By now we’ve all heard about and seen the scandal that wasn’t. Andrew Sullivan calls out Tucker Carlson on the video:
All that Carlson did is clip it to get an “angry black man” in the minds of Americans. It’s at once one of the most desperate and lame and vile plays of the race card I can remember – an obvious recognition that the 47 percent tape can only really be countered emotionally with race-baiting. But it lit up “conservative” media in ways that Conor best expresses:
“If the New York Times was constantly searching for archival footage to prove that Mitt Romney doesn’t like black people, or that he is “whipping up race hatred,” the conservative media would accuse them of frivolously ignoring the actual issues that this election ought to turn on. It would say that they were exploiting the racial anxieties of Americans to tarnish the character of a man whose long record of public policy-making shows no evidence of racial animosity or radicalism.
When it comes to racial demagoguery, the right has become everything it says it hates about the left.”
Carlson used to be a brilliant writer. He’s now a racist demagogue. He’s a story in one person of how degenerate and disgusting much of American “conservatism” has become.
This is all they’ve got left, folks. Expect more of this: Breaking News! Obama is an angry black man! I had actually hoped we’d moved beyond this crap. Silly me.