CRAWFORD: But the controversy seems to show that on one of the nation's most complex social issues, race, the Obama administration reacted impulsively.
JULIAN BOND [FORMER CHAIRMAN, NAACP]: We need to get this out in public discussion. We can't hide from it. And I'm afraid the Obama administration more often hides from it than confronts it.
CBS and the other networks utterly excuse the hateful and vicious comments Bond makes against conservatives, constantly accusing them of being racists, like this doozy from January 20 of this year, a few weeks before he stepped down after two decades as the NAACP's chairman of the board:
We saw hate on display this summer in town halls and tea parties, subsidized by corporations and their well-funded fear machines across the country. Our politics have been poisoned by armed and paranoid self-described patriots, drawn from the Taliban wing of American politics, a true fright wing, once called Birchers, now birthers, spreading lies and spreading myths.
Even as the Taliban sends suicide bombers to blow up innocents in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Julian Bond explicitly compares American conservatives to terrorists. He's repeatedly called conservatives the "Taliban wing" of the GOP. MRC chairman Brent Bozell called this man's rhetorical record out on the Mark Levin show.
Not only has Bond been board chairman of the NAACP (so much for "healing"), but Bond is a co-founder and board member of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which laughably claims to be all about "fighting hate" and "teaching tolerance." A look at some of Bond's more vicious remarks against conservatives would shred that mission. Here's just six more examples:
1. Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, July 10, 2007:
It can be said Katrina, like lynching, not only destroyed the work of generations in a single day but is resulting in a deliberate effort to dispossess black landowners.
2. Fox News. A speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, shown on Hannity & Colmes, October 8, 2006 on the Republican Party:
Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the confederate swastika flying side-by-side. They've written a new constitution for Iraq, and now they're trying to rewrite the Constitution here at home. And they draw their most rabid support from the Taliban wing of American politics. And now they want to write bigotry back into the Constitution.
3. USA Today, July 16, 2001, referring to remarks in February 2001:
"Instead of uniting us," Bond told the NAACP board then, "the new administration almost daily separates and divides. They selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and chose Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection."
4. Washington Times, February 21, 1999.
NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said yesterday that House and Senate leaders have "become the running dogs of the wacky radical right" and are contributing to a situation where "white supremacy" is "everywhere in America."
"The leadership of the House and Senate is more hostile to civil rights than at any time in the recent past. . . . On the NAACP's nonpartisan congressional scoreboard, they fail," Mr. Bond said in a speech on race relations at the NAACP's 90th annual meeting in Washington, where he was unanimously elected to a one-year term by the board of trustees.
5. Washington Times, May 28, 1998.
NAACP Chairman Julian Bond yesterday called the Republican Party "a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts" that has waged an "assault on the rule of law" intended "to subvert, ignore, defy and destroy the laws that require an America which is bias-free."
Mr. Bond also told the National Press Club that "as long ago as 1964, Republicans had begun to remake their party as the white people's party."
6. CNN, July 12, 1998:
BLITZER: You know, the Ennis Cosby murder caused a lot of concern in the United States. Camille Cosby, the mother of Enis Cosby, wrote a letter in USA Today this past week. I'm sure you probably saw it, but lets show our audience. She wrote, "I believe America taught our son's killer to hate African Americans. All African Americans, regardless of their educational or economic accomplishments have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin color." That was a reference to the now convicted murderer Mikhail Markhasev, who came from Ukraine where there of course is a very small African American population. Do you agree with Camile Cosby's assessment that all African Americans are at risk today?
BOND: Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, Ennis Cosby's death is sad reminder that those people who say there's a class of black Americans who don't need protections of civil rights laws or affirmative action just isn't true, that this young man was singled out because he was black. James Byrd was killed because he is black. Another man killed and his head cut off in Virginia, his body burned because they were black.
These things don't happen to these people because they are poor, they happen because they're black. Race is a life and death issue for African Americans in this country. And the sooner, I think, our nation comes to grips with that and then tries do something about it, the better off all of us will be. Now, that's not to say that we haven't made some progress. We have. But there is obviously much more to do.
