Veteran race hustler embarrasses himself again

During a pitching change in tonight’s Washington Nationals game, I switched over to Megyn Kelly’s show on Fox News. Kelly was interviewing Al Sharpton at an event he holds every year to which politicians come to kiss his, um, ring.

Kelly asked Sharpton why race relations have deteriorated during the Obama administration. Sharpton said it’s because President Obama has stepped up and done things for black people.

Like what, Kelly wanted to know. Sharpton pointed to the fact that the black unemployment rate has fallen during Obama’s years.

Do whites resent this, Kelly wondered. Sharpton responded that the employment picture has improved for all races, but whites somehow only notice the improvement for blacks, which makes them believe the president is singling out one race for special treatment.

What a moron.

Next, Kelly asked Sharpton about the emergence of black extremism as exemplified by Black Lives Matter, with its charming rallying cry “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.”

Sharpton noted that for as long as he can remember, there have been two strands in the civil rights movement — the non-violent strand associated with Martin Luther King (which Sharpton falsely claims always to have been a part of) and a more radical one.

This is true. One recalls Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, and so forth.

But here’s the big difference: Leading Democratic politicians weren’t afraid to criticize Malcolm X and his progeny. And they certainly didn’t pander to them.

At this point, with the pitching change completed, I switched back to the ball game. Thus, I missed the best part of the interview.

Kelly raised the issue of Ferguson and, specifically, Sharpton’s incendiary remarks shortly after Michael Brown’s death that Officer Darren Wilson’s account didn’t make sense and that Wilson couldn’t have feared for his life.

Kelly pointed out that the Obama Department of Justice concluded, to the contrary, that Wilson shot Brown in self-defense and that witnesses who incriminated him weren’t credible. She then asked Sharpton “do you feel bad” about having incorrectly represented the situation, thus helping to ruin Wilson’s career.

You can see what happened next, including Sharpton’s mic grab, by going here. The short version is that Sharpton doesn’t feel bad because he relied on the accounts of several witnesses who appeared on his television show.

The fact, pointed out by Kelly, that Sharpton opined on this highly charged matter without having talked to a fuller cross-section of the witnesses bothers him not at all. The fact that the Obama Justice Department found that the statements by the witnesses Sharpton talked to did not hold up doesn’t bother him either.

Sharpton acknowledged that he never corrected his ugly accusations against Officer Wilson. The best he could do was to point out that, once the Justice Department released its findings, he stopped protesting the Michael Brown shooting.

Who knew that there are limits, these days at least, to Sharpton’s demagoguery?

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