Brian Kilmeade, defending Lord Bill O'Reilly from the nefarious Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, gives voice to the basic Fox News view of the world:

Kilmeade: They can't handle the give and take of the debate. They were outraged that somebody was saying, uh, there's a reason, there was a certain group of people that attacked us on 9/11. It wasn't just one person, it was one religion.

Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.

Oh really, Brian.

Well, just as we had to do for Sarah Palin back in 2008, let's do a little reminder session for Kilmeade et. al.:

Eric Rudolph:

Eric Robert Rudolph (born September 19, 1966), also known as the Olympic Park Bomber, is an American radical described by the FBI as a terrorist who committed a series of bombings across the southern United States which killed two people and injured at least 150 others.

Rudolph declared that his bombings were part of a guerrilla campaign against abortion and what he describes as "the homosexual agenda." He spent years as the FBI's most wanted criminal fugitive, but was eventually caught. In 2005 Rudolph pleaded guilty to numerous federal and state homicide charges and accepted five consecutive life sentences in exchange for avoiding a trial and the death penalty. Rudolph was connected with the white supremacist Christian Identity movement. Although he has denied that his crimes were religiously or racially motivated, Rudolph has also called himself a Roman Catholic in "the war to end this holocaust" (of abortion).

James Kopp:

James Charles Kopp (born August 2, 1954) is an American citizen who was convicted in 2003 for the 1998 sniper-style murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, an Amherst, New York physician who performed abortions. Prior to his capture, Kopp was on the FBI's list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. On June 7, 1999 he had become the 455th fugitive placed on the list by the FBI. He was affiliated with anti-abortion group "The Lambs of Christ." He has been referred to as a terrorist by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.

The Phineas Priesthood:

Letters left at the scene of an April 1996 bank robbery/clinic bombing in Spokane, Washington, contained Identity propaganda, diatribes against the banking system and were signed with the symbol of the "Phineas Priesthood." [At the time of the robbery, a bomb was set off at a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic as a diversion, with death threats toward abortion providers contained in the note left with that bomb.] The three men arrested, Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrell, were linked to white supremacist and "Identity" groups and were also charged with setting off bombs at a newspaper office and a Planned Parenthood clinic. All three were convicted.

[More here.]

Tim McVeigh:

Timothy James McVeigh (April 23, 1968 – June 11, 2001) was a United States Army veteran and security guard who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the Waco Siege, as revenge against what he considered to be a tyrannical federal government. The bombing killed 168 people, and was the deadliest act of terrorism within the United States prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

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You have got to be kidding me:

Peter Johnson: You know, it's a peculiar and strange and haunting and really backward reference that we're seeing by the president. And what we're really seeing is a reference to the notion of being in the back of the bus. And that's a matter of sad American history, embarrassing American history. Rosa Parks in December 1955 changed the course of American history when she decided that she would not give up her seat for a white person. And ended the concept, across the country, of African Americans being in the back of the bus -- literally, metaphorically, in every way in terms of our society.

So now we have a president referring to this kind of malignant, charged era in American history, and saying, in a long narrative -- and it's incredible what he said -- that somehow the car's in the ditch, that the Republicans are --

Brian Kilmeade: He's told the story a million times.

Johnson: No, no, but it's incredible -- at the top of the ditch, slipping, ah, drinking slurpees, kicking dirt in the face of the president and others who are trying to get this car out of the ditch. And once the car's out of the ditch and the Republicans demand the keys -- 'You can't have the keys, but we'll let you sit in the back of the bus.'

Couple that too with the statement the president made on a Spanish radio show, where he talks about exhorting the Spanish-American community, the Latino community in this country to punish their enemies when they vote.

Kilmeade: And reward your friends.

Johnson: When we engage in this charged, strange, malignant kind of language, we are not moving forward. We are moving backwards, um, in this country. And it's a regrettable statement.

