O'Reilly: I'm taking the New York Times on. It's war.

Pinkerton suggested that O'Reilly rebut by nailing the Times “on specific, factual errors, as you do all the time.”

Pinkerton further said that he planned to write a letter to the Times saying, “Look, you said that I was involved in the Willie Horton campaign of 1988. I wasn't.” Pinkerton added that then he and O'Reilly can go to the minority communities and tell them, “these guys are just not telling the truth and we can prove it chapter and verse.”

Actually, there's reason to believe that Pinkerton is the one not telling the truth. Pinkerton's involvement with the Willie Horton ad campaign, the racially charged ad used by George H.W. Bush (and FOX News chief Roger Ailes) to attack presidential candidate Michael Dukakis has been documented elsewhere by The Times, BBC, and The New York Review of Books, among others.

http://www.newshounds.us/2009/02/03/bill_oreilly_declares_war_on_the_new_york_times_again.php

But Dukakis wasn’t destined to be the change that voters were looking for. He had been fatally wounded, politically, by Gore, back in April; he just didn’t know it. That seemingly little issue of the weekend passes for first-degree murderers just wasn’t going to go away.

In fact, it was my job, as the director of research -- as in "opposition research" -- in the George H.W. Bush for President campaign, to help make sure that talk about the passes didn’t go away. The Bush campaign took the state matter of prison furloughs and turned it into a national issue. The voters agreed: Bush 41, once written off as a wimpy loser, crushed Dukakis in a November landslide.

James Pinkerton, November 2007