It was inevitable that Fox host Bill O'Reilly would weigh in on the Planned Parenthood/Komen Foundation controversy. And perhaps just as inevitable that he'd mangle the facts along the way.

Here he is, on Friday night (2/3/12):

Last year the Komen Foundation gave Planned Parenthood $680,000. Now, that is the source of controversy because as you know, Planned Parenthood is primarily in business to provide abortions, more than 300,000 each year.

Later he added:

Planned Parenthood does not give women who visit its clinics the other side of the abortion story because again PP is in business for abortion.

Here is Planned Parenthood's breakdown of medical services (h/t Ezra Klein):

O'Reilly was fortunate enough to book an opposing guest--talk radio host Leslie Marshall--who wasn't prepared to argue this point:

O'REILLY: OK their big business, Planned Parenthood is abortion. And lobbying for abortion, would you concede that?

MARSHALL: I would concede that they perform abortions and they are politically --

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: No the largest part of their business, the most things that they get involved in concerns abortion, would you concede that.

MARSHALL: I can't because I've heard a good argument on both sides and information on both sides.

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: OK, well, all right, there is no good argument. The absolute truth is PP is in business for abortion; 300,000 a year and they make tons of money from it.

Mitt Romney might need some help defending his considerable wealth or controversial career in private equity. But he doesn't need the kind of help Bill O'Reilly is offering.

Mitt Romney's declaration that he pays about a 15 percent tax rate on his income has generated plenty of chatter, in part because it confirms that much of the Republican candidate's yearly income is taxed at a rate appropriate for capital gains and dividend income--much lower than if Romney were actually working for a living.

But enter into the picture Fox host Bill O'Reilly, who apparently thought he should rescue Romney by making an argument that even the candidate himself isn't making--that Romney is being taxed twice. On a segment last night (1/18/12) with two progressive guests (an exceedingly rare sight on Fox), O'Reilly explained things to Heather McGhee of the think tank Demos:

O'REILLY: Do you know what the 15 percent rate is all about. Do you understand that?

McGHEE: Yes, absolutely it's about his capital gains.

O'REILLY: OK, so ordinary income in Romney's tax bracket taxed at 35 percent, right.

McGHEE: Yes.

O'REILLY: OK, so he already got taxed 35 percent on his investment money. It's already been paid. So then he invests it, all right, and he gets more money from the investment in which he pays another 15 percent on top of the 35 percent of anything that he makes.... So isn't it misleading to tell the public, as Warren Buffett has done, that Romney's whole resume is a 15 percent deal? Isn't that misleading?

This would be slightly more convincing if it were accurate. As Pat Garofalo pointed out at Think Progress (1/17/12):

One of the reasons Romney is able to drive his tax rate down so low is that he is still earning money from his private equity firm, Bain Capital, that is likely subject to a pernicious tax loophole. This loophole lets wealthy money mangers like Romney pay the capital gains tax rate on profits they make investing other people's money, turning the justification for having a lower capital gains tax rate completely on its head.

The other guest on O'Reilly's show--Public Citizen's David Arkush-- tried to point this out:

O'REILLY: But Mr. Arkush, do you see my point here about Mitt Romney? He paid his fair share, 35 percent on the money he made when he was in the work force. He got out of the work force and he's living on his investments and paying another 15 percent on top of the 35. One percent, and I'm in that 1 percent, pay 37 percent of the income, and you're going to sit there and tell me I'm not paying my fair share? Come on.

ARKUSH: Well, I actually think you're mistaken about Mitt Romney. One of the things that's going on here is he's actually exploiting a tax loophole in paying only 15 percent. He didn't pay 35 percent on his original income. He got to treat ordinary income, which most people would pay a regular tax rate on, as capital gains.

It was at this point that O'Reilly interrupted:

Did he do anything illegal? Did he do anything illegal, Mr. Arkush?

