Godwin’s rule, anyone?
During the July 17 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, discussing comments he made the previous night comparing the Daily Kos blog to the Nazi Party and to the Ku Klux Klan, host Bill O’Reilly asserted that “[t]he comparison is valid.” O’Reilly was responding to a viewer who said in an email that O’Reilly “owe[d] me and thousands of others an apology,” claiming that “you should not compare anything to the Nazis.” O’Reilly replied: “Hate to say it, sir, that website traffics in hate, as do the Nazi websites. No difference.” O’Reilly then read an email from another viewer who asserted: “I’m a black American and understand your argument against JetBlue, but I disagree with you comparing the Daily Kos to the KKK. The website simply hates the Bush administration.” O’Reilly responded: “What does the pope have to do with the president, sir? How about Israel? The website sells hate, as does the KKK and the Nazis. The comparison is valid.”
Read the Media Matters post for the full story. Since Bill is so against hate and racism, I look forward to his admonishment of the anti-choice extremists storming Birmingham and Wichita this week.
Traffics in hate?
He should talk.
How fun!
I am convinced that this guy is a troll. No one can truely be that stupid.
Dude, different groups may spread hate, but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. Like how Daily Kos isn’t killing people en masse.
(Man, I had this argument after 300 came out and people were comparing the Spartans to the Nazis. They were viscious, nasty people, but those two are NOT the same, goddammit.)
Comparing Kos to the KKK is as stupid as as calling Bush a fascist, especially when we are at war with real fascists. In both cases there are similarities of course, but mistaking similarities for equivalence is a hallmark of McCarthyism.
I had the lucky pleasure to watch the whole segment (my father LOVES O’Reilly). The irony and ridiculousness of the whole bit is obvious, but I honestly pray for the day that O’Reilly, Boortz, Limbaugh, et al are no longer spreading lies and hate to that segment of the U.S. that seems to buy into it so easily…
Stephen King said something about Dan Rather once–not too long after the “Kenneth, what’s the frequency” thing–that he watched Rather because he thought that one day, Rather would really lose it on air and say, “OK, motherfuckers, here’s the deal: There was a huge cover-up at Roswell, the government is run by aliens…”, and then the screen would go blank. One of these days, Billo is going to appear on camera with snot on his tie, stare blankly into the distance for several seconds, and then start screaming that Barack Obama is half-Klingon and that it’s loofahs at dawn.
Yeah, I saw that. He’s lost it. Thanks for the MEDIA MATTERS link!
Halloween Jack, very funny–but what’s scary is I can totally see it happening!
It may not even be a “one of these days” thing. I’m still trying to find a clip of the time he started chanting “I want to go to a gay bath house” over and over again. That bit got expunged from the archives and transcripts so fast I think they might have actually warped space-time.
Please look up the definition of “fascism” before you spout up any more stupidity.
Someone who wants to form a fascist state and someone who wants to create a caliphate with himself as the new caliph are not similar at all. This is the kind of shit that got us into trouble during the Iranian Revolution when Carter’s and Reagan’s advisors insisted that the revolutionaries weren’t Islamic fundamentalists, they were communists backed by the Soviet Union.
Whoops. We’re still trying to recover from that stupid misreading of the situation. Please try not to foment any new misreadings that will shove us even deeper into the shithole we’re already in.
The protestors simply being at those clinics wasn’t even the worst that happened there. I wonder what BillO will have to say about it? Probably nothing at all.
Manju, I really have to disagree. I’m not a big fan of Kos, but this comparison doesn’t hold. The Bush administration has a number of projects going (CIA black sites & suspension of habeas corpus, religious zealotry, concentrated power, an attempt to control women’s bodies) that show some very disturbing trends in a fascist direction. If you haven’t seen those, you need to open up your eyes.
Kos, on the other hand (and from my limited exposure), believes/believe that the Bush administration is doing a bang-up job of sending this country down the tubes and that we would all be immeasurably better off if those power-hungry individuals were no longer at the helm. What this has to do with blindly hating large groups of people to the point of murder is completely beyond me.
Apples and oranges, my friend.
“The Bush administration has a number of projects going (CIA black sites & suspension of habeas corpus, religious zealotry, concentrated power, an attempt to control women’s bodies) that show some very disturbing trends in a fascist direction.”
Don’t forget the merging of government and corporate interests.
I think the term islmofascism is very good label for the various radical islamist ideologies that have been growing for the last quarter of a century and has found power in Afghanistan and Iran. the implementation of sharia law and and a theocratic caliphate fits the general notion of fascism: right-wing, reactionary, authoritarian, totalitarian, anti-individualism, etc. certainly anyone who thinks bush is a fascist would call bin laden or Ahmadinejad neo-fascists at a minimum.
Yes. As did FDR and Churchill, especially when you consider the internment of Japanese-Americans or the intentional bombing of civilians. But a trend toward fascism does not a fascist make, otherwise anyone who wants greater control of the economy could be labeled communist since they are trending that way.
As far as Kos goes, some of the vitriol, occasional anti-semitism, calls for protectionism and fear mongering regarding outsourcing, and 911 conspiracy theories do remind me of the KKK. But oreilly’s attempt to equate the two is a form of McCarthism since he disregards all the liberal leanings that can be found on Kos. But Kos and O’reilly have a lot in common.
i’m just sitting by in my lawnchair, waiting for the inevitable but maddeningly elusive day when his head simply, finally, explodes.
and preyingmantis, i want to see that, too, if you can find it. wtf??
He had Dan Savage (the sex columnist who does Savage Love, not the rabid wingnut radio personality) on The O’Reilly Factor one time when he was promoting one of his books. Mr. Savage’s big gay Achilles heel is bathhouses–his open dislike of them is rather at odds with pretty much everything else he says.
Contrarian that he is, O’Reilly homed in on the inconsistency and attempted to make him defend the disapproval within the context of his opinion on everything else. Unfortunately for O’Reilly, his attempt was a little hamfisted, and he wound up chanting “I want to go to a gay bathhouse” instead of asking the nuanced, pointed, enlightening and non-surreal question that he surely had planned.
Here’s the column in which he talks about it (Courtesy of The Stranger’s archive)