So ESPN dumped Hank Williams Jr. from his Monday Night Football intro music video spot thing because the singer said that President Obama inviting Rep. Boehner golfing was like Hitler going out with Israeli president Netanyahu.
It was a dumb thing to say. At the very least it was a farcical exaggeration (which also happened to break Godwin's Law in style). At worst it was indefensible disrespect to the sitting President. I lean towards the latter, although I think there was no disrespect intended toward the office, which means I'm not comfortable with just hammering the guy, no matter how much I can't think of a time it would be appropriate to say.
Of course it created a small furor on the mainstream news and on the interwebs.
So I want to take a step back and pose a question.
Suppose some liberal (or African-American, or both) highly public entertainment figure, say somebody on Glee, had said something like:
"It's ridiculous, Obama inviting Boehner to go out for a round of golf is like Sarkozy inviting Hitler to hit the links."
That's almost equally indefensible, and only less so in that Boehner's a Congressman, not our head of state. Still, you don't compare people to Hitler unless they're actually people like Hitler - looking at you, Joe. Stalin, that is, not Biden. In case that wasn't clear.
Would the reaction have been the same? I'd like to think so, but I'm not comfortable actually predicting it – mainly because we have way too many loonies running around saying almost equally dumb things about the last president without a mass reaction calling them to account.
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