Rep. Al Green (D-Let’s Stay Together) has had a tough week. First, he was thrown out of President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress, and then he was censured, with ten congressional Democrats joining Republicans in voting for the censure. After all this, Green is not exactly in a reflective mood. He shows no sign of being ready to make any public acknowledgement of the fact that he acted improperly during Trump’s speech, and deserved the congressional rebuke. Instead, he is resorting to an excuse that is so tired and overused that it’s astounding that even leftists think it still works. Yeah, you guessed it.
Green appeared on "The Breakfast Club" Friday, and host Charlamagne Tha God asked him a question that seemed tailor-made for the all-too-predictable answer Green gave. "You said,” Mr. Tha God asked, “that the speaker was doing his job, so if that's the case, why didn't Democratic speakers do their job and kick out Joe Wilson when he yelled out at Barack Obama, ‘You lied.’ Why didn't they do their job and kick out Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Boebert, like why don't they do their job?" Yeah, no. This was not as clever a question as Charlamagne clearly thought it was.
This is because Green has been quite clear that he kept on trying to disrupt Trump’s speech even after he had been admonished to stop: “I heard the speaker when he said that I should cease. I did not, and I did not with intentionality." That was what distinguished Green’s behavior from that of Wilson, Greene and Boebert. They each made a single outburst; they didn’t keep on being disruptive after being told to stop.
The censure of Al Green, therefore, had nothing whatsoever to do with racism, but nevertheless, Green played the race card with so much gusto and enthusiasm that you’d almost get the idea that it hadn’t been played hundreds of thousands of times before. "There is invidious discrimination in the House of Representatives,” Green claimed implausibly, and then gave Charlamagne a potted history of how much he had suffered in the bad old days.
“I’m a son of the segregated South,” Green, who is 77 years old, continued. “The rights that the Constitution recognized for me, my friends and neighbors denied. I had to sit in the back of the bus, the balcony of the movie, drink from a colored water fountain and my relatives who committed some crimes were locked up in the bottom of the jail. I know what invidious discrimination looks like. The Klan burned a cross in my yard. I know what it smells like."
Wow! The Klan burned a cross in Al Green’s yard, eh? How interesting, then, that back in Mar. 2011, Green got into a heated exchange with Kerry Picket of the Washington Times, in which he argued that the KKK was a bigger terror threat than Islamic jihadis. In the course of a series of testy remarks, Green said: “If you never had to live with a cross burning, you don’t appreciate what a cross burning can do in terms of terrorizing people.” Yet in the entire conversation, Green never told Picket that a cross had been burned on his own lawn, and there is no ready record of his having said it on any other occasion, either. Maybe it did happen, but he has been remarkably reticent about it until his conversation Friday with Charlamagne Tha God.
Related: Dems Offer Lame Excuses for Why They Refused to Applaud Anything in Trump’s Speech
On that show, Green went on: "I was in filthy waiting rooms and I’ve been in places where I didn’t want to be. And I know what it sounds like. I’ve been called all kinds of ugly names. So I know invidious discrimination. "And when the speaker decided that I would be removed, and then there was this motion, this resolution to censure me, it became obvious to me that I was not being treated as others were. And candidly speaking, it is invidious discrimination, harmful discrimination."
Charlamagne, unfortunately, didn’t ask Green how long ago it was that he drank “from a colored water fountain” or was in “filthy waiting rooms.” Nor did he ask him how he came to be a member of Congress at all, if there was so much “invidious discrimination” in the U.S. even today. And worst of all, he didn’t challenge Green for the obvious hogwash he was peddling. He didn’t get censured because he is black; he got censured for being a disruptive lout. Apparently, however, the tired old excuses still play well to his constituency.
