Oy. Last night Bill O’Reilly said: “It is not a stretch to say that MoveOn is the new Klan.”

This kind of rhetoric crafted to marginalize MoveOn is a mainstay of the right:

For movement conservatives and establishment centrists alike, MoveOn is just a new name for an old foe. Bill O’Reilly has called it “vicious,” “radical,” full of “fanatical left-wingers” who are blackmailing the Democratic Party. John McCain, not to be outdone, responded to the “General Betray Us” ad by telling a Republican audience this past fall that MoveOn “ought to be thrown out of this country.” Ostensibly mainstream voices like CNN’s Campbell Brown have referred to MoveOn as “American insurgents,” while Peter Beinart, in a 2004 cover essay in The New Republic, suggested that MoveOn be purged from the center left just as communists once were. Democrats have gotten in on the act as well: Hillary Clinton told donors at a private fundraiser that MoveOn had “intimidated” her supporters in the caucus states, and Barack Obama took a veiled swipe at the group in his recent speech on patriotism.

O’Reilly’s such a ludicrous figure, it seems hardly worthwhile to respond to this sort of thing, but just as a brief historical primer:

This, this, and this is what the Klan used to do.

This, this, and this is what MoveOn does.

So, yeah. It is kind of a stretch.