The question is, why do conservatives continue to allow such “clueless” people to speak for them?

Bill O’Reilly is the lead conservative commentator on the leading conservative cable channel. And yet, somehow, the irony is lost on O’Reilly as he himself calls half a million Americans “hatemongerers”, the “KKK” and “Nazis” is in and of itself hate-mongering.

(Watch out IlliniPundit — next thing you know O’Reilly will be calling you a hate-mongering, David Duke-style Nazi too…)

DailyKos is a blog, nothing more, nothing less. It receives roughly half a million hits and is by far the largest blog in the political blogosphere (whether con or lib). Markos “Kos” Moulitsas himself is an Army veteran and a former Republican.

YearlyKos is just a convention (conservatives have meetings and conventions too). Last year it was in Las Vegas. This year it’s in Chicago (which explains why Sens. Durbin and Obama are scheduled to appear, along with most of the Illinois Democratic Congressional delegation).

Since when did a gathering of like-minded Americans become a “David Duke convention”, as O’Reilly called it?

Then again, out of those half million visitors, there are bound to indeed be a few kooks — no news flash there (esp. on the Internets). Some of the most hateful and spiteful folks are taken care of by the DKos community itself as users are able to rate various comments from 0 to 5. Earn enough zeroes and your comment becomes hidden to the general public.

So instead of picking up on the entirety of that blog, Mr. O’Reilly found the random few kooks and emphasized those as if they represented the whole site.

They, of course, don’t, as “conservative progressive” and DKos front-page contributor DarkSyde describes in his post, “Welcome Fox Viewers“:

My Daily Kos (Dkos) handle is Stephen DarkSyde, or DS for short. I’m a moderate conservative, currently registered as an Independent. I’m no lefty, or ultra-liberal, or anything of the sort — although I have very dear friends who could be described as liberals or conservatives. I am a ‘progressive’ conservative’ for lack of a better term. [...]

Despite my background, after an annual vote by the members of Daily Kos, and at the invitation of the owner, Markos Moulitsas, I was honored to be given the opportunity to post directly to the front page. My posts, like all those of my fellow front page contributing editors, (List and bios here) are written and published without passing through an editorial filter of any kind. It’s an astonishing degree of freedom we enjoy, and one I’d wager most newspaper columnists and cable news show anchors would cherish.

More to the point, does a blog which allows someone with my political convictions to post on the front page sound like a place that is some kind of bastion of far left, vicious, hate-mongering fringe freaks? If so, the nation is in big trouble [...] (emphasis is original)

We here at Illinois Reason won’t be holding our breath waiting for a similar O’Reilly report noting the hate-mongering going on at Illinois Review with their posts in which Ill Review editor Fran Eaton distorts an entire church’s teachings and makes up bizarre hidden agendas about cartoons and her fellow Ill Review contributor Jill Stanek claims Chinese people eat babies and compares elected officials to porn stars (complete with rather invasive and demeaning questions) … among other over-the-top comments that are actually worse than those.

That’s to say nothing of the segment O’Reilly could do analyzing his own hateful comments, along with those of his viewers and guests. Think Progress reports:

- Noting the irony, Kos posts some of the hateful email he has received as a result of the O’Reilly segment.

- Jeffery Feldman shows how O’Reilly has hosted “hateful” voices on his show numerous times in the past.

[...]

UPDATE: O’Reilly has previously said that he’d like to “go in” to the blogosphere “with a hand grenade.”

Nice.

I’m all for freedom of speech, but that also includes the right of us reasonable folks to call bullshit on such Bill-shit and the folks who would serve to promote such drivel.