Fox News outraged when liberals use Nazi analogies (like Fox News)

You may remember how Jon Stewart took the leaping mickey out of Fox News two years ago when Megyn Kelly actually tried to pretend that the channel never compares its ideological opponents to Nazis & co. Well, it seems the sad clowns posing as journalists there are confused again, as CBS’s Bob Schieffer made a loose (but still inappropriate) analogy between the Third Reich and the gun lobby and they’re now busy denying they ever use such rhetoric at all and trying to climb up on their high horse:

Transcript: (click the [+/-] to open/close →)

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TITLE: Fox News Can't Decide If It's OK To Call Someone Hitler (January 2013)

KIRSTEN POWERS: Speaking of Nazis, a lot of people – these gun rights people think that Obama’s like the next Hitler and they need to have their guns to protect themselves from this tyranny.

MARINE CPL. JOSHUA BOSTON: It’s something we’ve seen happen time and time again in history, with Stalin, happened in Cambodia, and then, of course, the Third Reich. No-one saw that coming until it was too late.

MAN #1: In Nazi Germany, they had a propaganda magazine called Der Stürmer. They had an article that they titled “The Jew Next Door”. The Journal News, their article was titled “The Gun Owner Next Door”.

SEAN HANNITY: You mean that happens? Governments actually become tyrannical, historically?

FOX ANCHOR #1: Of course, we’ve seen this: Germany, Italy, Japan. Yes, we’ve seen it.

MAN #1: These are scary times.

LARS LARSON: Everybody in America who owns one of the guns on the list will be required to go in and give up fingerprints, mug shot, and be entered into a database. It’s be “your papers, please” like Nazi Germany.

STEVE KAUFMAN: I mean, you go back to the 1930s with Hitler, he did the same thing.

HANNITY: Isn’t that what a lot – you don’t talk a lot about – what were the intentions of our founders and framers? We have Stalin, we have Hitler, we have countries, tyrannical, they talk a lot about that, and so people say, if you mention that in this day and age, that’s extreme.

HANNITY: The mainstream media is doing their part to smear gun owners as they are now likening NRA members to Nazi.

HANNITY: Our friend, Bob Schieffer – and by the way, I don’t mind that Bob has an opinion, but he can’t on the one end be a journalist and – it just gets complicated, but he’s now comparing the gun lobby to defeating the Nazis.

CBS’S BOB SCHIEFFER: Surely, passing civil rights legislation, as Lyndon Johnson was able to do, and before that, surely defeating the Nazis, was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: In other words, taking on the NRA is the equivalent of taking on Adolf Hitler.

BRENT BOZELL: And there, in the same sentence as ‘Nazis’. This should be insulting.

ERIC BOLLING: What is the liberal media doing instead of “fair and balanced” reporting? Guys like Bob Schieffer are running around comparing the NRA to Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler.

MSNBC’S MARTIN BASHIR: If anyone deserves to be equated with Hitler on the issue of firearms, then it’s not the President, it’s the NRA.

LIMBAUGH: Now, is there room for that in our discourse? Why is that not an example of just over-the-top defamation?

HANNITY: By the way, conservatives use the word ‘Hitler’, and there’s a total liberal, Left meltdown like Alka-Seltzer in water. Left does it, it’s fine.

FOX ANCHOR #2: Think of if conservatives used that language to describe liberals on the same policy, then there would be collective outrage on the front page of the papers and demands for people to resign and apologize.

JIM PINKERTON: He’s given himself a little bit of wiggle room, Bob Schieffer, just a little bit of wiggle room. “Oh, I didn’t exactly compare the NRA to the Nazis; I sort of threw ’em in the same pot and let the people on^[sic] the audience sort it out.”

FOX GUEST #1: There’s clearly an inference that the NRA is the equivalent of the Nazis, and I do think it raised questions about whether or not he was just a little bit too opinionated.

PINKERTON: George Orwell, back in 1946, in the famous essay, said, “The word ‘fascism’ should only be used for people who – Hitler, Mussolini, so on, and not just thrown around all the time.” That was 1946. Seventy years later, we’re still doing it as much as ever.

FOX ANCHOR #2: We should take Hitler and Nazis off the table and our – if they really wanna have a dialogue, as Robert Redford said, then let’s just stop – can we just, like, take [?] off the table.

FOX ANCHOR #3: Why bring that into the comparison? I mean, it was clearly –

FOX GUEST #2: Well, first of all, never bring up Nazis. Like, that’s the big mistake. Never.

Fox isn’t angry at liberals for using such rhetoric because it’s wrong, but because they’re worried about patent infringement.

(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)