Question: Is Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show about to vanish into the MSNBC weekend haze, gone for good from the network’s primetime line-up? Longtime media writer Lloyd Grove seems to thinks so, as reported here at the Daily Beast.
To borrow from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright? MSNBC’s chickens are coming home to roost. But you gotta love outright bald hypocrisy as practiced over there at the far-lefty cable network.
No, I’m not talking about the Clintons and all that foreign cash. We’re talking here about yet another NBC problem, this one blossoming on the set of Morning Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC set.
As reported here at NewsBusters by Mark Finkelstein, the liberal media is having the vapors over former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s remarks on President Obama.
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
Later, after the inevitable liberal media firestorm erupted, the former mayor went on to say:
“Some people thought it was racist — I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people. This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”
Nowhere was the reaction to this screechier than MSNBC, where race card-playing has been polished into such an art form that it would make a Klansman weep with joy. Like clockwork, as if being oblivious to the obvious is either in his DNA or a clause in his contract, the network’s house “Republican” Morning Joe proceeded to say:
“Are we really going to go through another cycle where Republican candidates are too stupid to get out of the way of the stupidest people in their party, that keep them from winning presidential elections by spewing hatred instead of telling people how they're going to get back to work?”
Stunning, yes? Here is a guy who blithely plays the co-host of a morning show on a network that has a god-awful record for living in the sewers of racial politics. But Joe is concerned about Rudy Giuliani - a guy whose political heroes include those vociferous racists Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, with a considerable record of his own for saving black lives with a tough crime policy. Talk about turning things upside down?
his is the network that gives the possibly-soon-to-be-removed-to-the weekend lineup Al Sharpton an entire show. That would be the Al Sharpton who has snarled of the first black mayor of New York:
“David Dinkins.… You wanna be the only n***** on television, the only n***** in the newspaper, the only n***** to talk.…Don't cover them, don't talk to them, cause you got the only n***** problem. Cause you know if a black man stood up next to ya they would see you for the whore that you really are.”
Not to be forgotten is this video clip of Sharpton shouting to the audience member of a TV show: “You ain't nothing, you a punk faggot. Now come on, do something!” Or the audio tapes littered with Sharpton’s charming references to "Greek homos," "Chinamen," "Koreans sell us watermelons” etc etc etc .
And, with all the Brian Williams news of recent vintage, not to be forgotten is the time Williams himself showed up to kiss the racial ring at a gathering of Sharpton’s National Action Network:
Then there’s the “racially obsessed” Chris Matthews (in the dead-on words of Sean Hannity) who has amazingly shifted from being an admirer of John F. Kennedy - the President who famously said “race has no place in American life or law” - to being a devotee of race card playing. Matthews “forgot he (President Obama) was black”, admitting accidentally that well, he thinks the guy isn’t really just “the President” but has to be classified by race. There was, as I described at the time, a “foam flecked” assault on a baffled RNC chair Reince Priebus on race issues. And who can forget the continual redefinition of everyday words as suddenly “racist” ? Words like “Chicago” and “urban” and ”food stamps” and even “golf” (in the case of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell).
One could run through a litany of MSNBC personalities who have spent their air time playing the race card. There’s Touré, the “founder of a militant anti-white student paper” in his college years at Emory University. There’s Melissa Harris-Perry, who mocked on her show that “This is the Romney family. And, of course, there on Governor Romney’s knee is his adopted grandson, who is an African-American, an adopted African-American child, Kieran Romney.” Harris-Perry later apologized. Then there was the now-departed Martin Bashir, who saw the IRS as the new “N-word”. As Jonah Goldberg noted, MSNBC has a whole deck of race cards. Giving the network a reputation that is even lower then their ratings.
In fact, as I once wrote over at The American Spectator, Joe Scarborough himself has never been shy to play the skin color card. On one occasion he sat on Meet the Press and had the chops to say that Sean Hannity and Mark Levin had called the president a racist. Hannity spoke out and said the obvious - he had “never” done so. Mark Levin, who had never said it either, replied:
“I have no idea what this fool is talking about. I used to think Scarborough was lowering himself by appearing on MSNBC. I now think MSNBC has lowered itself by airing Scarborough. And given the freak show that is that cable network's lineup, that says a lot.”
In sum?
MSNBC is losing its ratings - getting absolutely clobbered - because it has made of itself a racial sewer. And there sits Joe Scarborough - silent as a church mouse while raking in the bucks in quiet acquiescence of all this - having the gall to say of Rudy Giuliani:
“Are we really going to go through another cycle where Republican candidates are too stupid to get out of the way of the stupidest people in their party, that keep them from winning presidential elections by spewing hatred instead of telling people how they're going to get back to work?”
As if that wasn’t bold enough in the hypocrisy mine field, Scarborough kept going, saying:
“We will see if Chris Christie repudiates. We will see if Jeb Bush repudiates. It's not enough to say we'll let Rudy Giuliani speak for himself….They should be speaking out.”
Well if that’s the new Scarborough standard, let’s see if Morning Joe will have the chops to repudiate the regular race-card playing of his own network. Will he stand up and say: “Enough! Enough already!” Will Morning Joe even threaten to quit if MSNBC doesn’t change its race-card playing ways?
Answer? Not a prayer. There’s too much money involved in being an anchor, even if that means being the morning face of a network dedicated to the old progressive formula of race-card-playing-plus-class-warfare.
In other words? This latest from Mr. Scarborough on Rudy Giuliani is nothing more than one very big, very bold and very bald episode in hypocrisy. Nothing more. Nothing less.
