“This is your first appearance. We welcome you. We’re glad you chose our forum to make your own statements,” said Barbara Walters at the start of an interview with Hank Williams, Jr. on “The View” this morning.
It’s Williams’s first national interview since last Monday’s “Fox & Friends” appearance during which he said Pres. Obama and VP Biden playing golf with GOP leaders was analogous to “Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu.”
That comment led to Williams’s song, “All My Rowdy Friends” being pulled from ESPN’s “Monday Night Football.” (He says it was his choice, ESPN says it was their decision). But that’s not the end of the song. “As of May 1st in 2012, ladies and gentlemen, me and my song will be free agents,” Williams told the audience.
Williams — wearing a Mickey Mantel Yankees jersey — acknowledged it was a bad idea to use Hitler in an analogy. Stalin, Pol Pot, or Genghis Kahn would have been more acceptable, joked Joy Behar. “I’m not smart enough,” said Williams. “That’s when you grab at it, you know.”
When Walters asked him if people should boycott “Fox & Friends” and ESPN — as Williams suggests in a new song “Keep the Change” — he paraphrased Harry Truman: “He was in the Rose Garden in 1948. He was asked a political question, he said, ‘Son, never kick a cow terd on a hot day.'”
And one more analogy, which, thankfully, doesn’t cite a megalomaniacal murderer. “Disney, ABC and ESPN and the opening of ‘Monday Night Football’ are kind of like the Spanish/American War. They’re history,” said Williams.