Bill O'Reilly's New Target: Tom Hanks

Bill O’Reilly's favorite new target: Tom Hanks. The Fox News host says the actor is unfairly claiming racism was behind our attack on Japan during World War II ... and behind the current War on Terror. The actor, while promoting his miniseries The Pacific, told Time that we “wanted to annihilate” the Japanese 60 years ago “because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?” Poppycock, responds O’Reilly. "We had to kill the Japanese because they wouldn't surrender. If the jihadists were Thais, Burmese, we'd be doing the same thing to them."

Mediaite points out that those comments come from one of three Hanks-focused O'Reilly segments; in another, the host says Hanks has “gone of the rails.” Last night, Karl Rove joined in, responding to comments Hanks made about his new book. Said Rove to O'Reilly: "I didn't write this book with the expectation that it would be picked up by Tom Hanks and Danny Glover and Sean Penn as part of their book club. He is impervious to rational discussion. He has no intellectual curiosity." To be fair, O’Reilly is also a bit miffed that Hanks won’t promote his series on Fox. (More Bill O'Reilly Tom Hanks stories.)