Yahoo News fired David Chalian today after he was caught smearing Republicans as “happy to have a party with black people drowning.” At the Daily Kos, that home of the constant drumbeat that conservatives are beyond evil, the blogger known as Vyan wondered out loud: "One wonders with the incredible speed of his firing whether the fact that - at least optically - what he said appears to be completely true wasn't a factor?"
Then came a slight adjustment: "I'm not saying that Republicans Hate Black people and wish to see them lose their homes and livelihood. No. They just Hate Democrats and since about 90% of the Black People in the Nation are Democrats since the passage of the Civil Right Act after Republican Presidential Nominee Barry Goldwater openly opposed it."
For his part, Chalian apologized publicly and privately to the Romney campaign and said he was "profoundly sorry" for an "inappropriate and thoughtless joke." But liberals like Chalian aren't really joking when they say things like this, as Vyan demonstrates. They sincerely believe white conservatives could party while blacks drown. It's amazing that people with this depth of loathing, a loathing that seriously distorts the truth about conservatives, can be seen by anyone as capable of detached or "objective" journalism.
Perhaps they could suggest that it's unfair that Chalian would be fired for saying privately what former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines wrote publicly about Bush after Hurricane Katrina in 2005: "This president who flew away Monday to fundraisers in the West while the hurricane blew away entire towns in coastal Mississippi is very much his father's son. George H.W. Bush couldn't quite connect to the victims of Hurricane Andrew, nor did he mind being photographed tooling his golf cart around Kennebunkport while American troops died in the first Iraq war. After preemptively declaring a state of emergency, the younger Bush seemed equally determined to show his successors how to vacation through an apocalypse."
Raines concluded: "The populism of Huey Long was financially corrupt, but when it came to the welfare of people, it was caring. The churchgoing cultural populism of George Bush has given the United States an administration that worries about the House of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die in foreign deserts."
