don't play by their new rules on health care — oh, here's a new little twist. Have you heard this? You're going to be looking at a fun little stint in jail.
MUELLER: We are losing freedom. The Berlin Wall anniversary is just the other day. And these are the kind of policies that used to be imposed on people behind that wall. One problem we're going to have, though, Sean, they're going to have, though, Sean, they're going to have to do something about prisons. They're going to put all these people in jail. It cost $50,000 a year to take care of a prisoner. So they're going to have to do prison reform.
HANNITY: That's going to be true.
MUELLER: Democrats don't like to do prisons.
HANNITY: Put people in jail if they don't get their government mandated health? We're going to tax business. We're going to tax individuals. There's going to be fines. There's going to be penalties. There's a millionaire's tax. We're paying for it through the wall. This is what you want?
You may want to hire some new fact-checkers, Bill.