Bill O'Reilly is now laughing off his claim that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is “a Communist” who “secretly adores Karl Marx.” On his Fox News show tonight, O'Reilly said to Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer: “I called him a Communist with Lou Dobbs -- and we were both laughing. And on the Huffington Post, there it is: 'O'Reilly Calls Reich A Communist.' And he writes -- actually writes a column about it, Reich -- he's so indignant.”

However, during the April 20 segment in which O'Reilly called Reich a “communist,” neither he nor Dobbs appears to be laughing.

On April 23, Reich responded to O'Reilly in a Salon.com blog post in which he wrote, “For the record, I'm not a Communist and I don't secretly adore Karl Marx.” Reich went on to write:

Ordinarily I don't bother repeating anything Bill O'Reilly says. But this particular whopper is significant because it represents what O'Reilly and Fox News, among others, are doing to the national dialogue.

They're burying it in doo-doo.

Reich added: “Ad hominem attacks are always the last refuges of intellectual boors lacking any logic or argument.”