The American bus -- the American car is a bus and a car for all Americans, regardless of race, and regardless of party. And so we're allegedly in this post-partisan, post-racial era where we summon our better angels. To summon our worst demons and to go back 55 years and summon a horrible image of a courageous Rosa Parks fighting the evil of segregation -- to inject that again into our politics is a mistake. It's a surprising thing and I'm sure the president wouldn't do it again.

Soooooo. I guess RedStaters aren't the only wingnuts this desperate in their neverending search for proof, which they know fershure is out there, that President Obama and the liberals are the real racists in this mix.

Now Fox & Friends are in on the action. Can Glenn Beck be far behind?

But let's replay the tape, just so everyone can see what Obama actually says. The tellings vary slightly, of course, from venue to venue, but here's how he put it last week in Seattle:

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Transcript:

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Now that the 9/11 first responders' health bill has passed the Senate, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show obviously deserve a round of applause for stepping up and playing a critical role in getting it done.

That really seemed to stick in the craws of the crew at Fox & Friends this morning. Check out this exchange between Gretchen Carlson (who I think is just still mad at Stewart for calling her out on the dumb-blonde schtick), Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, culminating with this:

Carlson: I think it's interesting when you have Jon Stewart, who apparently decided to get really serious on this topic, have a serious show about it. That's like mixing apples and oranges, c'mon! I mean, people already think that his show is real news, which is a problem.

So then when you have comedy and then one day you decide to just get totally serious --

Doocy: He's an activist.

Carlson: But I don't know if that works in the mind of the -- mind of the American people.

You know what's an even bigger problem, Gretchen? That people already think every show on Fox News other than Shep Smith's is real news. When in fact, it's demonstrably little more than lying, smearing, fearmongering propaganda. Now THAT'S a problem.

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There's been chatter among the Tea Party classes the past few weeks about the possibility of a Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck presidential ticket -- even though Beck himself has laughed it off.

But the notion popped onto the airwaves the other morning on Fox & Friends, when Gretchen Carlson gushed, along with Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, about Palin's appearance on Beck's show the day before:

Doocy: One other thing I think we should point out, they did challenge Saturday Night Live to put them on as guest hosts -- together.

Kilmeade: They should take that up.

Carlson: Some people are saying they might be on the ticket together, down the road. Maybe Saturday Night Live will be the first stop.

I'm trying to decide if these people's fantasies would be a dream come true, or our worst nightmare.

When Congressman Joe Wilson shouted out "You Lie!" during one of President Obama's speeches earlier this year, Fox News ran cover for him and helped turn him into a right wing hero. When Senator Al Franken followed Senate procedure and told Joe Lieberman that his time was up, they tear him to shreds, making crass, childish and personal insults. Video and more from Media Matters:

During the December 18 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, hosts Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson, and Brian Kilmeade repeatedly attacked Sen. Al Franken -- calling him "uncivil," a "newbie," and "an angry clown" -- for denying Sen. Joe Lieberman extra speaking time on the Senate floor. The Fox & Friends hosts ignored that, in fact, Franken, Lieberman, and Majority Leader Harry Reid all stated on December 17 that Franken was following Reid's orders not to grant any speech extensions.

But Franken, Reid, Lieberman say Franken was following request not to grant extensions

Franken: "I really just had no choice." Minnesota Public Radio reported on December 17 that "Franken says Majority leader Harry Reid ordered all senators who presided today to keep speeches to their ten minute limits and not grant any extensions" for senators of either party:

Franken says he wasn't trying to slight Lieberman and in fact supports the amendment to the health care bill Lieberman was discussing. Read on...

The right loves a good nontroversy. Senator John McCain was so outraged by the incident that he couldn't hold back that nasty temper of his, calling it unprecedented and outrageous. As it turns out, he was completely off the mark and out of line. In fact, he's done the same exact thing himself.

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The right-wingers were out in force yesterday in their attempt to paint the Fort Hood shootings as an act of radical Islamist jihadi terrorism, and claiming that "political correctness" kept the military from screening him as a threat -- evidently simply because he was Muslim.

