Sometimes I feel a little badly for Bill O’Reilly. For my steady eight o’clock news diet, I always tune in to Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, and Keith’s continuous mocking of O’Reilly is both hilarious and uncomfortable. Just last night, Olbermann was having a field day with O’Reilly’s “war” against Spain’s efforts to try several neoconservatives for war crimes, as well as O’Reilly’s “war” against UPS. UPS recently dropped their advertising on O’Reilly’s show over concerns that O’Reilly was and is a serious whackjob that UPS doesn’t want to have anything to do with.

Olbermann’s daily vendetta isn’t the only thing O’Reilly has to worry about. Bill appeared on David Letterman’s The Late Show last night, and it was clear that David still isn’t pulling his punches on O’Reilly. I have to give O’Reilly a little credit though – even though Letterman has famously mocked and belittled him before, O’Reilly showed he has a pretty good sense of humor. The Huffington Post has the story on what went down:

David Letterman, who infamously told Bill O’Reilly in 2006 that “about 60 percent of what you say is crap,” had his old bête noire back on his show on Tuesday night.

At the start of the show, Letterman couldn’t help lashing into the Fox News host, saying “I wish I was smart enough to make him look ridiculous… He’s going to come out here all puffed up.”

From practically the moment O’Reilly sat down, the sparks flew along with some surprising topics upon which they agreed.

“I think of you as a goon,” Letterman point-blank told O’Reilly. Then, holding up the cover of O’Reilly’s book, “A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity,” which has a photo of O’Reilly as a boy, Letterman quipped, “I look at that and I see this sweet, adorable kid… I have a sweet adorable kid and I wonder, ‘What if he too becomes a goon?'”

And Letterman launched into O’Reilly positions, such as his boycott of Sean Penn movies, giving him the ultimate back-handed compliment: “You’re too smart to believe what you say.”

When Letterman focused on Rush Limbaugh, implying that he’s the face of the Republican party, O’Reilly alluded to the radio host’s power, saying that “I don’t think any Republicans or conservatives want to offend the man.” And he strove to distinguish himself from Limbaugh and fellow Fox News personality Glenn Beck by claiming that he’s a journalist: “I got a degree, I paid a lot of money for… I went out, covered stories… those guys are basically entertainers… we give information”.

O’Reilly also revealed that former Vice President Dick Cheney refused to come on his program, adding that he doesn’t like Cheney: “We asked him a million times… he wouldn’t come on.”

And he laughed about the famous video of him cursing out his staff – “I have so much better stuff than that… Irish guys curse. That’s in the DNA… We’re loud and say bad words.”

From The Huffington Post

I’ll give credit to O’Reilly for some things – he doesn’t just read off Republican talking points, and he was never just a vessel for the Bush Administration, though their ideologies often lined up. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that O’Reilly isn’t even close to being the worst “television personality” on Fox News. I save that honor for batsh-t insane Glenn Beck, whose apocalyptic rantings and honest-to-goodness calls for violent domestic insurrection scare the hell out of me. Next to Beck, O’Reilly seems like an almost honorable journalist. Until Olbermann replays that clip of O’Reilly saying that a murdered rape victim deserved it because of what she was wearing.