Brent Bozell’s Hypocrisy On View
Reported by Ellen - December 20, 2006 -
The December 19, 2006 edition of Hannity & Colmes included yet another attack on The View and Hollywood celebrities. The panel featured two guests whose opinions ran the gamut from condemning The View’s Joy Behar to condemning the left because Behar, in an off-hand remark, equated Donald Rumsfeld with Hitler. Brent Bozell represented the latter opinion. He sanctimoniously complained, “If any conservative on television were to make a comment like that, before the sentence were finished, that person would be fired.” So Alan Colmes read Bozell some Hitler comparisons from Republicans and asked where Bozell’s outrage was then. Bozell could only feebly parse the difference. But even that weak defense crumbles upon one look at his website. With video.
Subbing for Sean Hannity, Mark Steyn, in his introduction, somehow tied Behar with Sean Penn saying Bush and Cheney should be impeached. “How far out of touch with America and with reality are these Hollywood and liberal media elite types?”
Boston University professor and former ABC correspondent Bob Zelnick was the other guest. After calling Behar’s remark “awful and disgraceful,” he went on to take another, gratuitous swipe at her for suggesting that the Republican Party may have been responsible for Senator Johnson’s illness. “The lady needs a rest,” Zelnick added.
It was the conservative Steyn who questioned whether Behar really believed that or had just been joking. But Zelnick, presumably there as a member of the “liberal media,” insisted that Behar’s comment reflected “some suspicion.”
Bozell spent the entire segment looking sideways into the camera. (Did he cut himself shaving or was he just unable to look the audience in the eye as he made his hypocritical accusations?) Bozell said Zelnick was “spot on,” but gave no recognition to the fact that Zelnick came from the same “liberal media” background Bozell has made a career out of knocking. So Bozell left out the media and just went after liberals for the time being. “With the Rumsfeld quote, what you’ve got is the far left feeling that it’s perfectly acceptable to insult conservatives and Republicans by any means necessary, including equating them to the perpetuators of the Holocaust.” Then, the ever put-upon Bozell went back to attacking the media. “If any conservative on television were to make a comment like that, before the sentence were finished, that person would be fired.”
Oh really? Hannity & Colmes regular Ann Coulter has made a series of comments suggesting that people she disagrees with should be murdered. And Sean Hannity suggested that Muslim Congressman-elect Keith Ellison’s use of the Koran during his ceremonial swearing-in was comparable to using Mein Kampf.
I had hoped that Colmes would have brought up some of Coulter’s “choice” remarks (it was too much to hope for any of Hannity’s, I suppose). But Colmes did come up with some good ones of his own. “I’ll give you an example of where it’s happened, by the way, and I didn’t hear you speak out about this,” Colmes told Bozell. “We had Donald Rumsfeld comparing critics of anti-terrorism policies to those who tried to appease Hitler… You had Rick Santorum comparing the Democrats’ criticism of them breaking rules by opposing filibusters to Hitler. Did I hear you EVER speak out about any of these incidents?” Colmes noted that these were powerful people speaking, not comedians, as Behar is.
Bozell, caught at his own game, fudged. He demanded that Colmes “Go back to that example and show me where one person was personally equated to Adolph Hitler.”
Apparently, neither Bozell nor Colmes heard me yelling at the TV, “Hannity!” and “Dennis Prager,” the Hannity & Colmes guest whose column Hannity drew from in making the Mein Kampf comparison.
However, Colmes rightly dismissed the relevance of the "personal" aspect and accused Bozell of only getting aggressive when it's liberals doing the insulting.
Bozell didn’t have a good answer for that. So he went on the attack, by pretending to be a victim. “I’m sick and tired of the left pontificating and giving me lectures about hate speech.”
Colmes countered with, “Because the right is so moral, as we discovered with this last Congress.”
“Not one single person has denounced Joy Behar for what she said,” Bozell whined.
And how often has Bozell denounced the poison of Ann Coulter, who is a regular on FOX News and elsewhere? I doubt he ever has. In fact, his organization's website promotes her appearance at the upcoming 20th anniversary gala.
Unfortunately, Colmes gave in to Bozell’s finger-pointing sneers. “I will. She shouldn’t have said it.”
So that made the Behar denunciations unanimous. Bozell was smirking at the end. Does anyone think that he'll be less condemning of liberals next time?