Of course, that's entirely missing the point, which is that  a perfectly legal tax loophole allows Romney to earn millions of dollars and pay little in income taxes. If Romney were really being taxed twice, as O'Reilly seems to think is the case, you'd think he might make that argument himself.

O'Reilly closed the segment by telling his guests, "We're going to continue the discussion; I think you're both good guests." Let's hope it corrects his misinformation.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claims he was accosted by a "screaming" man "armed with a cell phone camera" on December 7 while walking to a media party at the White House in Washington, D.C. On his show the next night (O'Reilly Factor, 12/8/11), O'Reilly explained,

I told the guy to get lost, but he came closer and closer, armed with a cell phone camera. When he was about a foot away, I turned to shield myself and my assistant with an umbrella. At this point, we were just a few feet away from the White House gate.

According to O'Reilly, at the White House gate he tried to get the Secret Service and the D.C. police to arrest the man, but was told by a police officer that according to the law, no assault had occurred. Claiming the police had also told him that his tormenter was a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Fox News host concluded his commentary with an attack on OWS:

Ironically, a few nights ago, I told you bad things were going to happen because these occupy protesters are becoming increasingly aggressive. But I never thought it was going to happen to me. However, these anarchists are now everywhere.

The problem with O’Reilly's account is…just about everything. As the videotape posted by interviewer Branden Lane shows, he was not screaming, he was much more than a foot away when O'Reilly opened his umbrella at him (apparently hitting his camera in the process), and did not appear threatening as he straightforwardly asked O'Reilly if he was returning from a fundraiser for Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.

One could argue that the man was less threatening and intrusive, and more professional, than the video teams O'Reilly sends to ambush subjects while they are at their homes or on vacation or when they are with their young children. In fact, O'Reilly's producers have actually physically interfered with subjects on some of their ambush stakeouts.

Conservative David Frum writes in the new issue of New York:

Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day. For sport, I’d always answer, "I'm available--but does your senior producer know you’ve called me?" An hour later, I'd receive an embarrassed second call: "We've decided to go in a different direction."

This is interesting. Up to this point we've only been familiar with progressives--including FAIR staffers--who have been invited, and then promptly uninvited, to appear on Fox. There have also been reports about journalists who were critical of Fox who are barred from appearing.

In other Fox-related news, Bill O'Reilly last night proved that irony is alive and well, announcing that he'd be doing a segment on what the cable news networks should do when people "lie on the air." Naturally, the lie he wants corrected is about something someone said about Bill O'Reilly. Later on, he told guest Bernie Goldberg:

I mean, on this program, if a guest says something that is untrue on this program, I will correct it as soon as we know it's untrue. And I think all the networks should have that rule in place. You have to do that.

Totally in agreement. But what about when the untruths come from the host?

On his Friday night show, Bill O'Reilly took his viewers to a magical place--one where the right-wing Koch brothers have no connection to the Tea Party movement, while Occupy Wall Street is a secret project directed and financed by the likes of Moveon.org, SEIU and  George Soros.

At the top of his broadcast, O'Reilly wondered if we are now in "phase two of the campaign to undermine America"--this would apparently be the phase where activists protest against police brutality, with an assist from "the radical MoveOn organization, which is funding some of the occupiers."

As he explained his conspiracy theory:

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is not a spontaneous protest against economic inequality. It is a well-thought-out campaign to bring down the infrastructure of this country, to turn us into a Western European-type entitlement state.

That's what George Soros, MoveOn, the SEIU and many far-left journalists want. And they are using the protests to that end.

Moments later, O'Reilly was "interviewing" Fox News contributor Leslie Marshall, who mentioned the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers. That left O'Reilly visibly upset:

O'REILLY: OK, well, you can believe anything you want, you're an American, but you made a statement that the Koch brothers were tied into the Tea Party financially. Can you prove that?

MARSHALL: Well, the Koch Brothers (INAUDIBLE) such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

O'REILLY: Can you prove it. Wait. Wait, wait, wait, Leslie.

MARSHALL: Yes.

