What with PageF-----gate going on, Fox News has to be desperate these days to stir things up. After all, misidentifying politicians' political parties can only work for so long before even Fox News viewers catch on. So how do we know they're getting desperate these days? Because as Stephen Colbert would say, Bill O'Reilly just put Jon Carroll of the Chron's back pages on notice.

Yes, erstwhile defender of the "common man" and defender of Christmas has called out erstwhile defender of the "World's Most Perfect Granddaughter" and lover of cats for writing a column in which Carroll supposedly called O'Reilly "a liar." Which Carroll didn't-- he instead wrote that you could find clips on YouTube which shows O'Reilly lying. So a couple of weeks ago, Papa Bear O'Reilly goes after Carroll on his TV show for calling him a liar and then challenges Carroll to show up on the Factor and debate it out, mano a mano as it were. This is the O'Reilly equivalent of "pistols at dawn" or "meet me at the blacktop at lunch time." And, of course, O'Reilly digs in by basically saying Carroll won't have the balls to appear on the show. Did you hear that, Jon? O'Reilly just called you the p word.

We find this funny for oh so many reasons, mainly because the idea of the aging-hippie, Dylan quoting, cat obsessed Carroll showing up to duke it out with O'Reilly is just hilarious. We're guessing too that O'Reilly and his people have no idea who Carroll is but going after Carroll is pretty funny too-- as we all know, bullying hippies around is so easy nobody does it. You can't fight totally earnest people who abhor violence and eat tofu. Carroll is such the easy target that he's actually a really difficult target.

Fox News: when the going gets tough, the not-so-tough pick on San Francisco.