“If you’re less curious about who mentored Obama than you are about how Sarah Palin maintains a year-round tan in Alaska, you might be a liberal,” Jim Treacher writes at the Daily Caller. “Or a member of the media (PTR).”
Drip…drip..drip…
As with the ACORN videos, what’s on the videos sometimes isn’t as much fun as the media’s hysterical response to them. Regarding those earlier videos, as Jonah Goldberg wrote last week in his eulogy to Breitbart:
When liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.
He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.
The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.
60 Minutes won awards for hidden cameras, but when he used the same technique to embarrass liberals, such tactics were suddenly proclaimed ethically beyond the pale. The joke was on the scolds because they had to cover the stories anyway. And the stories got results. Congress defunded ACORN. Heads rolled at NPR. Andrew understood that news and arguments change politics if you can get the news and arguments to the people — and if you don’t let those who don’t like what you say define you.
Whatever his faults, that was my friend’s great and remarkable strength: He never let the bastards get him down. That took away his enemies’ greatest power, and they hated him all the more for it.
And this morning, as you can see in the painful to watch video above, “CNN beclowns itself painting Breitbart editor-in-chief as racist.” Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air:
Soledad O’Brien and her CNN panel manage to stumble into Contessa Brewer territory in this appearance by attempting to paint Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak as a racist for making a point about Barack Obama’s support for a proponent of “critical race theory” during his days at Harvard Law School. Joel ends up in an argument with a woefully unprepared O’Brien on the theory itself, but the actual facepalm moment goes to one of her panelists, who asks Joel why he’s so afraid of black people:
Only one problem, as Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler. “Joel Pollak’s wife is black. She’s from South Africa, actually, and her mother was a political appointee of none other than Nelson Mandela. Here she is, in video made when Pollak ran for Congress.”
I realize when you’re the farm team for Fox and MSNBC, you might be short-staffed, but whose idea was it to send Soledad O’Brien out to attack yesterday’s clip from Breitbart.com? As we saw last night when I pulled the Wright-Free Zone clip out of mothballs, O’Brien declared Wright’s speech to the NAACP “a home run” on CNN in 2008, and was given a personal shout-out in that speech by Wright himself.
But at least O’Brien has been an on-air newsreader for many years; as I’ve mentioned before, I used to enjoy her work during the early days of MSNBC, back when it was more Tech-TV, and less Air America with video. The bigger question is, whose idea was it to send Jay Thomas, last seen playing Eddie LeBec on Cheers, to pull the race card on Pollak? He may have just scored the only double-own goal in NHL history. Beyond his direct racialist assault on Pollak, as Jeff Goldstein writes at Protein Wisdom:
And as an aside, here’s a note to Jay Thomas: in your attempt to marginalize Whites who don’t engage in knee jerk paternalistic defenses of Black academics, you are in fact presuming to speak for those Black academics and take ownership of what it is they believed in order to try to protect them from the scrutiny they themselves invited by the very fact of their works and theoretics.
That is to say, by trying to diminish scrutiny of their scholarship, you are treating them as a plantation owner might the chattel he wishes to protect.
Which I’m sure has never even occurred to you, so convinced are you of your own rote liberal rectitude.
It goes beyond the soft bigotry of low expectations; it is the overt bigotry of the falsely pious. And the times, they are a-changin’…
Last word to Capt. Ed:
Frankly, it’s clear that no one at CNN does critical thinking, on race theory or anything else. The point of Andrew’s final project isn’t so much to make Obama’s early radical ties clear; it’s to point out how the media tried to keep them quiet. This uninformed attack from O’Brien and most of the CNN panel is a great demonstration of the very point that Andrew wanted to make with these videos. All they needed to say — and what Holmes tried to say at one point — is that plenty of people toy with radicalism in college, but drop those passions when they get into the real world, and that college activism isn’t terribly germane twenty years later with a term as President already in place. They fell into the trap set by Andrew and Joel, and somewhere Andrew is enjoying a mighty laugh over it.
I suspect he’ll be enjoying a few more before the year is done.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member