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Sure enough, just as Nicole wondered, Juan Williams was pretty bent out of shape over Warren Ballentine's calling him out -- using black cultural lingo -- for being such a willing supplicant to the "Limbaugh is being oppressed by mean black people" meme currently popular in right-wing circles.

So who does he bring on to buttress his claim that liberals are being bigots? Why, none other than Tammy Bruce and ... the Rev. Ken Hutcherson!

Bruce is bad enough. This is the person who called Michelle Obama "trash" and opined that "President Obama has some malevolence toward this country". She's also suggested that torture is no worse than a bad day in West Hollywood. We also remember her classy tweet on learning of Ted Kennedy's death: "[He] left a woman to drown and now he's left us to drown." In other words, hardly an ideal person to be claiming a lack of civility from the left.

But Hutcherson? That's rich.

Folks outside the Seattle area may not know a lot about Hutcherson, so
they just see him as a black conservative. Which is common enough, especially on Fox. It's more genuine than being a fake liberal like Williams, at least.

But he's also one of the most prominent anti-gay bigots in the state, and for that matter on the West Coast.

This is a man who told his flock that "God hates effeminate men".

He also headed up an initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination in Washington state. (It went down in flames.)

Of even deeper concern is his heavy involvement in promoting a virulent and violent anti-gay organization called Watchmen on the Walls. This is a global evangelical-Christian outfit that, elsewhere in the world (particularly in Eastern Europe) is associated with violent anti-gay hate crimes.

I reported on a Watchmen gathering in nearby Lynnwood a couple of years ago (photos here). I also remember his sermon very clearly:

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Tammy Bruce, last night on The O'Reilly Factor:

Bruce: But ultimately, it comes down to his inability to govern, and the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated.

Where does Fox News dig these characters up? Really. They never cease to amaze. There's no limit to what they'll say anymore. This is the logical endpoint of the "Obama is a secret radical" meme that Fox has been flogging the past several months.

Telling people that the president hates the country -- that's just plain ol' depraved. It's sick. These people are sick, sick, sick.

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According to Bill O'Reilly, there is now a tell-all-book standard for determining whether or not political officials should be investigated. If it's not in the tell-all books available, it's not there.

And according to Tammy Bruce, "enhanced interrogation" is really not much different than a bad shopping day in West Hollywood.

Discussing the "far left" push to look into potential prosecutions of Bush administration officials for war crimes and various other misdeeds (see here [wmv] or here [mov] for the preceding Talking Points Memo segment), O'Reilly argued that the absence of any evidence of criminal wrongdoing in books by Scott McLellan and Bob Woodward about insiders' views of the White House pretty much means there isn't any evidence to be had.

O'Reilly: So, you don't really have anything on the table that says that you -- look, in order to launch an investigation --

Marc Lamont Hill: Let's investigate --

O'Reilly: No, you don't launch an investigation without probable cause. That's not how it works.

Hill: But there is probable cause, and that's what we need to look at.

O'Reilly: Like what? Like what?

Hill: When you talk about Guantanamo, when you talk about Abu Ghraib -- there were reports from FBI agents, from guards, from many people who said that there's a structural sort of attempt to torture and to abuse prisoners. And this is something that George Bush has dismissed this as a few bad eggs, a few bad apples, and what we see here is a structural issue. And so let's investigate those structural issues.

O'Reilly: The only probable cause is one person in Guantanamo said -- and she described, you know, loud music, stress positions, what do you say to that, Tammy, that there's been enough news reporting to raise it to probable cause. I don't agree, but what do you think?

Tammy Bruce: No, loud music and standing for long hours and not having enough water is what I experience in West Hollywood on occasion. The truth of the matter is, this is classic Bush Derangement Syndrome. It's something that was coined by Charles Krauthammer, I believe, where these are individuals who are obsessed and paranoid about the president, and they're going to have to, in one of their favorite phrases, move on. Sooner than later.

It just makes no sense. These are people who don't need to be in office, they need to be in a psychiatrist's office.

O'Reilly: Unless there's a smoking gun or -- I gotta go, but -- [to Hill] You don't expect Barack Obama to go into this witchhunt mode, do you?

Hill: No, because he doesn't have the political courage to pursue justice. It's not personal, it's justice.

Bruce: It's derangement.

It's becoming apparent that, to Bush's never-say-die defenders, the presidency is now a Get Out Of Jail Free Card -- one only redeemable for Republicans. They've elevated the Office of the Presidency (GOP Mode Only) into a virtual dictatorship free to break whatever laws it likes as long as one can claim they're "doing it to protect the country."

As for "probable cause," O'Reilly should acquaint himself with the evidence that's already available in the form of Michael Haas's book George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration's Liability for 269 War Crimes. It lists 269 potential war crimes in which public evidence of Bush's culpability is already available. O'Reilly might be inclined to dismiss most of them, but it's hard to see how he can dismiss them all.

Unless, of course, he just wants to. After all, when you get down to it, Bush's criminal acts were no worse than bad shopping days.