A couple nights ago, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart mocked Fox News' sudden discovery that comparing your political opponents to Nazis is ridiculous and offensive. Tonight, Bill O'Reilly had the option of humbly conceding Stewart's point, ignoring it, or rationalizing his own abuse of Nazi analogies. Guess which one he went for?

That's right: O'Reilly defended comparing the Huffington Post to the Nazi Party on the basis that Stewart failed to provide the full context. And that context was: an insulting comment about Nancy Reagan.

Make that a deleted insulting comment. If you click on the relevant Huffington Post piece on Nancy Reagan, you'll see that all of the comments have been scrubbed. The nasty comment about Reagan has been immortalized solely in the right-wing blogosphere, including in an indignant column on BillOReilly.com.

So O'Reilly's defense for comparing the “hate-filled blogs” to Nazis is that one random commenter on the Huffington Post said something cruel about Nancy Reagan in a comment that was later deleted. Funny how the full context doesn't actually make his Nazi analogy seem all that reasonable.