Roger Ailes told a joke, and Dems are jumping all over him for it. Is that fair? I say not.

Below is the allegedly offensive joke - it’s about the third joke in the list:

From MediaBistro Roger Ailes Speech:

It is true that I said Britney Spears looked great at the Academy Awards. and I later found out it was Jack Nicholson.

[Laughter/ooohs]

It is true that just in the last two weeks Hillary Clinton has had over 200 phone calls telling her in order to win the presidency she must stay on the road for the next two years. It is not true they were all from Bill.

[Laughter]

And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’

[Laughter]

I view Ailes’s joke as being at the expense of Bush, not Obama, as in “Bush is so stupid he thinks Senator Obama is Osama bin Laden”. But some prominent Dems disagree, or are disingenuously distorting the meaning, claiming Ailes compared Obama to terrorists.

• MyDD’s take
• DailyKos diarist’s take - discussing how Nevada Dems used Ailes’s joke as excuse to cancel a Fox debate. See also Politico’s news item about Nevada Dem Party and the debate controversy. Seems to me that the Nevada Dems found Ailes’s joke to be the easy way out of a controversial Fox-sponsored debate in Nevada. Accordingly, Dems became willing to distort Ailes’s meaning.
• Huffington Post’s take

Anti-Bush forces pulled the same distortion with Bush’s “Catapult the Propaganda” remark.

We don’t need to distort our political enemies’ words and meanings, because that reduces us to the level of Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Ingraham, Savage, Beck, and their ilk.

Maybe there’s something wrong with my humor receptor, but it seems pretty clear that Ailes is poking fun at Bush.