O'Reilly, meet Godwin

I've been taking a bit of a break from blogging lately, but I just saw something I couldn't let pass. Before you watch the YouTube clip, you should be aware that Bill O'Reilly is 99.44% full of shit. The other 0.56% is either hot air or methane. (I haven't done a chemical assay of the gaseous portion.)



O'Reilly is talking about Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos website. I should disclose that I know Markos personally, although I haven't seen him in years, and it's really my sister he's friends with. When I was in college, he was a Republican -- actually campaigned for Republicans. I guess their tough anti-Communist stance appealed to him, but somewhere along the line, he decided that the GOP doesn't really care about people like him, and he found some of their values repellant. Today, Markos is a Democrat and the proprietor of Daily Kos, currently the world's largest political blog.

Going back to the embedded YouTube clip, I thought it was an interesting tactic for Fox News to ambush David Barger, the CEO of JetBlue, at his apartment. Clearly, Barger had only the foggiest notion of what he was being harassed about, and he was rightly peeved. It kind of reminds me of something Michael Moore does. And speaking of unlikely comparisons...

Around the four-minute mark, Bill O. compares Markos to Hitler, and here is where we invoke Godwin's Law. Godwin's Law originally applied to Usenet newsgroup discussions and states that as the number of postings on any given topic increases, the probability that someone will make a comparison to Hitler approaches 100%. Later corollaries were added that assert (a) once Hitler has been mentioned, there is no point in continuing the discussion, and (b) he/she who made reference to Hitler has lost the argument.

We don't really need Godwin's Law to see how wrong O'Reilly is. There are too many inaccuracies in yesterday's segment to enumerate. A particularly egregious one is his portrayal of a few offensive comments (repeated ad nauseam) as being representative of what you will find at Daily Kos. There are over a hundred thousand registered users at Daily Kos, each with the ability to post comments on the site. Daily Kos has some nice features that allow this large community of users to moderate themselves, and it generally keeps the discourse on a pretty even keel. But are we to believe that not a single user will ever post something offensive? (See Godwin.)