Bill O’Reilly continued his drift to the fringe Monday when he said DailyKos.com is effectively the same as the KKK and the Nazis: a reviled hate group. Listen here. Since all of the leading Democratic candidates will appear at the upcoming YearlyKos convention he basically, in my view, cut himself off with that hyperbole from every Democratic voter in the country — more than half of the population, based on the latest elections.
I liked O’Reilly in the early day of Fox News, even if I didn’t often agree with him. He was amusing and often asked good questions. In recent years, however, he has become increasingly mean-spirited. In recent weeks, he has descended to outright racism. Now he maintains that the Democrats are in effect supporting the KKK and the Nazis.
Some argue that the man who repeatedly lied about winning a Peabody Award has always been an irresponsible extremist. I am not so sure. U.S. history is full of characters who became famous and then, as their popularity waned for various reasons, resorted to greater and greater extremism in an effort to keep the spotlight. I am not sure when the tipping point came for O’Reilly — perhaps when he browbeat the kid who lost his Dad on 9/11; maybe it was the sexual harassment “loofah” lawsuit from his assistant that he had to settle; or perhaps it was that he beat the drums of war so loudly for the invasion of Iraq that now he is forever tied to that disaster despite his efforts to “apologize” — but at some point he passed from being a commentator to a crank.
I wonder how much longer he will last. At some point, especially if the Democrats win the White House, he may become more of a liability than an asset for Murdoch.
We know this because DailyKos often gives voice and credence to noted left-wingers such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza who have repeatedly called for the execution of their political opponents as traitors. Just like the Nazis!
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Oh, wait… Scratch that, reverse it.
a bit longer, is that i’m not sure the average american is really even aware of dailykos. so, your statement
is perhaps true if you amend it to say “every blog-savvy Dem voter”. as for people like, for example, my internet-ignorant father, who are liberals yet watch o’reilly religiously, they don’t get the connection and just hear yet another smear that they don’t know should offend them.
Fox will probably send a camera crew to YearlyKos again, just like they did last time (after first laughing at us and then realizing that every major national daily, CNN, ABC, C-Span, and a host of others were covering us as serious news).
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I plan to bring a loofah to carry around in my YKos gimme bag. If the Fox crew corner me for an interview (a long shot, to be sure) I’ll wave it in the camera and say, “Oh, Biiiiillllllll, this is for you! Wish you were here!”
O’Reilly, Rush and the rest of the Right Wing noise machine, I’ll be forever grateful that he (O’Reilly) was the inspiration behind Stephen Colbert’s ‘Colbert Report’.
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I can’t think of a better antidote than Colbert’s satire, for the sickness in our society that O’Reilly represents.
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In part because of wingnuts like O’Reilly, I’ve begun to describe myself as a ‘Liberal’ (sometimes to provoke!), even though I’ve always been very independent in my politics. For the last 10 years, the GOP has been so effective in framing political discourse through the media, and promoting their agenda, that demagogues like O’Reilly have become commonplace.
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Hopefully in ten years he’ll be an historical footnote.
DailyKos doesn’t actually have anything to do with YearlyKos — Markos licensed the “Kos” name to them, but that’s it.
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Nonetheless, I imagine O’Reilly wouldn’t see a lot of difference.
That’s like saying Nike doesn’t have much to do with its manufacturers in Indonesia because, you know, they’re just suppliers. For most practical purposes, certainly for all political purposes, but perhaps not for all legal purposes, YKos and DKos are the same thing.
Boston AM radio but pretty harmless. He wasnt as loud and he seemed to really work hard at being different. He was a kind of boring since his act was so forced.