Last week on his show, Fox host Bill O'Reilly and his guest Lou Dobbs decided to attack former Secretary of Labor and professor Robert Reich, calling him a "communist" who "secretly adores Karl Marx." O'Reilly was called out by Reich both on MSNBC and in a post he wrote at the Huffington Post here -- Why Anyone Should Care That Bill O'Reilly Calls Me a Communist .

Reich challenged O'Reilly to a debate both on Ed Schultz's show and in his column. O'Reilly's response? He was "obviously joshing around" and laughing when he called Robert Reich a Communist. Whether O'Reilly and Dobbs were joking or not, Fox intentionally confuses their audience by conflating the words Communist, Marxist and Socialist on a regular basis, with the worst being Glenn Beck when he was still on there, to the point that all of them are meaningless and nothing but a general slur or insult to be lobbed at liberals. The sad joke is that their audience doesn't know the difference between any of them. And I doubt most of their viewers thought O'Reilly was joking at the time.

h/t Media Matters