There are some moments on TV that should just be sent to the cutting room floor before they ever hit the screen. This is one of them.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck proves that she doesn't listen, she doesn't think, and she's as much of a troll as Breitbart when she wants to be.

This is a classic example of what I keep ranting about. There's no issue here, and anyone with half a brain knows it. But Hasselbeck concern trolls over the Hatch Act (inapplicable to the speech and group Sherrod was speaking to) as if it is the NEXT HORRIBLE RACIST THING.

Transcript:

HASSELBECK: There's another bit from your speech that's actually raising a second wave of controversy.

[from clip, SHERROD:]I haven't seen such a mean-spirited people as i've seen lately over this issue of health care. now we endured 8 years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.

HASSELBECK: So what about that epiphany, where is that epiphany where it's not about color and it's not about race. What do you then say?

SHERROD: You know, why is it that there's such opposition to something that's so important to poor people. Again, I'm coming at it from the angle of poor people. Poor people need health care!

[applause]

HASSELBECK: And i hear you because I listened to your entire speech and I read the entire transcript but when someone listens to that they're thinking 'yeah, well all of a sudden it's back to black and white, why did we have to get there' .

And then is it also because being a civil servant are you not allowed to have such a partisan opinion? I thought --

[crosstalk]

-- I thought that was not okay.

SHERROD: Poor white people need health care too. You know, so I wasn't talking about health care for just black people. I'm talking about health care for poor people. I know what happens to folks who don't get a chance to go to doctors. I know what's happening to hospitals and their emergency rooms with all of the load of dealing with the person after it's too late.

WENTWORTH: It's too bad, and I know we're going to come back and talk with you again, but it's too bad everything has to immediately take the road of racism. It's poverty. Poverty.

GOLDBERG: Hang on a second -- this is going to be great. you won't forget it.

[break]

After the break and re-intro, Hasselbeck gets another chance at the well of the Concern Trolls:

HASSELBECK: You know, we had just shown a clip where the tail end of it you say "we endured 8 years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff the Republicans are doing because we have a black President." Second part of my question: Doesn't the Hatch Act prohibit civil servants from making partisan and political statements? SO isn't that reason enough to look into okay, is this something even legal going on?

Wow, isn't it really nice of Elisabeth Hasselbeck to be concerned that Shirley Sherrod might have violated the Hatch Act? And it certainly plays well to the Fox/Breitbart crowd out there who loves the "scary black person doing illegal and racist things" trope. Only, Elisabeth really didn't know what she was talking about, because the Hatch Act does not rob government employees of their First Amendment rights. It simply limits political activity while they are ON DUTY. Here's all you ever wanted to know about the Hatch Act from the Office of Special Counsel.

And once again, Shirley Sherrod puts Hasselbeck right back in her place:

SHERROD: You know, maybe the Hatch Act would have been meant only for me, because I don't know any government official who was gagged, especially during the Bush administration.

[applause]

BEHAR: You know, I want to support what Shirley said before, which is that during the Bush administration you had tax cuts for the wealthiest and he did not -- that whole adminiistration did not give a damn about poor people and everybody knows it. That's why Obama was elected in the first place.

[crosstalk]

-- and even now, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment insurance but they're okay with tax cuts to the wealthy --

[crosstalk]]

Let me finish. So now you have Obama in office, and he does give a damn about black people

HASSELBECK: Black/white or rich/poor? Which is it?

BEHAR: A lot of people are poor because they were black --

[crosstalk]]

HASSELBECK We're supposed to be postracial here --

[crosstalk]

GOLDBERG: There is no postracial yet. this was a media idea that sounded great, that sounded wonderful, but the truth is that these issues, these questions of race have never come up this way before because there has never been a black president before, so people are now trying to figure out how they feel, how they deal how they talk. this is a new world for us.

WENTWORTH: Obama has a very fine line to walk. I mean, can you imagine being the first black president having to deal with all these issues?

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Happy blogiversary to skippy the bush kangaroo!

Queen - Somebody To Love

Everyday - I try and I try and I try -
But everybody wants to put me down
They say I'm goin' crazy
They say I got a lot of water in my brain
Got no common sense
I got nobody left to believe

I am an optimistic person by nature, I really am. But I think that I have reached a point of uncharacteristic despair over the state of the world. I had hoped that we would reach a certain level of sanity after the Orwellian Bush/Cheney years, but instead the crazy has amped up to all new bewildering levels. And unfortunately, our media has failed us miserably by playing into the crazy without ever calling it that.

