O’REILLY: Okay, now he shows up on Saturday at the most hateful - there is not — and I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in here — there is not a more hateful group in the country than these Daily Kos people . . . Hateful, hateful, hateful. The rhetoric that they use and the rhetoric that the Klan and the Nazis use are the same rhetoric. It’s hate. Everyone knows that.
Note: Blow Riley asked me if I would post this for him, and since I didn't have another diary planned for today, I agreed. Evidently, he attended NN'08 in Austin, and was so excited by what he saw there that he immediately registered on Daily Kos. When he found out he'd have to wait a week before he could submit a diary, he got frantic. I figured posting this was the least I could do for him. From the looks of it, it seems like The Bill O'Viator had a somewhat different experience than the rest of us had. But let's let him tell it in his own words and pictures, shall we? - o.h.
NOTE: CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES WHICH MAY SHOCK SOME READERS.
So I finally made it to Netroots Nation, and what did I find? A bunch of people who think exactly like I do!! That's right - we hate all of the same things and believe all of the same things, and get excited by all of the same things!
I took a ton of pictures of my new friends, so I wanted to share some of them with you.
Okay, first, here is my buddy Heinrich, with a bunch of other guys:
Heinrich went out and checked some things out during the convention:
There were some great speakers there, like this guy
And the audience was very enthusiastic
People were mesmerized by the panelists
My buddy Adolf on the right (anybody know who the other guy is?)
We had to teach these guys the Terrorist Fist Jab - they were clueless LOL
We really enjoyed getting out to see the city
There was this street artist doing caricatures, so we paid him a few bucks to do us -
We never had any problem finding something to do -
Doing shooters - LOL!!!
"Hanging" with a couple of new friends . . . ;-)
Here's a whole bunch of my friends:
Some people even brought their kids:
It was adorable! - the little guys even drew some pictures -
I think the best part of the whole things was the social aspect of it - people weren't just there all about business
and can you believe they threw a party in my honor?
whoops wrong photo - here:
We had a great time. I'm really looking forward to next year.
UPDATE: Some in the comments have said the contents of this diary are inappropriate. I disagree. Some of the photos are shocking; all of them, I believe, are stomach-churning. They are intended to be. What O'Reilly said is way beyond the Pale. As I wrote in a comment downthread:
Given what O'Reilly said about his vision of who Daily Kos readers are (i.e., more hateful than the KKK and the Nazis), the diary represents what O'Reilly's vision of Netroots Nation must therefore have been, had he been there: a group of worse-than-Nazi-and-KKK hater-types having a good time getting together, doing their hateful thing. If one accepts O'Reilly's premise that Kossacks are literally more hateful than the Nazis and the KKK, it therefore inescapably must follow that our actions when we get together are correspondingly more hateful than those of the Nazis and the KKK - so, actually, I guess it could be argued that these photos do not depict acts that are hateful enough.
O'Reilly must be held to account for the actual words he used.