A day in the life of a Fox News liberal

Guest host the O'Reilly Factor, continue to portray racist, serial slanderer Rush Limbaugh as the victim of slander.

Gee, how dare anyone think Limbaugh is a racist or, at least, a race baiter.

Update: Last night I saw Williams again on Fox, reciting one of the most standard right-wing post modernist defenses typically employed to defend conservative movement hate-mongers: that there is a double standard because the other side is just as bad (or worse.)

Williams asserted that if Limbaugh were a liberal he'd be able to be a NFL owner, citing the NFL's association with Keith Olbermann to prove that there is a double standard. Why is this so difficult to understand? - the problem with Limbaugh is not that he has strong conservative opinions or that he offers fierce criticism of public figures. The problem is that he systematically says terrible things about people that are untrue and dehumanizing. Keith Olbermann doesn't do that. He doesn't lie on a sentence to sentence basis. He doesn't spread malicious conspiracy theory about political opponents being killers or fake citizens. Olbermann doesn't hope for or promote violence; he doesn't disguise racism as supposed anti-racism.

If Williams confined his defense of Limbaugh to criticism of those who have attributed false quotes to him then I would have no qualm. Those who did so were intellectually wreckless and owe Limbaugh an apology for smearing him with statements that he did not make. But Williams, Limbaugh, and the rest of his defenders are using the fake quotes to act as if Limbaugh doesn't have a history of defamatory comments and race-baiting. The fake quotes are a distraction from Limbaugh's very real history of demagoguery; a history which threatens to hurt the NFL's business.

Which is why the owners acted in their financial interests. Shouldn't the market fundamentalists at Fox be behind a market outcome?