Kicking things off bright and early on that front were the gang at Fox Friends, especially Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson. Kilmeade asked Geraldo Rivera early on the show:

Kilmeade: Do you think it’s time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers — anybody enlisted? Because if I'm going to be in a foxhole, if I'm gonna be stuck in an outpost, I've gotta know the guy next to me is not gonna wanna kill me.

Actually, Brian, they wouldn't have to be Muslim, or anything else, to want that -- especially, one suspects, after more than an hour in close proximity to your charming personality.

Then Carlson chimed in:

Carlson: I want to ask this question another way. Could it be that the military, because our society -- let's face it, our society has become very politically correct -- could it be that the military was also exercising political correctness, even though he had a poor performance report, and even though he spoke openly about being a radical Muslim, and had those supposed postings online, could it be that the military was exercising political correctness in not approaching him as seriously as they would have had he not been a Muslim?

Rivera answers "Yes," of course, but the answer is actually, "Political correctness has nothing to do with it." After all, the Army allows neo-Nazis within its ranks to post online and does not treat them as a particular threat -- even though they pose a variety of problems, not the least of which is that they tend to become violent themselves. If the military is practicing "political correctness," it's a peculiar kind.

Moreover, as Spencer Ackerman put it, this is a spectacularly short-sighted bit of bigotry.

But this is the way it goes. We were told by Fox News that to blame right-wingers for the actions of George Tiller’s murderer or the anti-Semite who shot up the Holocaust Museum was out of line. But Muslim soldiers — people who guard the freedoms that Fox bleats about with jingoistic sanctimony — are to be slandered by association. This is a disgrace to the memories of Spc. Kareem R. Khan, Capt. Humayun Saqib Khan, and so many others who have given their lives for this country.

David Frum, notably, chimes in with a provocative reminder for the jingoes.

That was only the beginning. These same notes were repeated throughout the day. Ackerman also noticed Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel "promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee," quoted in The Hill:

"This enemy preys on downtrodden soldiers and teaches them extremism will lift them up,” West said in a statement. “Our soldiers are being brainwashed.”

The release added that West claims “the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood is proof the enemy is infiltrating our military.”

Then there was Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey:

Retired 4-Star General Barry McCaffrey, who attended a fundraiser Thursdays night in Rochester for the Veterans Outreach Center, believes today's shooting could turn out to be an act of terrorism. “This is going to turn out to be a political act. People who are frightened of deployment don't murder their fellow soldiers. This was completely out of the ordinary, we've never seen anything like this. We have murders periodically in the armed forces, but it's somebody 20 years old, drunk, it's two o’clock in the morning, it's drugs, it's girls, it's cards its something so this was planned mass murder.”

Blue Texan at Firedoglake has a decent roundup from the wingnutosphere. Media Matters has the rundown of the insanity in the right-wing media.

Interestingly, later that morning on Fox and Friends, Kilmeade interviewed two real experts -- Dr. Paul Ragan, a former Navy psychiatrist, and Pat Brown, a professional criminal profiler -- who basically tried to explain that he was full of crap when he tried to paint the event as an act of Islamic jihad.

Kilmeade: It seems to me, Pat, religion plays a role. He perhaps was on a different mission.

Brown: Well, Brian, actually, I think religion does not play a role in this. What we're actually looking at is a typical mass murderer.

Mass murderers are either two age groups. They are either teenagers, who are disgruntled with where they are in life, and don't think they're going to be anything -- those teenagers that say 'I'm being bullied and nobody likes me, and so let me take everybody out -- or they're middle-aged men who are going downhill in life -- they're having problems with people, personality issues, you know, going up against authority. For whatever reasons, they're failing, and then when they start failing they have to find something to hang their hat on, they have to blame something.

So he happened to pick what he picked. But I don't think it really has anything to do with him being Muslim or any kind of "jihad." I think he just wanted to kill people and this was his excuse.

Kilmeade: Well, he did yell out, "Allah," that's kind of an odd thing to yell out for somebody who was just unhappy with his success in life.

Brown: But he was already going downhill. He's a psychopath, and that -- he's gonna say something.

