So Bill O'Reilly is finally confronted with the reality that Daily Kos is nothing like a neo-Nazi hate site.
Give BillO credit: He decided to air a segment on the anti-Obama hate sites that can be found on the Web. He had on Townhall.com's Amanda Carpenter, who reported to O'Reilly that the virulent hatred of Obama found at neo-Nazi and white-supremacist websites was something truly stomach-churning.
At the height of the discussion he asks:
O'Reilly: OK, now, the Kos is a hate site on the left, uh, how would these neo-Nazi things compare to that?
Carpenter: Ah, these are ... it's, it's much worse than Kos.
O'Reilly: Yeah?
Carpenter: Because it's filled with the worst slurs you could think of against a black person. You know, they talk about aborting black children. The degree of casualness to which it's done is most alarming. I mean, I was frightened in there. I mean there's literature, you know, different kinds of bombs --
O'Reilly: Anything else? Sure. I mean, these are people like Tim McVeigh, who blow -- you know, those people --
Carpenter: Right.
Right. Those whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. And so we quickly move on ...
Except that this kind of blows a hole in O'Reilly's horseshit claim that Kos is a "hate site" just like the Nazis. As we noted at the time, there's a wee problem with this thesis: what real Nazi/hate sites are like.
Ah, but instead we quickly move on to even more specious crap ...
O'Reilly: Any other mainstream sites out there, not Nazi stuff, hating Obama?
Carpenter: Oh I don't think any mainstream site would tolerate this kind of hate speech. I mean, you shut that kind of stuff down immediately.
O'Reilly: But in general, any other hate-Obama hate sites that aren't Nazis?
Carpenter: I haven't seen anything to the degree of these neo-Nazi sites. They're certainly on the fringe but nothing compares to them.
O'Reilly: OK.
Yes, including Kos.
But just to be clear: While Carpenter was quite properly appalled at what you could find at neo-Nazi sites (the "popular" site to which she refers, incidentally, is almost certainly Stormfront, which in June was reported to be attracting 40,000 unique visitors per day -- nothing to sniff at, actually), these are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hate-Obama sites.
There's Floyd Brown's ExposeObama operation.The Freedoms Defense Fund. The Anti-Obama.net. Christ, there's an endless raft of them out there. And that's without even counting the regular wingnutosphere.
And I know this will come as a surprise to O'Reilly (or at least go unmentioned by him), but they all have one thing in common, including the Nazi sites ... they're right-wing sites.