And we're going to have more of that this Sunday. The oil spill in the Gulf appears to be boring the Villagers with Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen appearing only on Face the Nation, which will also feature the Republican governors of the Gulf states. What's a little generational catastrophic environmental disaster to the Beltway Bubble? Navel gazing and sweeping pronouncements on the health of the majority party after the primaries of last week is a much more fun discussion, with Steny Hoyer and John Boehner on This Week, James Clyburn and Mike Pence on State of the Union, and Carly Fiorina on Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday. In the "What possible relevance do you have to be on a news show" category, GWB's non-Jenna daughter, Barbara Bush, is also on Fox New Sunday.

ABC's "This Week" - House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio; House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.; Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Govs. Charlie Crist, R-Fla., Haley Barbour, R-Miss., and Bob Riley, R-Ala.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - White House senior adviser David Axelrod; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.; Carly Fiorina, the Republican nominee for Senate from California.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Savannah Guthrie, John Heilemann, Rick Stengel, Helene Cooper. Topics: How Obama Can Take Charge of the Gulf Oil Crisis. Is the Rise of the New Right Making Regular Republicans Harder To Elect? Meter Qestions: Will President Obama Pass An Energy Bill This Year? YES: 6, NO: 6; Will the political damage to the President over the handling of the spill be long-lasting? YES: 5, No: 7.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Riley; Reps. James Clyburn, D-S.C., and Mike Pence, R-Ind.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - It's the worst oil spill in US history and the media seems to want one thing from Obama: to see him get mad. In "Fareed's Take" this week, Fareed gets mad -- at the media's absurd demand that the President "show some emotion" instead of dealing with the many weighty issues on his plate. Plus Paul Wolfowitz, and the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister who says the activists onboard the flotilla had ties to Al Qaeda.

"Fox News Sunday" - Fiorina; Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Barbara Bush, daughter of former President George W. Bush.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

"Rand and Sarah go to Whites-Only Castle, from the makers of Dude, Where's My Brain?" Photoshop by Distributor Cap, click here for larger.

Open thread below...

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Spotted at Sarah Palin's rally for Rick Perry in Houston on Sunday by Bryan Fotographer at the Houston Press, who also provided the caption: "The 'Get a brain, morans' sign guy must have been busy on Sunday."

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Excuse me?

You know I was trying to think about who he was tonight and it's interesting... he is post-racial by all appearances. You know I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know he's gone a long way to become a leader in this country and passed so much history in just a year or two. I mean it's something we don't even think about. But I was watching him and said "Wait a minute, he's an African American guy in front of a bunch of white people and there he is President of the United States and we've completely forgotten that tonight". Completely forgotten it.

I think it was in the scope of his discussion; it was so broad ranging, so in tune with so many problems and aspects, and aspects of American life that you don't think in terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity. It was astounding in that regard and very subtle fact -- it's so hard to even talk about it -- maybe I shouldn't talk about it, but I am. I thought it was profound in that way and I think in terms of the seduction tonight -- I don't think he did anything tonight out of love for Republicans or deep understanding of people who disagree with him. He's probably incredibly frustrated by the failure of a single Republican Senator to step up and say "We've got to do something about health care. I'm challenging my caucus on this one. I'm with you buddy. I'm a profile in courage." Not a single Republican. That has got to frustrate a guy who has tried to reach out.

If only Tweety's brain was post-racial. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that MSNBC is going to do some apologizing tomorrow.

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INSTAPUTZ: Althouse Putziness

That heavyweight intellectual, Jonah Goldberg, loves to tell his audiences that no one on the left took his masterpiece, Liberal Fascism, seriously -- they just made fun of it!

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.

Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.

Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

I laid it all out again not too long ago:

This is, in fact, the argument that Goldberg attempts to make in his book as well: That the fascists occupied the "political space" on the Left, and thus were simply out to compete against their fellow leftists. But this is where Goldberg most deeply portrays a lack of respect for the historical material available to him, because any careful study of the actual details of how the fascists came to power in both Italy and Germany makes abundantly clear that they were occupying the available political space on the right -- and had charged hard in that direction from early on in their drive to power.

I discussed this in some detail, citing particularly Robert O. Paxton's work in The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton, for instance, debunks the fascists' ostensible "anticapitalism":

Continue reading »

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