Michael Eric Dyson

On Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer got reaction to Ted Kennedy’s death from left-wing Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, who touted the Senator’s importance in the 2008 campaign: "Of course Barack Obama had the wings of hope and the winds of possibility behind him, but Ted Kennedy was an awful powerful gust of wind that gave him a necessary lift."

Dyson, who was not identified as liberal, went on to describe Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama as coronation: "This was a man of American royalty bestowing upon Mr. Obama, if you will, the mantle of that kind of liberal leadership...I think that Senator Kennedy identified in Barack Obama the same hopefulness that he had seen glowing in the face of his brother John and radiating from the heart of his brother Robert."

Dyson continued to glorify Kennedy and Obama quasi-religous terms:

The networks might just as well have hung out a sign this morning: non-African-American experts on policing and racial profiling need not apply.  Good Morning America, the Early Show and Today had a total of six guests on the subject . . . and every one was African-American.

Among the highlights: a writer from Tina Brown's Daily Beast suggested that given our incarceration rate, the USA meets the definition of a "police state."

On Sunday’s CBS Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer discussed the challenges President-elect Barack Obama will face with liberal authors: "Today we ask the authors of four of the year's most important books to assess the problems the new administration will face." Schieffer asked the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, author of ‘The War Within: A Secret White House History,’ about Obama picking Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Woodward replied: "It's an amazing national security team that Obama appears to have selected. It's kind of like 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' You've got too cool, which might be -- or at least appropriately cool, General Jones as the national security adviser; Gates is kind of just right, in the middle; and Hillary Clinton, hot."

Schieffer later turned to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, author of ‘The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,’ and asked: "...your fascinating book, 'The Dark Side,' tells how the current vice president, Richard Cheney, amassed power unknown to any vice president in our history. I'd like to ask you first, how did he do that? And do you see Joe Biden having the kind of power?" Mayer replied: "it takes a president like Bush to have a vice president like Cheney. Obama, so far, seems to be so much more involved in the details and in kind of wanting to command the policies all the way up and down, really -- so I don't see it repeating." Mayer then went on to compare the Bush and Obama administrations:

Another difference that's very important is that both the president coming in and the vice president are lawyers, and one of the things that happened in the last administration was neither of them were. They were not constitutional scholars and they enacted policies that -- including legalizing torture for all purposes -- that really were not constitutional. And I don't think we're going to see that again. This is a -- this is a group of people who -- and the secretary of state is also a lawyer now. These people respect the law, I think.

Since Time now sends out its issue on Fridays, perhaps they regret the decision to hand over a page to leftist professor Michael Eric Dyson to proclaim that Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a "war-tested patriot," unlike draft dodgers like Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton. "War-tested" is an odd word, since Wright served stateside, but "patriotism" is even weirder for a man who has alleged that America is a terrorist nation who deserved 9/11. Dyson, used to arguing for bigger thugs than Wright (gangsta-rapper Tupac Shakur) and inveighing against insufficiently radical blacks (Bill Cosby), effortlessly if ridiculously pitched Wright as the uber-patriot, more patriotic than George Bush, Bill Clinton, or Dick Cheney:

Even the angry comments of Jeremiah Wright have to be read as the bitter complaint of a spurned lover. Like millions of other blacks, Wright was willing to serve the country while suffering rejection.

On his April 8 "Countdown," host Keith Olbermann smeared Iraq war veteran David Bellavia as a racist:

OLBERMANN, from the April 8 "Countdown" opening credits: Nothing obscure about this: Racism as a Republican campaign plank. Sen. McCain introduced at a rally on Capitol Hill."

BELLAVIA, introducing then hugging McCain: You can have your Tiger Woods. We've got Sen. McCain.

OLBERMANN: Did he actually just say that? And why did McCain then embrace him?

Bellavia is running as a Republican for Congress in upstate New York and is pitted against another Iraq veteran, Democratic nominee Jon Powers, in that contest. Olbermann turned to liberal professor Michael Eric Dyson to sanction Olbermann's specious charge that the McCain campaign is racist: