MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry has a tendency to wax sanctimonious when the camera light goes on and she takes to the air.
So it's our pleasure to note her utter hypocrisy when it comes to how to describe the president's signature legislative accomplishment, the ObamaCare health care overhaul. [See video after jump.]
On her December 8 program, Perry had the audacity to claim that the use of the term “ObamaCare” was “a derogatory term… conceived up by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to put themselves above and apart from a black man.”
During her opening rant, Perry doubled down on the so-called “controversial word” arguing that ObamaCare was “meant to shame and divide and demean” a way of making President Obama feel “inferior and unequal and to diminish his accomplishments.”
The segment wouldn’t have been so offensive if not for the hilarious irony of the situation. While on December 8 Ms. Perry was lecturing Americans on the “derogatory” word ObamaCare, just two weeks earlier she herself used the word to refer to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in a discussion with Ron Christie:
So Ron, let me ask, then, particularly you brought up Kasich. So I’m wondering will there be an internecine fight around ObamaCare…
So I’m assuming by Ms. Perry’s own use of the word she is trying to put herself “above and apart from a black man, to render him inferior and unequal and to diminish his accomplishments.” Next time Ms. Perry wants to lecture her small audience about what words we can and cannot use it might be wise for her to stop using them herself.
See relevant transcript below.
MSNBC
Melissa Harris-Perry
November 24, 2013
10:47 a.m. Eastern
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: So Ron (Christie), let me ask, then, particularly you brought up Kasich. So I’m wondering will there be an internecine fight around ObamaCare and particularly the Medicaid expansion aspect of it between the Republican governors who made a decision to in fact expand and those who didn't? Because some of them are going to end up likely on one of those big primary stages together in the debates.
MSNBC
Melissa Harris-Perry
December 8, 2013
10:00 a.m. Eastern
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: Good morning. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. I want to talk today about a controversial word. It's a word that has been with us for years. And like it or not, it's indelibly printed in the pages of American history. A word that was originally intended at a derogatory term. Meant to shame and divide and demean. The word was conceived up by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to put themselves above and apart from a black man, to render him inferior and unequal and to diminish his accomplishments. President Obama has been labels with this word by his opponents, and at first he rose above it, hoping that if he could just make a cause for what he'd achieved, his opponents would fail in making their label stick. But no matter how many successes that he had as president, he realized there were still many people for whom he'd never be anything more than that one disparaging word.A belief he knew was held not just by his political opponents, but also by a significant portion of the American electorate. And so he decided, if you can't beat them, you've got to join them. And he embraced the word and made it his own, sending his opposition a message they weren't expecting. If that's what you want me to be, I'll be that. Y'all know the word that I'm talking about ObamaCare.
