Normally, I consider even engaging with the 'arguments' of demagogues like Bill O'Reilly to be self-defeating, but I've been nursing this grudge for almost two years and I finally get to say 'I told you so.'

In 2004, The Factor observed that 'self-reliant' Australia was winning a lot of Olympic medals in Athens and that 'socialistic' Canada was not. This was, he said, clear demonstration that 'entitlement culture' is 'a force against self-discipline and motivation.' There are many things wrong with this argument, most fundamentally the assumption that Olympic medals tell us anything significant about a country's greatness. (More humorously, the final 2004 medal rankings, when adjusted for population, place the 'dominant' USA behind socialist Canada, as well as almost every nation in 'decadent Western Europe.') But let's give O'Reilly his point of fact on the Athens games.

I am curious, then, how he would explain the results of the just-concluded Torino 2006 games, where 'nannystate' Canada out-medalled Australia 24-2 and placed third in overall medal count (not to mention that 'dominant' USA got beat out by 'decadent' Germany with less than a third of our population). Did Australians (and Americans) abandon their competitive spirit? Does self-reliance cease to function at sub-freezing temperatures? Or will he acknowledge that he made a bogus point based on insufficient and decontextualized data because it suited his political agenda? Yeah, right.

I realize this point is a tiny, and comparatively harmless, drop in the bucket of falsehoods that O'Reilly and his ilk disseminate. But I think it is emblematic of broader strategy that ranges from attributing natural catastrophe's to divine vengeance to manipulating intelligence to justify a war. Treating facts as nothing more than decoration for arguments based entirely on ideology and dogma is bad enough. Letting the demagogues get away with it is even worse.

Supplemental reading

• For intelligent analysis of Olympic medal counts and what they actually correlate with, see Andrew Bernard and Meghan Busse's research at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.
• For people who don't mind expending effort on arguing with Bill O'Reilly, see Sweet jesus, I Hate Bill O'reilly, Intl.
• Not really appropos of any of the above, except that it is Olympics-related, I fully approve the Dowbrigade's critique of Olympic non-sports.