BILL O'REILLY: What do we do?

MEGYN KELLY: It's a political question for President Obama and a military question for him, but it's not really much of a legal question because legally he can do it.

O'REILLY: OK.

KELLY: If he wants to do it....

O'REILLY: Let me stop you there. So there's no difference between killing bin Laden, Al-Awlaki with a drone? OK. Just today they killed another big terrorist guy in Pakistan with a drone. We could drop a drone right down Ahmadinejad's nose legally?

KELLY: We can go after Iran. We can start a military conflict with Iran. President Obama can do that tomorrow.

O'REILLY: With the drones. Boom.

KELLY: Just the same way...

O'REILLY: Ahmadinejad, ah.

KELLY: Look what we did in Libya. It's a lot more than what you are talking about right now. And he didn't seek congressional authority. Although he should have, technically, under the law. But even if he didn't, which he didn't, no one has ever gone after a president for doing this.

O'REILLY: OK. So legally, he could take the mullahs out. He could take Ahmadinejad out. He could send them a message, saying, "Look, you try to do this on our soil, here's what happens to you."

KELLY: The law is, technically, he's supposed to have an imminent threat against the homeland. Or....

O'REILLY: I think blowing up an embassy in Washington is an imminent threat. Do you?

KELLY: But that's been stopped. So technically....

O'REILLY: But the fact that it's been stopped doesn't really matter, because the threat is still there.

In fact, such comparisons are common currency on Fox News and in much of right-wing media, as FAIR has documented (Action Alert, 1/16/04; FAIR Blog, 4/2/09,  8/9/09, 4/28/10; Extra!, 3/10). Fox's Glenn Beck, a leader in this trend, compared the auto bailout to "the early days of Adolf Hitler" (4/1/09), said that Barack Obama's plans to expand the programs like the Peace Corps were "what Hitler did with the SS"  (8/27/09) and, when Obama said he was looking for "empathy" in a Supreme Court nominee, claimed that Hitler's empathy "led to genocide everywhere" (5/26/09).

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (10/3/10), who wrote a surprisingly good book on Beck, did a count of how many times the Fox host had made various Nazi allusions:

In his first 18 months on Fox News, from early 2009 through the middle of this year, he and his guests invoked Hitler 147 times. Nazis, an additional 202 times. Fascism or fascists, 193 times. The Holocaust got 76 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 24.

Yep, the particular comparison that was so outrageous it merited in-depth examination on Fox News has been made on Fox's top-rated show at least two dozen times--along with hundreds of other Third Reich references.

For an added dose of hypocrisy: Bill O'Reilly (1/20/11) had right-wing talker Laura Ingraham on last night to weigh in on, among other things, the outrageous Nazi analogies coming from the left. Ingraham has a record of--you guessed it--playing the Nazi card while criticizing the Obama administration.

How does Fox get away with such shamelessness? It's hard to explain--if I'm not allowed to mention the Big Lie theory.

Check out this exchange between Fox News's Megyn Kelly and Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) on the omnibus spending bill pending in the Senate:

Kelly: It's a super railroad, of sorts--a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney, we kid you not, to the doorstep of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. I say, to the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. So should your tax dollars be paying for these kinds of projects?

Note that the brothel in question is outside of Carson City, Nevada--more than 300 miles away from Las Vegas, where the imaginary earmark was previously delivering Disneyland visitors. Presumably this particular brothel was chosen by Fox because it includes the name of an animal, and the first rule of budget reporting is that animals are funny.

Benen particularly "love[s] the way Megyn Kelly adds 'we kid you not' while blatantly lying to a national television audience" and sees "an apparent attempt to win some kind of irony award" in Kelly's request that Rep. Franks "hold lawmakers accountable for made-up earmarks that don't exist outside Republican talking points and the GOP's cable news channel."