Topic: Newsmax
James Hirsen -- best known as an longstanding apologist for Mel Gibson -- does his best to perform the same service for Hank Williams Jr.
In his Oct. 7 Newsmax column, Hirsen fretted that "The long-running "Monday Night Football" theme song written by Hank Williams Jr. has been permanently cut by ESPN over Williams' comments that purportedly compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler." Purportedly? That's exactly what Williams did.
After rehashing Williams' comments on "Fox & Friends" in which he made the remark in question, Hirsen claimed that Williams' later statement attempting to tamp down the controversy "suggest[ed] that he was misunderstood." No, it didn't; it suggested that he was trying to defuse what he had said earlier in order to save a lucrative gig.
Hirsen went on to complain:
It should be noted that the Hitler comparison is the very same one that the left routinely used with impunity against President George W. Bush throughout his eight years in office.
It is unfortunate to say the least that a great song, one that millions of folks have come to associate with an American institution, will no longer be played because of an inappropriate and ill-considered analogy.
However clumsy Williams' comment was, though, it was not born of malice.
In my opinion, benefit of the doubt should be offered as freely as an apology and should not be doled out according to political correctness or ideology.
Presumably, Newsmax columnist Phil Brennan got that same benefit of the doubt when he pulled his own Obama-hitler comparison, writing in 2008 that "Like the German people of 1932, many Americans seem to be willing to put our future in the hands of a messianic leader with abundant oratorical gifts, a questionable and largely unknown past and a unshakable conviction born of a socialistic background that America can spend its way out of a debacle initially caused by trying to spend our way into prosperity."
As the links supplied above note, Hirsen is generally blind to controversial statements made by conservatives in general and conservative friends in particular, like Gibson. It took Hirsen two weeks to report on the scandal of Gibson's hateful comments made during a split with his ex-girlfriend -- and only then did Hirsen disclose that Gibson is " business associate and friend," something he hadn't done previously despite writing about Gibson at Newsmax for years.And even then, Hirsen took pains to insist that Gibson "has a long history of being a tremendous family man, a good father, a generous person, easy to work with, just all kinds of positive attributes."
