Not having a television is probably a good thing. If I had one I'd end up watching Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter and having my blood pressure higher than the market's ever been under their president. I'd love to be able to ignore the two of them and the other members of the neo-con collective, but they're like beach sand in a bathing suit: they're everywhere and really irritating.

For reasons known only to NFL officials, Bill O'Reilly was asked to write an end-piece for the official Superbowl program. Keith Oberman of MSNBC has done a brilliant deconstruction of the facts in it. O'Reilly is famous for a variety of things-not just his penchant for loofahs, vibrators and phone sex-and one of them is his self-proclaimed lack of spin on issues. However, it only takes one example from the essay to point out that his devotion to telling the whole story is a bit weak.

O'Reilly, who grew up on Long Island, opens his essay by letting us know that he made the Marist College football team as a freshman-something he said not many freshmen did. He fails to point out that football at Marist College was a "club" sport. A club sport is one that has no serious support from the college, has no scholarships and while it does play against other schools, the players themselves foot most of the bills. (O'Reilly goes on to claim that he won the division punting title as a senior, but the Marist media guide for football doesn't even include punting in their compiled stats for the club years. (Marist College Football Media Guide, p.30))

I know the true nature of club sports because, at the University of Vermont, I played a year of club lacrosse.

The essay goes on to explain how playing football had a formative role in what O'Reilly has become. He recounts a story of how, in a tough game, he managed to punt the ball straight up into the air, gaining zero forward yardage-something contra-indicated when you're punting. "The crowd hushed, it took forever for the pigskin to come down." The impression created by that line, and O'Reilly's seemingly self-effacing description of his mortification, gives the impression that he was in a stadium packed with spectators. This is in direct contrast, however, with the photograph from his yearbook that shows him playing on an open field with trees in the background.

You might well ask yourself why would or should I care about what Bill O'Reilly writes in a puff-piece that virtually no one read? There are a number of reasons and very important ones. Demagogue that O'Reilly is, he is deft at shading the truth and through that shading wins legitimacy for himself that he does not deserve.

I noted above that I played club lacrosse at the University of Vermont. I was a goalie, which is the rough equivalent to being a bullet-catcher in a firefight. You're trying to stop a ball that's as hard as a hockey puck, travels just about a fast, and often gets skipped off the ground, converting a high shot into a low shot-and you're doing this while wearing a fraction of the padding a hockey goalie gets. (Yes, at my insanity hearing, my having been a lacrosse goalie will be the only exhibit needed.)

At Octoberfest in 1975 came the defining moment of my lacrosse career. The coach shouted my name. Chest-protector half hanging off, I was thrust into the goal in a penalty situation. We were a man down, and for the two minutes of that penalty, the pressure was on. The shots were relentless, smashing off my body. I punched shots out of the air. I smothered them with the stick. I even butt-ended one out. Things came at me so fast and furiously, I had no chance to count how many saves I made, but one thing was clear: on my watch, nothing made it into the goal.

Okay, so the above is written in that O'Reilly style, and while 100% true, it's spun with an O'Reilly flare. We had two club teams, the A and B team, and I was the B team's goalie. That day we both played on an open field on the Redstone campus. B team played it's first half first, then the A team and so on. At the end of our game, which I'm pretty sure we lost, the B team was off on the sidelines drinking beer from a keg. I remember it being a hot day, so the beer was welcome, and I don't remember even watching the A game. I was just relaxing with my pads hanging off.

All of a sudden the coach yelled for me. I ran over and saw the A team goalie coming out for a penalty. (That's bad, rarely are goalies sent off.) So, without even time to hitch the chest protector on correctly, I'm tossed into the goal. Shots did pound in, and with the luck God visits on the stupid, drunk and naïve, I managed to keep everything out . And I remember vividly butt-ending one shot out of the air, not because I did it with any sort of deliberation, but because it worked.

Most of all I remember the stunned looked on the other players' faces when I came trotting off. If I'd ever been able to do for a whole game what I did for two minutes, we could have smoked anyone we played. Sure, I rose to the challenge, but that's part of the job, right? You do the best you can when called upon. And that reason is why it's the defining moment of my career-likely remembered by no one but me and the poor schlub who had his shot butt-ended out of the air.