O'REILLY: Leslie, you're a Fox News contributor. You have a responsibility. Can you prove the Koch brothers are tied into the Tea Party financially? Can you?

MARSHALL: With a check in hand, no.

O'REILLY: OK. Thank you.

While it's certainly the responsibility of a guest to be able to document such facts, it's rather unlikely that O'Reilly would have accepted any such facts anyway.

Do the Koch brothers have anything to do with the Tea Party? Well, yes. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation was founded by Charles Koch, and has served to train Tea Party activists. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker (8/30/10):

Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement's inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a website offering supporters "Tea Party Talking Points." The Arizona branch urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged members to sign up for "Taxpayer Tea Party Registration" and provided directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion. The North Carolina branch recently launched a "Tea Party Finder" website, advertised as "a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina."

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to "educate," fund and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.

Or as one source rather colorfully put it:

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party: "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud--and they're our candidates!"

And Dick Armey's FreedomWorks group, which has very publicly helped organize Tea Party activists, is the product of a merger between Empower America and Citizens for a Sound Economy--the latter heavily backed by the Koch brothers.

So other than founding and funding the groups that have been key organizers and trainers of the Tea Party movement, the Kochs have little to do with it.

Don't tell that to Bill O'Reilly, though. He can only connect certain dots:

This isn't a spontaneous demonstration against crony capitalism. If it were, they would be in front of the White House. This is organized by the unions backed up by George Soros and the MoveOn people.

The links between those groups and OWS prompted the other guest, Caroline Heldman,  to turn the tables on O'Reilly:

HELDMAN: Bill, do you have evidence to back up those links? Do you have evidence?

O'REILLY: Yes, absolutely, we have reporters down there all the time and the reporters ask people who they are, where they are going. The spontaneous people are back to their jobs; 85 percent of them, Dr. Heldman, have jobs. You can't stay off the job for a month. I can back what I say up.

Now THAT is evidence--Fox-style.

The country is on the brink of bankruptcy, Fox host Bill O'Reilly warned last night--all because Barack Obama is spending too much money. Drastic cuts are required, but "the far-left loons want to spend more."

And he's got the number to prove it:

In 2007, during the Bush administration, federal deficit spending was $161 billion, despite the Iraq and Afghan wars. Four years later under President Obama, the deficit spending is $1.3 trillion, eight times as much.

To be fair, the economy collapsed on Bush's watch, and both Republicans and Democrats committed almost a trillion dollars to prop up the economy. As we all know, the stimulus spending did not work very well.

But the Obama administration has not cut back. Today the feds are spending $9.8 billion every day. That breaks down to $410 million per hour. Tax revenue has actually gone up. It's 21 percent higher this year than last, but there's no way Americans can bring down the federal debt with their tax dollars. The spending is just too massive.

It would be surprising to find out that government tax receipts increased 21 percent. They didn't. O'Reilly is misreading the Wall Street Journal editorial where he got these number, which says that "federal receipts grew by 6.5 percent in fiscal 2011, including a 21.6 percent gain in individual income tax revenues."

Actually, the whole piece is unhelpful to his argument, since it argues that the rise in spending has actually been pretty modest over Obama's term;  it actually fell slightly from fiscal year 2009 to 2010. And the current deficit as a share of GDP--which is a better way to measure the deficit anyway--has dropped over the past two years.

And it's not clear why O'Reilly would choose the 2007 fiscal year to compare Bush's record to Obama's--unless the point is to make Obama look worse. The 2008 deficit was $459 billion.

O'Reilly says that he "is playing Paul Revere" here.  More like Chicken Little.

Fox's coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has often looked and sounded like Glenn Beck were still working there.

On Friday's broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor (10/14/11), Beck was there to show how wild conspiracy-mongering is done:

O'REILLY: What's the George Soros factor here?

BECK: George Soros is connected with this through the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation, his Open Society and Code Pink are involved in what is called the Wall Street Journal... Occupied Wall Street Journal. And it is a--it's a full color newspaper.

