FOX NEWS President Roger Ailes isn't known for being subtle. After all, you don't get to helm one of the biggest conservative juggernauts in the U.S. media by pulling your punches.
But Ailes may have just gone off the deep end. In an interview with the Web site The Daily Beast, Ailes went on a tirade against National Public Radio (NPR) over its recent firing of Juan Williams, after Williams appeared on Bill O'Reilly's O'Reilly Factor and stated that seeing Muslims in airports makes him nervous.
Fox, of course, promptly rewarded Williams with a $2 million contract, and conservative politicians are now attempting to strip NPR of the estimated 2 percent of funding it receives through federal grants and agencies.
But Ailes went even farther. "They are, of course, Nazis," Ailes told The Daily Beast about NPR officials. "They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view."
Nazis. Of course. At the helm of public radio.
"They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda," he continued. "They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive."
[Ailes] has graduated to publicly spouting the most paranoid variety of right-wing lunacy: one in which a media organization that doesn't even rival your own is not only made up of Nazis, but of left wing Nazis, a political classification that we can't even begin to conceptualize. (Free speech in concentration camps?) And while there are certainly right wing commentators out there who practice the same brand of purely imagination-based rhetoric--Glenn Beck comes to mind--those commentators are, of course, not in charge of one of America's most influential media outlets...
This is a man who's already acquired a permit for carrying a concealed handgun and who told the New York Times "I've got a bad leg, I'm a little overweight, so I can't run fast, but I will fight" in case of terrorist attack at his place of employment, and who is shadowed by private bodyguards at all times, and who bought the newspaper in the small town where he lives in order to buffer himself from criticism. He has become so insulated from the normal human experience of life that he has become untethered from reality. It's actually sad to see.
