Riddle me this: How can a cable news program be so sensitive regarding the use of the “n word” that they blur it out of a website headline shown onscreen, then turn around and defend a film in which that same word is used more than 100 times?
That's what happened during Wednesday's edition of Martin Bashir's MSNBC talk show. The host and both of his guests attacked editor Matt Drudge as a “race baiter” and “race peddler” for using the word seven times as a headline for a story on the popular Drudge Report website about “Django Unchained,” liberal filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's latest movie.
Bashir began the discussion by claiming that “the far right has moved from a war on Christmas to a war on Jamie Foxx,” who in the film plays a slave in the 1850s who escapes and returns to kill his former masters. The characters use the “n word” throughout the movie, which led Drudge to use his unusual headline.
“And so, I just don't give that kind of credibility” to Drudge, Taylor said before claiming that he deliberately used the headline to cater “to the least of these folks who still harbor some of the worst prejudices and the most vicious and maligning stereotypes about people like me,” fellow guest Toure Neblett, and Bashir himself, as well as President Barack Obama.
“It is irresponsible, it is dangerous, frankly,” she noted. “If we look at this particular president, if we look at the Secret Service statistics, the number, the sheer number of assassination threats that come into this White House, either by the phone or email, or Internet. It keeps the Secret Service quite busy."
Bashir then showed a clip of remarks Foxx made while hosting Saturday Night Live last weekend.
I got a movie coming out, "Django," check it out. Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson. “Django Unchained” I play a slave. How black is that?
And in the movie I had to wear chains. How black is that? But don't be worried about it because I get out the chains, I get free, I save my wife, and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that? And how black is that?
Instead of being aghast at the reference to race-based murder, Taylor said Foxx is "a very good comedian" and called his comments “pure satire,” and Neblett, one of the hosts of the MSNBC series called The Cycle, claimed that the character's actions are “quite obviously heroic.”
Killing all the slave masters and the people who helped slavery function in the film was “not a bad thing to do morally,” Neblett stated. “The clarity between evil and good there is quite obvious,” he said before remarking that he found the film's concept “just quite brilliant and beautiful.”
He then noted that Foxx's character is “not this wild beast” because he doesn't kill a white character who helped him escape his slave masters.
“He just kills the white people enslaving himself and others and his wife,” Neblett remarked. “What else would you have them do?”
Bashir then asked:
Didn't the real problem begin when Jamie Foxx appeared on the soul train awards and began by thanking his lord and savior Barack Obama … and that also was deemed to have been a sacrilegious comment.
Taylor replied that Tarantino used the “n word” “like running water” in the film, but she called criticism of its use “just fanfare,” like the war on Christmas.
Neblett then came to Tarantino's defense by stating that in his films, the word is only used by someone who is morally bankrupt and should not be listened to.
“I have no problem putting it in people's mouths within the context of art,” he added.
As the discussion wound down, Taylor had another stern warning about the kind of people who visit the Drudge Report.
“They want their country back,” she said, noting that a recent poll showed that many on the right support the ability to secede from the Union. “It isn’t just because of socialism that they would like to secede, it’s because the man in the White House is black.”
So what can we take away from this obvious display of hypocrisy and poor judgment? Apparently, the only people who can use the “n word” with reckless abandon are liberal filmmakers, and conservatives are knuckle-dragging troglodytes who are prepared to secede from the country since the president is the incorrect skin color.
Apparently Taylor has never heard of the concept of “JesusLand,” a derogatory term created by liberal Democrats after the 2004 election when their preferred candidate John Kerry lost and the much-hated George W. Bush won reelection. Jesusland was used to refer to the majority of states that had voted for Bush instead of Kerry. There was open talk among such liberals of creating their own “United States of Canada” separate from Jesusland. Some of it was satirical but much was as sincere (i.e. only partially) as the stuff you currently hear from disgruntled conservatives.
