Colbert, O'Reilly, and Daily Kos

On last night's Colbert Réport (Comedy Central), Stephen Colbert skewered Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly for his campaign to expose JetBlue's sponsorship of the "Yearly Kos" convention for DailyKos.com and other liberal bloggers. (I won't be flying on JetBlue this trip, but I am in fact going to the Yearly Kos convention in Chicago next week, where I will rub elbows with — in other words, hope to be in the same large room with — the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson.)

Here is the transcript. The main text is all Stephen Colbert; the doubly indented quotes are all Bill O'Reilly, clips from The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News.

Nation, I gotta be honest with you: I'm bored. Every day, it's the same thing: Iraq this, Iraq that. I don't want to talk about Iraq any more. It's too easy: "Oh, look, here's some breaking news — another thing blows up." I didn't even have to do any research; where's the challenge? Besides, all this war analysis is just spoilers. Hey New York Times, I didn't ruin Harry Potter for you; don't ruin this war for me. Can we all just wait until September when General Petraeus comes to Washington and tells us the ending? At least there's one place that understands this: Fox News. According to a recent study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in the first quarter of this year, Fox spent less time covering the Iraq War than either CNN or MSNBC. Look, just because everyone else is reporting that the U.S. is jumping off a bridge in Iraq, that doesn't mean Fox should report it, too. They are focused on the homeland, like Bill O'Reilly who recently exposed trendy airline JetBlue for sponsoring a convention of bloggers from the far-left web-shite DailyKos.com. Now, before anyone accuses Papa Bear of just going after JetBlue for sponsoring liberals, I can assure you this is not an ideological issue, and O'Reilly can prove this isn't an ideological issue. How?

This isn't an ideological issue.

Okay? Let's put that idea to bed. He goes on:

If a company was sponsoring a David Duke convention, we'd do the same story.

For the record, the David Duke convention is being sponsored by Air Aryan, the airline with the most overhead arm room.™ See, Papa Bear is going after JetBlue's sponsorship here because Daily Kos is such a vicious hate site. Just listen to some of the comments he found on it.

"The pope is a primate." "Evangelicals are nut cases." "Better luck next time," after an assassination plot against Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan. ... It's like the Ku Klux Klan. It's like the Nazi Party.

Exactly. The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing peope to express unpopular views in an open and free forum. Yeah. Yes, yes! Applaud his courage. And it doesn't matter that these comments weren't written by Daily Kos management; if someone writes something on something you own, you automatically support that message. That is why I have stopped eating at the Outback Steak House on Route 3. I was appalled by their bathroom wall's stance on what amounts to "a good time." Shocking! And there was no answer at that phone number. You see, Bill and his median-age 71-year-old viewers know just how the Interwebs work.

Open forum is "bull," all right; you can regulate what's on your web site.

And Bill knows that for a fact, because his web site is a free and open forum; you just have to first pay $5/month to become a premium member. I think $5 is a small price to pay to agree wtih what Bill says. So do not go to DailyKos.com. Jimmy, put up the web address, so users know where not to go. There it is: Do. Not. Go. There.

Well, first of all, Billo, a little vocabulary lesson.

Primate, n., a bishop who has precedence in a province, a group of provinces, or a nation. [Merriam-Webster]

That's the first definition listed, even before monkeys and apes and every single human being. So calling the Pope a Primate is neither false nor insulting. As to evangelical nut cases, a lot of evangelicals — though certainly not all of them — are nut cases. For example, if you don't think that Fred Phelps qualifies as an evangelical nut case, then you might be a nut case. As to the third quote, I sympathize with frustration over the direction that Dick Cheney has led this country, but I must underscore that, so long as anything even remotely resembling a democratic process exists, assassination is never the answer in America, whether you're talking about assassinating Cheney or Clinton or Reagan or Carter. All the same, Daily Kos makes that same distinction, and should not be tarred by one person's comment. Lastly, Billo clearly wins a "Godwin." Those of us with long experience on the Interwebs know that whoever first calls his opponent a Nazi almost always loses the argument, both on substance and on style.

Technorati tags: Stephen Colbert, Colbert Report, Comedy Central, Bill O'Reilly, O'Reilly Factor, Fox News Channel, Daily Kos, DailyKos.com, Yearly Kos, JetBlue

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