Now that Jon Stewart has exposed the hypocrisy of Fox's attack on Steve Cohen for comparing Republican lies to Nazi propaganda, Bill O'Reilly is changing his tune yet again.
Initially, O'Reilly was outraged by Cohen's comments, saying Cohen "was absolutely over-the-top" for making the comparison. But then came Stewart's montage, showing that O'Reilly has repeatedly done the same thing as Cohen.
So how did O'Reilly react when presented with this obvious contradiction? Did he acknowledge that he might have been over the top as well? Nope. He justified his comparison.
O'Reilly defended comparing the Huffington Post to the Nazi Party on the basis that Stewart failed to provide the full context. And that context was: an insulting comment about Nancy Reagan.
Make that a deleted insulting comment. If you click on the relevant Huffington Post piece on Nancy Reagan, you'll see that all of the comments have been scrubbed. The nasty comment about Reagan has been immortalized solely in the right-wing blogosphere, including in an indignant column on BillOReilly.com.
You see, if your name is Steve Cohen, it's not okay to compare a Republican lie to Nazi propaganda. But if your name is Bill O'Reilly, it's totally cool to compare an entire news organization to Nazis because some assholes left dickish comments that were subsequently deleted. And it's not like that was the only time: O'Reilly has used the analogy to attack progressives over and over again.
In the end, though, O'Reilly's biggest sin isn't that he's a hypocrite or that he's repeatedly made an offensive analogy: it's that he's thoroughly and consistently wrong. If he spent as much time trying to get the facts right as he does calling people Nazis, his audience would be much better off because of it.