Salon's Joan Walsh: 'Hannity and Carlson Are Having An Ethnic Nervous Breakdown'

October 2nd, 2012 11:40 PM

The media are out in force Tuesday evening trying to convince people that the 2007 video of Barack Obama revealed by the Daily Caller is old news and nothing that should concern anybody.

Doing her part is Salon editor Joan Walsh who quickly published a rebuttal entitled "Right-wing Racial Panic: Hannity and Carlson hype a 2007 Obama video and prove they're having an ethnic nervous breakdown":

Tuesday night they hyped a 2007 Barack Obama speech to a group of black ministers at Hampton University in Virginia, and they engaged in the most rancid racial fear-mongering I’ve seen in a long time. Hannity hailed the speech as “a glimpse into the mind of the real Barack Obama,” and he tried out his own black preacher voice for special effect. Carlson insisted Obama was preaching racial division to his black audience and sputtered, “This is not a dog whistle, this is a dog siren!”

He would know.

Walsh then began her defense writing, "There was absolutely nothing objectionable in Obama’s speech. It made me proud to have a president who could speak with that complexity."

As for Obama's accent being different in the video, Walsh said this was no big deal.

"[S]o was Hillary Clinton’s and Al Gore’s in comparable situations – as Hannity noted with no self-awareness. So was Joe Biden’s at the NAACP."

"White politicians pick up a certain…cadence in black crowds," she added, "and they maybe get teased a little."

Notice she only identified Democrats as using such a tactic.

Regardless, she continued, "[W]hat we have here is an epidemic of white guys ruling on the correct way for other people to identify themselves in ethnic terms."


And concluded:

It pains me to pay attention to Carlson and Hannity. They’re hucksters and I mostly ignore them. And Matt Drudge too, who hyped the video much of Tuesday evening. They’re all trolls. But they’re singing from a GOP hymnal that we’ll hear more from before Nov. 6. It’s getting uglier, but it’s also getting dumber. They’re losing, and they know it.

We'll see in 35 days, won't we?