O'REILLY: Right.

BECK: You know what it costs to print a newspaper.

O'REILLY: Somebody is behind that.

BECK: Huge money. Huge money.

O'REILLY: Right, and what's the editorial bent of the newspaper?

BECK: Revolution.

O'REILLY: OK, overthrow?

BECK: Yes, I mean, you know, collapse the system.

Beck manages to names names. SEIU and the Working Families Party are involved in what is obviously a global Marxist revolution. (Some of the evidence has been erased from Craigslist, but Beck has it.)

And, Beck warns, it goes all the way to the White House. Barack Obama is a "street organizer.... He knows everything that's going on, he knows all the people that are involved." Beck went on to predict that there will be violence, and that Van Jones will emerge to reap the benefits.

To be fair, O'Reilly offered another take, one more sympathetic to the protests. That came courtesy of Geraldo Rivera.

Last night's O'Reilly Factor (10/13/11), with guest Megyn Kelly, talking about how to deal with Iran:

BILL O'REILLY: What do we do?

MEGYN KELLY: It's a political question for President Obama and a military question for him, but it's not really much of a legal question because legally he can do it.

O'REILLY: OK.

KELLY: If he wants to do it....

O'REILLY: Let me stop you there. So there's no difference between killing bin Laden, Al-Awlaki with a drone? OK. Just today they killed another big terrorist guy in Pakistan with a drone. We could drop a drone right down Ahmadinejad's nose legally?

KELLY: We can go after Iran. We can start a military conflict with Iran. President Obama can do that tomorrow.

O'REILLY: With the drones. Boom.

KELLY: Just the same way...

O'REILLY: Ahmadinejad, ah.

KELLY: Look what we did in Libya. It's a lot more than what you are talking about right now. And he didn't seek congressional authority. Although he should have, technically, under the law. But even if he didn't, which he didn't, no one has ever gone after a president for doing this.

O'REILLY: OK. So legally, he could take the mullahs out. He could take Ahmadinejad out. He could send them a message, saying, "Look, you try to do this on our soil, here's what happens to you."

KELLY: The law is, technically, he's supposed to have an imminent threat against the homeland. Or....

O'REILLY: I think blowing up an embassy in Washington is an imminent threat. Do you?

KELLY: But that's been stopped. So technically....

O'REILLY: But the fact that it's been stopped doesn't really matter, because the threat is still there.

It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O'Reilly channeling Beck's Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard:

On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren't exactly sure.

What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are being organized by some very interesting people. Does the name MoveOn.org mean anything to you? How about George Soros? Well, for the first time, MoveOn, funded in part by Soros, has openly allied itself with the protesters.

In addition, we have some unions in the mix: the United Auto Workers, the United Federation of Teachers and, of course, the always reliable SEIU. Of course, not all workers in those unions support bringing down capitalism. They don't. But their leadership is certainly sympathetic to the demonstrators.

But, again, what do these people want?

The common thread seems to be "income equality." Groups like the Working Families Party and the Strong Economy for All Coalition are basically socialistic outfits. They want the government to take money away from the affluent and give it to them, a nice deal if you can get it. And you can get it in places like Cuba and Zimbabwe.

The big money behind these protesters, Soros, he doesn't want socialism. Soros is the biggest capitalist on the planet. He wants power and these groups are using the far-left zealots to try to achieve that.

In case your tinfoil hat is not getting good reception, O'Reilly's point is that MoveOn endorsed Occupy Wall Street two weeks after it started, and George Soros contributed to MoveOn in 2003-04, and therefore Soros is "the big money behind these protesters."

Maybe the chalkboard would help.

Yesterday's AP "factcheck" (9/20/11) of Barack Obama's speech about raising taxes on the super-wealthy cleverly debunked an argument that Obama didn't make. No one is saying that all millionaires pay a lower rate than their secretaries--Warren Buffett drew attention because he said he did, and there are undoubtedly other multi-millionaires in the same boat. As Dean Baker observed at Beat the Press today (9/21/11):

President Obama made a simple and true statement in his speech on the budget Monday. He said that there were millionaires and billionaires who pay tax at a lower rate than middle income families.

