The No Spin Zone

Just inside the front cover of my copy of The No Spin Zone, bought used from Amazon.com for $1.43, which is $23.52 less than the suggested retail price and $1.35 more than it's worth, is scrawled "Happy Birthday Dad! I'm enjoying this book. I hope you do too! Love, Tom and Cindi."

Tom and Cindi, if your stupidity and hatred of your father are congenital defects, I apologize for mentioning this. Unfortunately, it soon becomes apparent just a few pages into The No Spin Zone that Tom and Cindi's Happy Birthday greeting is the most skillfully written part of the book.

As do his other literary offerings, The No Spin Zone amply demonstrates that O'Reilly continues to be locked in an epic struggle with his fans to determine who's dumber.

I've read four of Bill's books now, which should earn me some sort of medal. I'm sorry to say, however, that out of four glistening gold mines of insanity, I've brought you mere ingots. For the full experience, you'll have to read the books yourself. You can buy most of them on the Web for less than the price of renting Glitter.

Toward the end of The No Spin Zone, Bill treats the reader to a quintessential O'Reilly moment; it's braggadocio, stupidity, insanity, and obtuseness all rolled into one.

After a section on how the intelligentsia resent him and his success, O'Reilly relates his pride over having finally attained the lofty heights of Scooby-Doo and Joey Lawrence:

But the popular media are starting to come around. It took a while and we weathered some withering criticism, but in June 2001 I appeared on the cover of TV Guide, causing weeping and the gnashing of teeth in many quarters."

Wow, TV Guide? Maybe next he can get his old lady into Hustler.

Those Who Trespass

Following are the opening three sentences of Bill O'Reilly's novel, Those Who Trespass:

As Ron Costello saw it, the nighttime media party in Edgartown provided him a wide-open window of opportunity--one he could make the most of. For he was frustrated and fed up, and what he badly needed was to satisfy a basic human need, the need for some kind of physical release. Chasing the Clintons around the resort island of Martha's Vineyard, looking on as a cracker First Family acted out its vacation in front of millions, was not just tiring for him, but unnecessary.

As you can see, before he even broke the hundred-word mark of his great American novel, O'Reilly had already used the same word three times in the space of one sentence, got in a gratuitous shot at the Clintons, and telegraphed his own sick sexual fantasies through a fictional surrogate who, we would soon discover, just happened to be a reporter for a powerful television news network. Unfortunately, it doesn't get much better. Being a work of fiction, however, Those Who Trespass is fair and balanced. Except for that Clinton crack in the first paragraph. But after that it's completely free of petty partisanship. That is, until you get to page 4:

He could thoroughly describe the island--from the wilds of Chappaquiddick, where Edward Kennedy had abandoned a trapped and struggling Mary Jo Kopechne in a car filling with sea water, to the stately homes of Chilmark..."

That does a lot to advance the story. Toward the end of the first six pages of Those Who Trespass, available for free on Amazon.com, an assailant shoves a spoon through the roof of Costello's mouth, penetrating his brain stem. Just before this happens, Costello asks, "Why, why are you doing this to me?" The attacker responds, "For Argentina, that's why." It almost makes you want to track down page 7 and read it. But not quite.

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