You may already have learned (via TBogg, or indirectly via Sisyphus Shrugged or Pandagon) that David Duke was one of the guests on Bill O'Reilly's TV show last night.

You'll probably be tempted to jump to conclusions about the Right -- "Like attracts like" and all that. OK -- but please note that Duke himself feels hard done by:

After appearing on an eight minute segment of the O'Reilly Factor, which amounted not to a discussion of pertinent issues but a series of scurrilous and untrue attacks on me, I have some reflections on the so-called conservatives in media.

Before I offer those reflections, I want to respond here to the core of O'Reilly's attacks on me. He accused me of being anti-black, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.

... I have never in my life uttered an anti-Catholic word in my life. In my millions of written words and thousands of hours of recorded interviews and speeches you will not find even a single anti-Catholic utterance....

I didn't begin the show by suggesting that he was a sex offender, yet there is a lot more evidence of that charge than the completely untrue and nonexistent evidence that I was ever anti-Catholic.

Secondly, his promos for my appearance identified me as a White supremacist. I am not a White supremacist and in fact I strongly condemn any effort of any race to be supreme over or control other races or nations.

I simply want to preserve my European American heritage in our own homelands and defend the basic civil rights and human rights of our people. That does not make me a supremacist. As my book Jewish Supremacism points out, the ultimate racial supremacists are the Jewish supremacists who seek supremacy over the press and the foreign policy of every nation....

There's more. Good Lord, is there more. I've visited Duke's Web site many times over the years, and the man sure can pile on the verbiage. (Yes, I gave you a link to his site. Don't click if you have a moral objection, but really, you might want to visit sometime -- the site is both frightening and a hoot. Something you may not realize: Duke hates Jews way more than he hates any other group.)

On the other side, here's O'Reilly's take:

...The Factor told Duke that he and Ward Churchill are in effect opposite sides of the same coin: "Free speech has consequences--both you and Churchill, on opposite ends of the spectrum, have brought personal pain to Americans."

What lovely measured tones. I didn't see the show, but I kinda-sorta suspect it wasn't all like that.

(There's not much at Fox about this.)

Look -- the Bushist Right simply doesn't embrace old-school racism anymore. We on the left have to recognize that. We should have known that O'Reilly wouldn't be nice to Duke.

The new right-wing attitude toward race is this: Nonwhites have exactly the same potential to be good people as whites. We know this because some nonwhites actually do become first-rate Americans. You can recognize those nonwhites by the fact that they embrace right-wing principles. They have names such as Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales. We love these people, and we never tire of reminding liberals that we love these people. Regrettably, however, some nonwhites are lazy, shiftless, violent, sexually irresponsible, and overly dependent on government handouts. But that's not their fault. That's the fault of liberals, who make these nonwhites lazy, shiftless, violent, sexually irresponsible, and overly dependent by keeping them on their liberal plantation. Liberals, in fact, are the real racists. You can tell because they oppose nonwhites who embrace right-wing principles. Liberals claim they oppose nonwhites who embrace right-wing principles because they embrace right-wing principles, but we know they oppose them because they're racists. And that makes us feel very, very superior to liberals and Democrats, and to nonwhites who are liberal and vote Democrat.

Thus, we get this, from a low-level right-wing pundit:

You may be part of the right wing conspiracy if ...

You think there's a Lib conspiracy bordering on racism against conservative Blacks.

So if O'Reilly gave Duke a hard time, it's no surprise. He's arming himself for the next time a liberal calls him a racist. Then he'll pull the trigger.

****

An odd fact about that David Duke appearance -- Duke was in Moscow (per Fox); the oreilly.com page says he's "now living and teaching in the Ukraine." What's up with that?

The ADL explains:

White supremacist David Duke has set his sights on Russia. Saying that the nation holds the "key to white survival," Duke has recently embarked on a campaign to spread his racial theories of white superiority and anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union. The notorious American hatemonger has recently launched an appeal to Russian nationalists. In Duke’s eyes, Russia presents an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race, since he predicts that "racially aware" parties could achieve political influence there. He believes that Russia’s "sense of racial understanding" will unleash a trend internationally.

Duke has taken at least three recent trips to Russia to speak with nationalists and to promote his new book, The Ultimate Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question (the Russian title translates as The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of an American). Duke has indicated he may move there to more actively "struggle against people of other colors and with Jews," according to the Interfax news agency....

And, in fact, here's a Duke essay, "Is Russia the Key to White Survival?"

...Russia is a White nation! Of the many capital cities of Europe, it is accurate to say that Moscow is the Whitest of them all. Although there is the presence of some ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation, Russia has a greater sense of racial understanding among its population than does any other predominantly White nation. There is a common awareness among the people of the Bolshevik-Jewish invasion of 1917, commonly referred to in the United States as the “Russian Revolution” ...

Yeesh. Sorry -- I'll understand if you think you need to take a shower now.