Many news outlets went to town to point out that on average millionaires and billionaires pay tax at a higher rate than middle income families. Of course this is not what Obama said. He was pointing out that some of the richest people in the country (Warren Buffet was his model) get most or all of their income as capital gains and therefore only pay taxes at the 15 percent capital gains rate.

Baker recommends a piece in today's New York Times (9/21/11) that was more factual than AP's factcheck:

In 2009, 238,000 households filed returns with adjusted gross incomes of at least $1 million. One-quarter of them paid an effective federal income tax rate of less than 15 percent, the data shows, and 1,470 paid no federal income tax at all....

Though the group is small, the dollars are large. For the top 400 taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate has dropped from 29 percent in 1993 to 18 percent in 2008. The average adjusted gross income of those 400 households was $271 million. By comparison, households with $50,000 to $75,000 in income paid an effective rate of 15 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But the AP piece has legs--a Slate article noted: "But as a general point, Buffett is wrong: In aggregate, richer earners do pay higher rates." The link goes to the AP factcheck. Again--Buffett was talking about himself and others like him. It would not seem to be a hard concept to grasp, but for whatever reason there are reporters who seem interested in protected the super-wealthy.

In other tax news: Fox's Bill O'Reilly has apparently threatened to quit working if his taxes go up. Let's hope Congress considers the enormously positive political and social effects this could have on American life.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly knows a thing or two about boundaries.

As he told his TV audience Monday night, some "far-left" radicals crossed the line on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a blog post about how some Republican politicians turned the attacks into a "wedge issue," and referred to George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani as "fake heroes."

O'Reilly's reaction: Krugman is "insulting his country on the anniversary of 9/11. That is truly despicable."

O'Reilly had a little left in tank, so he went after former Times reporter Chris Hedges for writing this:

Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement.... We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists, too.

O'Reilly got down to his point:

The reason I am even pointing out the rantings of these far-left loons is that some of their more moderate confederates do not condemn the statements. I mean, the New York Times actually pays Krugman to spout this stuff. Yeah, we have freedom of speech, but there's also a responsibility in the journalistic and political communities, is there not?

Sure, let's talk about media figures using responsible rhetoric. Let's start with Bill O'Reilly's call for brutal attacks on a number of countries right after 9/11:

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, the channel's most popular host, declared on his September 17 broadcast that if the Afghan government did not extradite Osama bin Laden to the U.S., "the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble--the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads." O'Reilly went on to say:

This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.

O'Reilly added that in Iraq, "their infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain.... Maybe then the people there will finally overthrow Saddam." If Libya's Moammar Gadhafi does not relinquish power and go into exile, "we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mine the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. We also destroy all the airports in Libya. Let them eat sand."

Lucky for O'Reilly, there are few sanctions in corporate media--at Fox or anywhere else--for that kind of bloodthirsty rhetoric.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly laughs off any calls for increasing government spending to help create jobs. Last week he derided Paul Krugman for

demanding more stimulus spending. And this guy teaches economics at Princeton University? Unbelievable.

People like Bill O'Reilly don't pay any mind to the fancy pants Nobel Prize committee that gave Krugman one of their liberal awards. Why should he? He knows how the economy really works, as he explained last night (8/8/11):

Raising income taxes is not the way out of this. In 2001 and again in 2003, President Bush cut individual tax rates. And what happened? Well, from 2004 until 2008, tax revenue increased from about $800 billion to almost $1.2 trillion. That blows away the liberal argument that tax cuts starve the government of revenue. They don't.

This has been, at times, a talking point among conservatives. But you don't really get a sense of tax revenue without comparing it to something-- as FactCheck.org noted in a piece in 2007 (when John McCain was saying much the same about the Bush tax cuts), revenues tend to increase every year as the economy grows.

