Some of My Best Guests are Black: Meltdown with Keith Olbermann, Part 36

by David Forsmark  •  Feb 26, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Cross-posted from NewsRealBlog.com

http://www.davidforsmark.com/2010/02/some-of-my-best-guests-are-black-meltdown-with

Just here to make you feel better about yourself, Keith.

Last week, Keith Olbermann stepped in it with a race-baiting rant that accused the Tea Parties of being racist because they are supposedly white people "surrounded by people who look exactly like you."

When various conservative bloggers, including me, called him on the fact that MSNBC's anchor lineup would fit that description, Keith gave a non-response to each of us.

OLBERMANN "My response to this is: Where are the people of color at the tea parties?

Thursday, Keith still in this hole and still digging, responding to Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid, (and with his typically amateur-night research staff mis-identifying Kincaid as being with the Media Research Center) who reported that there were black people in attendance with this utterly clichéd retort:

OLBERMANN: Why not just say it: "Some of my best Tea Party friends are black?"

Big talk for a guy who made this excuse on his Daily Kos blog when called to task from the Left:

OLBERMANN: Gene Robinson is with me whenever he can spare the time (and is in the studio for all our long-form political coverage, and I try to glue him to the seat next to mine), and we get Clarence Page on whenever we can…

In other words, "Some of my best guests are black."

Olbermann still has not responded to the obvious hypocrisy on his show. Other than the brief blog excuse above, Keith has merely appropriated the Goebbels technique of ignoring the facts and counterarguments and just shouting his racist charges even louder.

OLBERMANN: And if that were not enough, the racists in the right wing are digging themselves in deeper by the moment by trying to answer the unanswerable, the commentary in which I noted the obvious. The tea parties are overwhelmingly almost exclusively white. Defending the 9/12 rally in Washington, one of the Brent Bozell's henchmen at the so-called Media Research Council cites another one of the henchmen.

How many blacks were in the audience? My colleague, Cliff Kincaid, who covered the protest and took pictures of it saw some blacks in the crowd, although he didn't count them.

That's the crowd organizers' claim was more than a million. Why not just say it? Some of my best tea party friends are black!

Well, we have Keith's allegation that the Tea Parties are all white; and that it's because of racism.

But we have empirical evidence that MSNBC's lineup is all white.

Now, let's ask the logical question of which is more likely to be the result of racism– the lack of black participation in Tea Parties, or their absence from the MSNBC lineup:

1. The Tea Parties are basically organized to protest Barack Obama's economic policies
2. In polls, American blacks still show support for Barack Obama's policies in the 90+ percent range
3. It was estimated by the New York Times that 5% of the Tea Parties are "minorities."
4. MSNBC relentless cheerleads for Barack Obama's policies
5. More American blacks agree with MSNBC than with the Tea Parties
6. MSNBC has 0% featured black anchors.

So, again: My response is, where are all the black faces on the MSNBC anchor roster?

And don't tell me some of your best guests are black.

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