Ragan went on to back up Brown's assessment. Kilmeade just didn't want to hear it.

Nobody on the right does. Because it's so much easier to bash Muslims when you have great cover like this, and the folks on the right aren't going to let it go to waste.

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Fox News' Brian Kilmeade caused quite a stir in 2007 (see above video) when he suggested that members of Code Pink should be tased or beaten to a pulp. Media Matters asks the question -- Does the one who is not Steve Doocy believe the astrobirthers who are disrupting health care town hall meetings should be treated the same way?

That sure doesn't sound like the Fox News of today which seems quite impressed by the GOP mini-mobs which have been formed expressly to heckler Democratic politicians who want to discuss health care reform with their constituents at town hall meetings.

But back in 2007, when anti-war protesters who make up Code Pink, made headlines by disrupting an official event, the Fox News morning team was seriously pissed off:

During a discussion about a Code Pink member heckling Hillary Clinton at a recent event, Fox News host Brian Kilmead said that people who confront politicians are “threatening” and should be Tased or “beaten to a pulp,” as the establishment media continues to sell the idea that anyone who disagrees with authority should be brutally punished. Read on...

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You know the opponents of health-care reform -- which obviously includes nearly every talking head who appears on Fox News -- are getting desperate when they start trying to scare elderly people by suggesting that President Obama's health-care plans will mean euthanization for old folks when they get hurt.

That's what the crew at Fox & Friends this morning did, led by "Fox News legal analyst" Peter Johnson Jr., and aided and abetted by Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson. First they played a snippet of Obama at a town-hall meeting on health care:

But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not making anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know, and your mom know, that you know what, maybe this isn't going to help, maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.

This became the launching pad:

Kilmeade: Dying?!! Sucking it up?!! And not having surgery?

Johnson: Too sick, too expensive.

Kilmeade: Well, that's what this whole trend is!

Johnson: Absolutely. And some people are saying, 'Well, this isn't health care reform,' and other people are saying -- maybe me -- that this is a subtle form of euthanasia. And when you start looking at the proposals, you say, 'God, what's happening?'

Of course, all they had to do was watch the entire set of remarks on this by Obama in their context to realize what's happening: that effective reform means cutting the waste created by a medical establishment that thrives on unnecessary procedures -- he wasn't suggesting that people be denied life-saving operations.

Obama made this clear up front:

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[H/t Media Matters]

Brian Kilmeade put on a classic display of the way today's right-wingers cling to old half-baked notions of race and eugenics yesterday morning on Fox and Friends, discussing a Scandinavian study of the benefits of marriage:

Kilmeade: Leave it to the Finns and Swedes to come up with something. Because that's a -- we are, we're a, we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other --

[Crosstalk]

Kilmeade: I mean the Swedes -- the Swedes have, uh, pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes. Because that's the rule. Finland -- Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society. In America, we marry everybody. So we marry Italians and Irish and --

Dave Briggs: OK, so this study does not apply.

Kilmeade: It does not apply to us.

Other species? We marry other species? Since when? What, is this the man-on-dog sex that Rick Santorum was on about?

And what the hell do "pure genes" -- whatever those are -- have to do with marriage behavior?

It's astonishing, really, the level of complete and utter idiocy that passes for professional news talk on our cable TV these days. Charles Pierce is right.

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Media Matters has put together a nice pastiche of all the Fox talkers and other assorted right-wing pundits writhing in agony and rolling on the ground holding their heads at the very thought of Senator Al Franken assuming office. It's really something to behold.

Besides the Fox crew, headed up by Brian Kilmeade and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity waxing wroth over Franken's victory, you also had Limbaugh calling him "a genuine lunatic" (no doubt for having penned Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot). Jim Quinn chimed in that he thought the election was stolen. Mike Barnicle on Morning Joe thought it was "kind of a surprise" that Franken "behaved like a responsible adult".

And Bill O'Reilly -- who has, em, a bit of a history with Franken -- has been on vacation all week, so we haven't heard yet from the Hot-Tempered One. We can hardly wait.