O’Reilly and Rivera shout and make up

Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera said Friday that there were no hard feelings after they engaged in a shouting match unusual even for a cable opinion program.

No chairs flew and no noses were broken, but the finger-pointing verbal duel over illegal immigration on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor” on Thursday night became a water-cooler topic the next day.

“Geraldo is a friend of mine, and I think I respect him even more now, if that’s possible, than I did before,” O’Reilly said in an interview Friday. But they disagree passionately on the issue, he said.

Rivera said his sensitivity to a “massive witch hunt” against illegal immigrants set him off Thursday.

The two men were discussing the case of Alfredo Ramos, a man charged with manslaughter and suspected of being drunk when his car crashed into another in Virginia Beach on March 30. Two teenage girls were killed. Ramos, a Mexican who has been in the U.S. for seven years, is allegedly in the country illegally.

“He doesn’t have a right to be in this country,” O’Reilly said. He said he wanted immigration laws enforced while Rivera favored “open-border anarchy.”

“Don’t obscure a tragedy to make a cheap political point,” Rivera told him.