Alan Dershowitz takes down the Fox blowhard and his new book, Kids Are Americans Too, in Sunday's Washington Post. In 2000 O'Reilly banned Dershowitz from his show and Dershowitz told his administrative assistant to refuse to take calls from Fox. Look for O'Reilly to bellyache and bring up Dershowitz's legal defense work for O.J. Simpson etc.

[O'Reilly] tells American kids -- many of whom, in his view, are "complete morons" -- that "Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the guys" who "got together in Philadelphia in 1787" to write our Constitution "believed that a lot of laws -- a lot of rights -- should be decided by the individual state, or even the individual county or city." Never mind that Jefferson was in France when the Constitution was being drafted and ratified.

And never mind, too, that the first court decision used by O'Reilly to illustrate his screed says precisely the opposite of what he tells the kids it says.

O'Reilly also purports to teach about morality and responsibility. He complains about secret legal settlements "in which no one admits any 'wrongdoing' in the matter." You mean, like the one he entered into with Andrea Mackris, one of his former Fox News producers, after she filed a lawsuit accusing him of harassing her with sexually explicit phone calls and of threatening that she would be "destroyed" if she "ever breathed a word" about it? This is the same Bill O'Reilly who tells kids that "any kind of bullying is a bad thing."

The author of this book also preaches to kids about their right to express themselves freely. Contrast that author with the talk show host of the same name, who said in a June 20, 2005, radio broadcast:

"Dissent, fine: undermining, you're a traitor. Got it? So, all of those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. . . . Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything."