August 20, 2016

Apparently the executives over at CNN believe that allowing their employees to go on the air and spout racist bile while insulting the other guests is good for business, because that's what they've been allowing the many Trump surrogates they've got on their payroll to do for months on end now.

Case in point is one of Trump's more vocal and obnoxious surrogates, Kayleigh McEnany, who has defended waterboarding, calling it just a "bit of discomfort," pretended that Donald Trump was just being sarcastic when he called President Obama the founder of ISIS, and just this week called Trump's race baiting speech in front of an almost all white audience a message tailored for blacks.

Sadly, this seems to be a feature and not a bug when it comes to their producers deciding who is going to get more air time. As Driftglass so aptly put it in his post last week discussing McEnany's continued presence on CNN:

It is important to remember at all times that what you see on CNN and MSNBC and Fox is "news" in the same sense that "Twister" is an important bulletin from the National Weather Service and "Sharknado" is a documentary from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Not "news" at all, but carefully cast and coordinated teevee shows designed to look like news.

Here we are again with her continuing to pollute our airways.

Here's a partial transcript courtesy of Media Matters: Black CNN Panelists Walk Trump Supporter Through His Long History Of Racism And Discrimination:

ANGELA RYE: If you want Donald Trump to say something that's meaningful to black people, and I'm not going to be the spokesperson for all black people tonight, but what I'm going to tell you is this. Plain and simple. He can disavow his racist butler. He can apologize for those two housing discriminations from the Department of Justice. He can tell me that that Black Lives Matter protester who he said deserves to get beat up, he can retract that and apologize for that. He can tell me that he never meant to say those legal fees of that guy that punched that black man in the face at his rally, should've hapened. He can apologize for the Indian man that was thrown out of his rally today. He can apologize to the Central Park Five --

BAKARI SELLERS: All five of them.

RYE: -- for taking out that full-page ad on them -- I'm not done, I'm just getting started and I haven't even got to last July. My only point to you is this: Donald Trump doesn't just have a messaging problem. He has a message and belief problem, Kayleigh, and he has to -- he has to hear it from more than Rhinestones and Polyester, his two little imps that go out on the trail for him.

KAYLEIGH MCENANY: We can go down this road, Angela. If Bill Clinton was golfing --

RYE: I will go there with you all day.

[...]

MCENANY: That is what was delivered under the Democratic administration. And that is why Allen West and Tim Scott --

RYE: Allen West?

MCENANY: -- support Donald Trump.

SELLERS: Tim Scott doesn't even support Donald Trump, so.

RYE: And actually Tim Scott is the same senator who went on the senate floor talking about the number of times he's been racially profiled, a concept that Donald Trump won't even acknowledge exists. Meanwhile he's calling black people --

MCENANY: He has acknowledged that exists. Maybe you didn't hear it but he has acknowledged that exists.

RYE: Well I don't know, maybe it got confused with the several other times he called people who look like me 'thugs.' Perhaps that's what got me confused.

[...]

SELLERS: I think what we saw today was we saw the Bannon impact on Donald Trump, because what Kayleigh was about to walk down is a very dangerous, nationalistic rhetoric path in which you begin to pit these groups against each other. One thing Donald Trump said today, and it made me perk up, was he said you're a refugee in your own community. So by pitting the African-American community in these quote, unquote "inner cities" that are sitting, that aren't doing anything, that are just blatantly lazy, that have no jobs, that have no schools, that Donald Trump was portraying against refugees, against Hispanic-americans,against immigrants. What you're trying to do is drive a wedge, and that's a very dangerous political philosophy. The question is whether or not that will work, and I doubt it.

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