Starting last week, NewsBusters has been revealing the winners and top runners-up for each category in the MRC’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Ku Klux Con Job Award,” for smearing conservatives with phony racism charges. (As always, thanks to our 39 judges who patiently reviewed dozens of quotes to select the very worst of the worst. And, the full list of winners can be found at www.MRC.org.)
Winning this category: Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, who on April 8 let loose a litany of complaints about the modern-day GOP, and claimed they were “really the party of Jefferson Davis.”
“Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today’s Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it.”
Coming in second, CNN analyst Sally Kohn, who appeared on CNN Newsroom back on July 21 and used the enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s campaign as an excuse to smear the conservative base of the Republican Party as having been “outraged” for seven years by President Obama’s skin color, rather than his left-wing policies:
“It would be unfair, or I think dishonest of us to not be clear that part of what he’s [Trump] speaking to is a part of the American public that for the last seven years has felt outraged. They talk about taking the White House back. They’ve said, and he retweeted this, they want the White House, capital W-H-I-T-E again. You know, there is a disaffected, highly racialized, highly us-versus-them part of the American electorate that he is firing up....”
Next, MSNBC’s foam-flecked Hardball host Chris Matthews, who on March 2 said that because Republicans support the idea that voters should show some basic identification when they vote, they were pushing policies akin to the “Jim Crow” laws (engineered generations ago by southern Democrats) that made it virtually impossible for black citizens to vote:
“It [the Republican Party] is no longer the party that voted overwhelmingly for civil rights and voting rights in the mid ’60s. In fact, its most consistent ambition these recent years has been a relentless push to limit voting rights, especially for minorities, by the imposition of new voter ID requirements, and with this, it’s doing what the Jim Crow enforcers did with poll taxes and outlandish literacy tests.”
Finally, what everybody wants — another quote from Chris Matthews! On April 14, the 150th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Matthews ended Hardball by again ripping the Republican Party as abandoning Lincoln and lurching towards policies of “Jim Crow and poll taxes and bogus literacy tests.”
“Let me finish tonight with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who was shot 150 years ago today.... Why do the people running the Republican Party, starting with Reince Priebus, oversee a national effort in three dozen states to create voter laws that make it hard for minorities, especially older minorities, from exercising the right that Abraham Lincoln died fighting to get them. This is a scar on the Grand Old Party....Who can not blame the Republican Party itself from reverting to the bad old days of Jim Crow and poll taxes and bogus literacy tests?”
Tomorrow: the dumbest celebrity quotes of 2015. The full report, with 10 categories plus the judges’ selection of Quote of the Year, is available at: www.MRC.org.
