Boy, Soledad has gotten really full of herself and annoying since I remember her from the early days on the tech channel.  She pretends she is some sort of expert or something. 

Immediately after this broadcast – well, later that day after the clip went viral – the Wikipedia page on Critical Race Theory was edited to delete the references to White Supremacy.  Any bets on those edits coming from CNN IPs?

I only watch CNN and other news programs when they host debates or when I skip around on Election Nights.  Finally deleted MSNBC from the mix, I think before the 2008 election, they had just gone beyond the pale.  But I never watch any of the idiots they have hosting shows – Soledad, Cooper, Morgan, that other idiot I see clips of, none of them.  This just reminded me why.

Remember though that the critical insight of the critical race theorists was that regular Marxist are racists.

 What is a regular Marxist?

Is that different from an irregular Marxist?

I find this latest episode of Breibartism depressing, for the dishonesty it involves on both sides of the fight.

O’Brien disgraces herself in this video. She is no journalist, in the sense that a journalist provides her audience with information to make so they can make own judgments. She clearly sees herself as a warrior in a partisan struggle. Her mindset is very similar to Breibart’s: the other side must be portrayed as evil, regardless of whether their actions are actually good or bad. When she says she wants to understand Joel’s thinking, she is lying shamelessly. But that is what we have today for news and pundit media: shouty pandering to close-minded partisans.

Joel has yet to detail what it is that supposedly made Bell evil, but I’m afraid the details hardly matter in the Breitbart method, which is a classic of ends justifying means. Joel’s goal is to undermine voter support for Obama, and he has chosen to pursue it by portraying Bell as evil. I don’t have much faith that Joel will present a fundamentally more honest and reasoned argument in this debate than O’Brien. As someone who has read some of Bell’s writing and knows something about his history, I find it very discouraging to see him used as a token in the fight over Obama. Bell’s thinking on race was unconventional, but his arguments were reasoned and informed by unimpeachable expertise. This was a guy who gave up a plum job in the Justice Department to spend years risking his neck fighting school segregation laws in front of nakedly racist judges across the South. The most striking thing I remember from his essays is his contention that civil rights advances are not the product of white altruism. Whites only concede rights to blacks when doing so does not threaten white privilege, he argued. That is a debatable proposition, and one that is inherently offensive to whites — but it cannot and should not be dismissed out of hand. I suspect Joel’s whole approach in this matter relies on dismissing Bell’s arguments out of hand, however. He is carrying on the work, after all, of a man whom history will ultimately remember for a very dishonestly-edited video more than for anything else.

Since there’s more to come, however, I’ll keep an open mind. I welcome any debate about Bell, about Bell’s actual influence on Obama, and about the integrity/bias of the news media. Speaking of media integrity, Amy Holmes made a very good point in this interview — one that was far more honest and fair than O’Brien’s behavior.

Wonder if Charles Manson devised the whole CRT thing.