MSNBC’s Dyson Compares Rand Paul to Segregationist George Wallace

May 31st, 2015 11:22 AM

On Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Michael Eric Dyson, regular fill-in host on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, took a swipe at Republican Presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul when he accused him of sounding like “George Wallace in one beat and like Noam Chomsky on the other.”  

Dyson’s comments came in response to Stephanopoulos wondering if “Hillary Clinton's baggage is going to start to weigh her down, how concerned are Democrats, progressives getting about that?” The MSNBC host eagerly spun and argued that “I don't think too terribly concerned. Look, she's been vetted already. All the stuff and guff she’s taken over the years, she’s got a lot of practice in trying to thrust.” 

After Dyson claimed that the “baggage” Clinton has to deal with “keep nagging away” he touted how Hillary is “celebrating the fact that all of the Republicans are jumping in” before he blasted Rand Paul: 

I mean, when you got a guy like Rand Paul whose a libertarian in the midst of a field of, you know, very conservative figures, he can sound like George Wallace in one beat and like Noam Chomsky on the other. I mean, that kind of diversity adds a kind of [sic] to the process at least alleviates some of the concern about Hillary on the left.     

Nowhere in his criticism of Paul did Dyson explain how the Kentucky Republican was similar to arch-segregationist Democratic Governor of Alabama George Wallace but seemed to have no problem making such an extreme comment which he frequently does during his regular appearances on television. 

On November 24 of last year, Dyson appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and accused Rudy Giuliani of having a “white supremacy” mindset after the former New York City mayor rejected then notion that cops are killing throngs of unarmed minority men. 

In June of last year Dyson filled in for Ed Schultz as host of MSNBC’s The Ed Show and blamed “right wing media and conservative politicians” for the Las Vegas shooting. During an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on May 4, 2014 Dyson shamefully compared Congressman Paul Ryan to Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling when he argued that “I see a relationship between what Paul Ryan says when he talks about inner-city people who are urban with all the code words being articulated and the kind of Cliven Bundy expression to the kind of Donald Sterling.”

See relevant transcript below. 

ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos

May 31, 2015

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And one of the other things that I think all of Republicans are banking on, Michael Eric Dyson, as Kristen was talking about earlier, is that Hillary Clinton's baggage is going to start to weigh her down, how concerned are Democrats, progressives getting about that? 

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: I don't think too terribly concerned. Look, she's been vetted already. All the stuff and guff she’s taken over the years, she’s got a lot of practice in trying to thrust. The problem is, you know, the question is, will she wait too late to be able to weigh in to leverage all of that authority she's accumulated over the years against some of the charges that keep nagging away.

But she's celebrating the fact that all of the Republicans are jumping in. I mean, when you got a guy like Rand Paul whose a libertarian in the midst of a field of, you know, very conservative figures, he can sound like George Wallace in one beat and like Noam Chomsky on the other. I mean, that kind of diversity adds a kind of [sic] to the process at least alleviates some of the concern about Hillary on the left.