Entertaining post at Media Matters, picking up on Fox News host, Bill O’Reilly.

During a discussion with a Fox News military analyst on his radio show, O’Reilly got a little carried away:

I hate to blow my own horn, Colonel, but … on the night that Saddam’s statue fell … I said on the air, ‘Hey, look at these guys looting the armories. What’s that all about? You can’t let those people do that.’ … As soon as I saw that, I went, ‘Holy you-know-what, there’s no plan to institute martial law and to take step-by-step reconstruction of this
country.’

The MediaMatters team have tracked down the transcripts from that night, and erm…it’s hard to find that exact quote. Instead, sit back and enjoy a little selection from the O’Reilly Factor back in April 9th, 2003, as Bill and Newt Gingrich exult over the fall of Baghdad, taking an opportunity to stick it to everyone from President Jacques Chirac to – well, these guys:

O’REILLY: Did you know – did you know, Mr. Speaker, that the BBC didn’t run the statue, cut away to an earthquake in India instead of running the most visual moment in the last 10 years – the BBC?

GINGRICH: Sure.

O’REILLY: The BBC!

GINGRICH: Now, look, the BBC has been for years totally owned by left-wingers who are viscerally anti-American. The BBC American channel may be the most anti-American channel, at least as anti-American as Al Jazeera.

It’s an ideological bias of the British left. They hated Margaret Thatcher. They hated Ronald Reagan. They cheerfully hate George W. Bush. I’m talking now about the BBC‘s left-wing board of directors and the BBC’s left-wing reporters. That’s just reality.

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives obviously making a very early pitch there as a possible future chair of the BBC…