Conservative commentator Lauran Ingraham told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that she accepts the on-air apology from liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz for vulgar comments he made about her on his radio show. She also agreed to O’Reilly’s idea of sitting down for a beer with Schultz.
Since the attack, Ingraham said she now identifies with conservative minorities: “This is what I think conservative women and, to some extent, African-American men who happen to be conservative, even Latino men who are conservative, have to face.”
O’Reilly said MSNBC’s new owner, Comcast, is stricter than previous owner GE, pointing to its “firing of a hateful commentator” at the channel just after the takeover. Schultz “flashed back to the old days” when he attacked Ingraham, O’Reilly said.
In a reference to 2009’s “beer summit” among President Barack Obama, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the white police officer who had arrested the black academic, O’Reilly suggested that the president host Ingraham and Schultz at the White House for a brew.
“As long as you’re buying,” Ingraham said jokingly. “I’m not into Guinness; it’s got to be American beer.”