Appearing yesterday on a conservative San Francisco radio show, Bill O’Reilly offered his first public comments since being criticized for saying he would approve of an al Qaeda terrorist attack on the California city.

O’Reilly not only stood by his comments, but claimed they “needed to be said”:

I mean, look, everybody knows what’s going on there. What I said isn’t controversial. What I said needed to be said. I’m sitting here and I’m looking at a city that has absolutely no clue about what the world is. None. You know, if you had been hit on 9/11 instead of New York, believe me, you would not have voted against military recruting. Yet the left-wing, selfish, Land of Oz philosophy that the media and the city politicians have embraced out there is an absolute intellectual disgrace.

Full transcript below (or listen to the audio): Read more

“It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. … While we can’t change the past, we need to accept responsibility, because a key part of restoring America’s moral leadership is acknowledging when we’ve made mistakes or been proven wrong — and showing that we have the creativity and guts to make it right.”

with staff on Latin America trip. The reason? “The crowning indignity for Bush was the Friday night state dinner starting at 10 p.m., an hour when the president normally is in bed. He left the dinner early, but it was midnight by then.” (Via HuffPost)

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on O’Reilly’s statement about San Francisco: “Someone at the O’Reilly website tried to cover that up — I can’t imagine why — removing the entire part about al Qaeda from the show’s transcript. Heads up to that enterprising individual: It’s on tape. Removing the words from the transcript doesn’t make the audio disappear.”

is gone from the L.A. Times, as ThinkProgress noted yesterday. His column will now be published by Huffington Post.

“Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material.” (Via Atrios)