A more useful measure would be how tax revenue looks relative to the size of the economy. As the Economic Policy Institute put it in a recent report (6/1/11) on the 10-year anniversary of the Bush cuts:

• Federal tax revenue fell from 20.6 percent of GDP in FY2000 (the last year of the 1991-2000 expansion and reflective of
Clinton-era tax rates) to 18.5 percent of GDP in FY2007 (the last year of the Bush economic expansion and reflective of
Bush-era tax rates).

• From 2001 through 2010, the cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt, nearly 50 percent of the total debt accrued
during this period.

• The decade of the Bush tax cuts had, on average, lower revenue levels as a share of the economy than any previous
decade since the 1950s.

That would be (part of) the "liberal argument" against the Bush tax cuts--and it doesn't appear to be "blown away" by O'Reilly's too-good-for-Princeton economic analysis.

On Tuesday FAIR documented that Fox host Bill O'Reilly called for the prosecution of media outlets that published Sarah Palin's hacked emails in 2008-- which might mean, if he were at all consistent, that O'Reilly wants to see his boss Rupert Murdoch do some hard time over the far more serious News Corp. hacking scandal.

FAIR's research showed up on Keith Olbermann's Countdown program on Current last night-- where O'Reilly was named The Worst Person in the World. Watch it (starts at around the 2:15 mark):

On last night's Fox show (6/23/11), O'Reilly gave viewers a lesson in... well, something:

So why is this happening? Well, it all boils down to political philosophy. President Obama is a liberal guy who believes the feds should run the economic show, and he hired advisers who believe that as well. The administration then set out to fight the recession by spending government money, the so-called stimulus, and that ran up trillions of dollars of debt.

Historically, the way out of recessions is to give the private sector lower tax rates and reward businesses for hiring people. But the Obama administration has resisted that.

Even by Bill O'Reilly standards this is remarkably off-base. Obama's liberalism aside (this is the guy who declared, "I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."), who are his left-wing economic advisers? Larry Summers? Most assessments of the Obama team were that his picks were not "ideological"-- which was intended to reassure anyone worried about any drift to the left.

The stimulus package-- a mix of spending and tax cuts-- cost around $787 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates its 10-year cost to be slightly higher than that ($821 billion), which is still miles away from "trillions." The deficit/debt problems that O'Reilly is concerned with are due primarily to the Bush tax cuts, the recession and the Iraq/Afghan wars. The spending associated with economic recovery plays a small role.

It is unclear where O'Reilly would get the idea that history tells us that lower corporate tax rates and slashing spending is the way out of a recession. I mean, it's been tried, but I think the consensus is that the results weren't all that great.

Last night (6/6/11), Fox News host Sean Hannity was talking with WorldNetDaily's  Joe Farah:

FARAH: Charles Rangel is still in the House. Barney Frank is still in the House. Bill Clinton is getting awards. Gerry Studds got a standing ovation from House Democrats. This is a guy who had sex with a congressional page, correct?

HANNITY: But what about--you know, you think back when Republican scandals come up, they all bail out. I can't think of one that ever stayed, can you?

He's got a point. Except for Republican Sen. David Vitter (prostitution scandal, still in office). And Republican Sen. John Ensign (extramarital affair, investigation over payments and favors for his lover's spouse), who stuck around for two years after his scandal surfaced.  Oh, and there's Republican Sen. Larry Craig, who was arrested for lewd conduct in a bathroom in June 2007 and finished out his term. And also Republican South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, whose extramarital affair made headlines in mid-2009 when he disappeared from public life to visit his girlfriend. (Remember his cover story about hiking the Appalachian Trail?)

Then there's Fox favorite Rudy Giuliani, who literally paraded his then-girlfriend Judith Nathan around town in 2000, announcing his intention to file for divorce in a televised press conference.

In the non-politician realm, Hannity needn't look far for other examples. Bill O'Reilly, anyone?