Bill O’Reilly has made it clear he has very little respect for Sarah Palin. Yet he trotted her out last night to offer Republicans advice on how to win the 2012 presidential election. That’s right, the quittingest half-term governor who is now the poster child for what not to choose in a vice presidential candidate and is persona non grata in the Romney campaign suddenly had more valuable insights than, say, Karl Rove or any number of other Republicans in the Fox News stable of pundits. Why? The answer seems to be O'Reilly wants Mitt Romney to personally attack President Obama in Palinesque, “palling around with a terrorist” kinds of ways.

You can – and we do – say many things about O’Reilly but one thing you can’t say is that he’s a fool. And he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, either. So it’s surprising – to say the least – that he’d consult Palin for comments on Laura Ingraham’s harangue the day before in which she said, “If you can’t beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the party.”

Palin’s first bit of advice was that Republicans need to explain to “the rest of America, who thinks that they’re gonna get a bunch of free stuff from Obama, that you have a choice. You either get free stuff or you get freedom.”

O’Reilly dismissed that by suggesting Americans “want the stuff” and will “sacrifice the freedom.”

His next question pointed to the possible real reason he wanted Palin’s input: to urge smearing of Obama: “Should Mitt Romney go after Barack Obama more – in a more personal way? Should he use words like, ‘incompetent,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘socialist,’ those kinds of buzzwords that would get an enormous amount of attention, that would lock people in? Should he do that?”

Of course, Palin thought so. After all, what has she ever offered to any dialogue other than smears and attacks? “They’re not just buzzwords, they’re accurate descriptions,” she now said. She added that Romney should be “severely aggressive.”

O’Reilly went on to say that during their convention, Romney and Ryan “pounded, pounded” Obama: “that Barack Obama is an incompetent, he doesn’t have any solutions to the economic malaise, he just wants to spend more money, and that’s gonna drive us over the fiscal cliff. That couldn’t have been clearer.” But what they didn’t do, O’Reilly said, was hold Obama “personally responsible.” In other words, “It’s not about policy so much, it’s about HIM. He’s a hard-core – and you fill in the blank.”

For whatever reason, Palin was in a restrained mood. She didn’t say “socialist.” She didn’t say Obama doesn’t understand the Constitution or that he pals around with terrorists or any of her other now-familiar hate mongering.

But that was exactly where O’Reilly wanted to go. He said, “And you’re saying the only hope the GOP has is if they change and bring it directly to him personally.” Actually, that was not what she had said. But it served as a convenient way for O’Reilly to make his point and distance himself from it at the same time.

In fact, Palin still didn’t want to go there. She agreed Republicans “do have to bring it directly to Obama personally” but as “a reflection of what he stands for – and his record proves what he stands for – he’s for growing this big, disconnected, dysfunctional, debt-ridden government and disempowering the individual. That’s what Obama and the left stand for.”

O’Reilly interrupted. Dropping his “it’s not me” pretense, he began jabbing his finger in the air and saying, “You gotta use those buzzwords! You gotta say ‘socialist!’ You gotta do that to get people’s attention!”

I’d like to say that this segment – showing that smart people on the right are feeling desperate – made me more confident of an Obama victory. But while it’s somewhat encouraging for a liberal like me to know that people like O’Reilly and Ingraham think Romney’s not looking like a winner, that's overshadowed by seeing how low – without any apparent hesitation or remorse – O’Reilly is willing - no, eager to go for the sake of winning. Less than two months ago, O’Reilly asserted that Obama is not a socialist. Yet now it’s not just OK but necessary to say otherwise because “you gotta do that to get people’s attention.”

Even worse, when O’Reilly says “buzzwords,” you can bet he’s not talking about “socialist.” He’s talking dog whistles on race, “foreign” and treason.