Bill O'Reilly Explains His New Book 'Pinheads and Patriots,' and Why He Loves Glenn Beck

In his first appearance in a while on this show, Bill O’Reilly asked Imus how the cancer battle was going. As Imus prattled on about his treatment regimen and PSA numbers, Charles held his head in his hands and asked O’Reilly, “Why?”

“I’m a humanitarian, as you know, McCord,” O’Reilly, host of Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor, said. He added, “Everyone’s pulling for you. Except the competition at other radio stations.”

O’Reilly’s latest book, Pinheads and Patriots, is already number three on the New York Times Bestsellers List, but O’Reilly told Imus today the most important part of the book, named after a nightly segment he does on his show, is its subtitle: “Where You Stand in the Age of Obama.”

“With all the ideology floating around…a lot of the real change the man has instituted is lost in the sense that you don’t know how it affects you,” O’Reilly said.

As an example, he pointed to Obama’s health care plan, or what he calls “Obama-care.” Initially willing to give it a chance because he thought it had some good provisions in it, O’Reilly was swayed when he made a phone call to his own insurance company to find out why his premiums were going up $2,100 this year.

“I called Ziggy at United Health Care, and I go, ‘Hey Zig, man, what’s this all about?’” O’Reilly said. “And he says, ‘Obama care! We’re going to get whacked in 2014, so we’re going to whack you for the next four years.”

A pinhead, for the record, as defined by O’Reilly, is “somebody who’s not thinking clearly.” A person can be both a pinhead and a patriot, depending on their latest deed. But O’Reilly noted, “Overall in a person’s life, when you reach a certain point the meter starts to tilt one way or the other.”

He pays no mind to things like the New York Times Bestseller List. “It doesn’t really matter anymore,” O’Reilly told Imus. “A show like yours will sell a thousand times more books than the New York Times.”

And he wasn’t just sucking up; O’Reilly believes the old guards of media like the Times and the major television networks are no longer solely responsible for distributing information.

“It’s the Internet, Fox News, talk radio that really drive the debate in this country, and that’s good and bad,” he said. He tries to fight against the disinformation readily available on the Internet by basing his shows and his books solely on facts.

“This is not an Obama-bashing book,” he said of Pinheads and Patriots. “I say good things about the President as well, but it’s all based on facts, and I think that’s what Americans need at this point.”

Unlike some of his peers, O’Reilly writes his own books, and does not “dictate into a taper recorder” and “have some guy named Lenny” write it for him. His previous book, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, was the genesis for the title of a tour he did with Glenn Beck this past summer, where the two spoke to sold-out crowds around the country.

“I like what Beck does,” O’Reilly said, and acknowledged that while there is often a lot of jealousy in television news, he doesn’t play that game. “I see Beck in a very interesting way. I don’t see him as a radio or television commentator, which he is. I see him as Norm.”

Referring to a character from the television show “Cheers,” O’Reilly expounded on his theory. “Norm comes in, he sits at the barstool, and he just lets it fly,” he said. “That’s what Beck is to me. And I am so happy that a guy like that has a television and radio program where everyday he can get in there and say, ‘This is how I feel.’”

As for how O’Reilly got Beck to agree to join him on the “Bold Fresh” tour, O’Reilly said, “I said, ‘Beck, you’re going to do the tour with me, and it’s named after my book,’” he recalled. “Then we showed him the numbers.”

-Julie Kanfer