11/13/2009 02:22 PM

Fox star Bill O'Reilly has scored the first interview with former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs.

Dobbs will make what is expected to be the first of many appearances on Fox Monday night as a guest on O'Reilly's show.

Dobbs sensationally quit CNN Wednesday amid claims he is poised to move to the Fox Business Network.

Fox would clearly be a more natural fit for Dobbs whose right-wing positions on just about everything went against CNN's efforts to carve out a media space in the middle.

However, Dobbs will be going up against O'Reilly if he wants to retain his mantle of "champion of the middle class."

Mind you, while both Dobbs and O'Reilly's stratospheric salaries put them way above the concerns of the man in the street, Dobbs took that manufactured outrage one step further in 2004 when he advised well-heeled subscribers to his $398 newsletter to invest in the same companies he was lamabasting nightly for outsourcing.

That's our Lou - bitterly opposed to outsourcing in public and backing it in private.

The man's a mess of contradictions; little wonder Niall O'Dowd recommended he see a shrink.

During his era on CNN, Dobbs claimed to be defending free speech but the only thing he defended was his ability to launch vicious attacks on immigrants and minorities.

He refused to allow dissent within his own team and a 2006 report on Dobbs in the Nation revealed that Dobbs was reviled as a "tin pot dictator" by staffers on his show.

Unsurprisingly, none of the staffers wanted to go on the record for fear of reprisal from Dobbs.

"He approaches stories with a partisan ax to grind," a former employee told the Nation. "He runs the place as a tin-horn dictator. He's assembled correspondents who feel beholden to him."

"They are given the line on the story and told how to assemble it in his partisan manner before they're sent out to do the story."

He'll go a long way at Fox.