Heroes
Fox News Awkwardly Tries To Play The Race Card. Again.
Don't worry, some of Fox News' best friends are black.
10.03.12
It's tough being a conservative pundit these days. Still reeling from Mitt Romney's rocky September (featuring greatest hits like "politicize that national tragedy" and "let's casually dismiss the working poor"), esteemed journalists like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have been even more desperate than usual to drum up some good old-fashioned anti-Obama outrage. So desperate, in fact, that I naively hoped for just a fraction of a second that the latest "bombshell" from Fox et al. might actually contain a valid policy criticism of the president. So, what did we get? A story on Obama's coddling of the financial sector? Continuation of a failed drug war? Militarization of intelligence agencies to expand an already alarming campaign of drone warfare?
Of course not. They just dug up Obama's Hampton University speech from 2007 again. Evidently, the fact the Obama used slightly different speech patterns when speaking to a black audience five years ago is evidence of an underlying theme of racial malevolence. Or something. Don't worry though, some of Fox News' best friends are black.
Here's some highlights (if you can call them that) of the effort to spin the old clip:
Obviously, the whole "scandalous leaked video!" angle fell a little flat seeing as how the event was open to the press in 2007:
Re: Secret tape of the Obama event: CNN covered it in 2007. It was open press. Here's our 2007 story: on.cnn.com/SZkeIy
— Sam Feist (@SamFeistCNN) October 3, 2012
In fact, the speech has actually been publicly available for quite some time. Check out the full video clips in the article and see if you can spot the dangerous and racially charged rhetoric. Maybe this is my "liberal bias" showing, but all I'm seeing is a politician using a different voice to speak to a different audience, which is a relatively common occurrence in this delightfully shallow "message of the week" world of ours.
But hey, as long as we're on the subject of politicians changing the way they talk to pander to an audience, here's Mitt Romney (of Massachusetts) saying "y'all" and discussing his love of cheesy grits during a campaign stop back in March. Enjoy:
This campaign really can't be over soon enough. God help us all.