The big problem with O'Reilly's story is simple: he makes it into some great test of moral strength. Nonsense. He made a mistake. The other players on his team probably told him that it was okay and he should just "suck it up." O'Reilly, however, after thirty-five years, apparently still feels the need to find some greater moral value to his humiliation. Instead of accepting the fact that he could have made a mistake and living with it, he has to turn that defeat into a victory. A lot of twisted psychology at work there, but you can see it with every demagogue.

Secondly, O'Reilly's tale misses the essence of what athletic competition is all about. For him it's bragging-and his boasts of prowess have all the power of Al Bundy's remembering scoring four touchdowns in one game. That O'Reilly has to recount, this late in his life, what a stud he was on the football field is pathetic. After all, what's all that success compared, say, to building a house to Habitat for Humanity, helping orphans in Afghanistan or even risking life and limb to entertain troops on a USO tour as his nemesis, Al Franken, has done repeatedly?

The essence of sports is learning if you have it within yourself to give everything you've got. It's about the relationships you form with the other players. While everyone I'd played with was surprised at how well I'd done, they patted me on the back, told me I'd done well, and drew me another beer. I'd done my part. I'd done what they were counting on me to do, I upheld their trust in me, and that's what was important.

Third, and I'll admit to a personal prejudice here, O'Reilly's piece is pure egotism. The essay should have been about what makes football great, not what makes Bill O'Reilly great. As the old saying goes, "There is no I in team," yet for O'Reilly, the only discussion of teammates comes when he notes that so many years later it's this kick that he hears most mentioned when folks talk about his career. I have to say, if his reportage on this aspect of things is true, then he's got a bunch of teammates who seem to take great delight in puncturing O'Reilly's ego.

Why is O'Reilly's being a raging egomaniac a problem? Most guys who approach life that way get dismissed as the south end of a north-bound horse (and, lordy, there is a herd of them among the neo-cons). Egotists with power, however, become prima dona bullies who use their power to crush folks. (Just watch and see. If O'Reilly notices this essay and summons up the guts to address it, his attacks will be chuck full of personal slights, dismissing me as someone who could never have done what he's done, so all I have to offer is sour grapes and stupidity.)

The problem with having a bully in O'Reilly's position should be obvious. Bullies cannot tolerate competition. Since O'Reilly espouses his personal views as fact and reality, he can't risk opposition that could point out his errors. Since many folks come to him as a fount of wisdom, and actually believe he is fair and balanced in his presentations, their view of reality is born in O'Reilly's fantasyland.

And if that doesn't scare you, pretty much the only thing that will is Laura Bush running to replace her husband in 2008.

Last, and most dangerous, is O'Reilly's using his football experience to create an image of himself that isn't true. Others have been very good at pointing out how O'Reilly has invented a blue-collar past for himself that's an utter fantasy. O'Reilly has built himself a legend and dwells deep within it, using this mythical background to create a commonality with earnest but hardly discerning Americans. He uses his myth to gain credibility with them, and then uses that credibility, as demagogues will do, to garner power.

He portrays himself as Joe Six-pack. Even his official bio says his best friends are still the guys from the neighborhood. He would have you believe he's just like the average American, but he's not. How many average Americans have ever had phone sex, much less have had to pay an assistant more than a million dollars to settle a lawsuit over it? Closest most Americans get to phone sex is reading the filing against O'Reilly, or listening to his protestations of innocence.

His all-American image is an illusion, and many folks buy into it because they find what he says comforting. Unfortunately, this is like listening to the whispers of a thief in the dark who keeps telling you that everything is okay. If you take comfort in the words of someone who has no credibility, you're taking comfort in lies. If you don't' realize that everything Bill O'Reilly does is for the sole benefit of Bill O'Reilly-and judge his actions accordingly-you're allowing your mind to be hijacked by someone who has become so used to spinning lies that he likely can't remember the last time he told the truth.

9/11 and the War in Iraq make one thing abundantly clear. Bad intelligence gets people killed. Bill O'Reilly has repeatedly showed himself to be as reliable as Achmed Chalabi. Accepting as true the reality that O'Reilly provides-be it his personal fantasies or his reportage on more important events-is to abandon your responsibility for our future and your right to guide our future.

Do you really want the guy who traces his start to punting backwards driving this bus?

Me, neither.