"With the powers vested in me by the liberal media, I am pleased this morning to declare Tou Thao a white man."
Joe Scarborough might as well have said that on today's Morning Joe. Expressing his outrage that the police officers who, in addition to Derek Chauvin, were on the scene when George Floyd died, have not been arrested, Scarborough said:
"Three white men have not been charged for standing there and watching as life drained from a man in a slow-motion murder."
As Scarborough surely should know, one of those three "white" police officers is Tou Thao, an Asian-American and a member of Minneapolis-St. Paul's large Hmong community. Googling indicates that "Tou,' which means 'son/boy' in Hmong, is the most common name in the community, and 'Thao' is one of the 18 clan names."
So how does an Asian-American become "white" in the eyes of the liberal media? By being involved in something heinous.
Scarborough contrasted the Minneapolis situation to a recent one in Alabama, where a black man was executed in connection with a murder despite having reportedly run away when the shooting started.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
6-1-20
6:30 am EDTJOE SCARBOROUGH: What I don’t understand, Rev, is why the other three officers have not been brought to justice yet. I want to go back. Because they were standing around for nine-and-a-half minutes.
I said this yesterday: the most damning for Minneapolis police in the murder of George Floyd are that the other officers were standing around for nine minutes, watching a fellow officer kill a black man. This is not a bad apple in the force. This is a culture that is rotted to its core.
And I want to take you back a few months, when we were talking on this show about Nathaniel Woods. Nathaniel Woods was a black man from Alabama, who in 2005, was with someone who committed a murder. But as he started shooting, Nathaniel Woods ran. Once the crime began, he ran away because he wanted nothing to do with it. There was no evidence that he was any part of the plan. And, yet, Kay Ivey, after ignoring complaints from civil rights leaders, and going through with the execution, said, there is no evidence that Nathaniel Woods tried to stop the gunman from committing these heinous crimes. That was her standard for letting a man, who did not pull the trigger and, in fact, who ran away when the crime started, to get executed.
And yet, we have three men who were standing there for nine-and-a-half minutes, not stopping a murder from taking place. Now, how do you execute a black man in Alabama for running away from the scene of a crime and let three white men in Minneapolis not be charged for standing there, in the middle of the day, and watch for nine and a half minutes, as life is drained from a man in a slow-motion murder?
BONUS COVERAGE: Sharpton Makes an Interesting-but-Ironic Point
Earlier in the show, Al Sharpton [video at tweet] criticized those who, without having to pay any price for it, incite others to violence, he said:
"We must distinguish between those protesting peacefully and those inciting others. In Ferguson, young people [were] being incited. Some of those young people went to jail, and the people that incited them left town."
Good point. But there's also the irony of Al Sharpton having said it. In the infamous Freddy's Fashion Mart case, it was Sharpton who incited protesters, saying, "we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." One of the protesters subsquently set fire to the store, causing the deaths of seven employees.
And you might say that at that time, Sharpton literally and figuratively walked away, going on to become rich and famous.
In subsequent years, Sharpton has tempered his rhetoric. Indeed, during the Trayvon Martin episode, we noted that Sharpton was more cautious with his comments than Scarborough, who branded George Zimmerman a "murderer" before he was even arrested.
So, has Sharpton sincerely evolved in a positive way. Or, now that he is very much a part of the establishment, is he seeking to protect his position? We can't see inside his heart, but whatever his motivation, Sharpton 2.0 is preferable to the old rabble-rouser.
