In case you missed it, CNN's Piers Morgan had on conservative radio host Larry Elder to discuss the George Zimmerman trial this Wednesday evening, and Elder took the opportunity to berate Trayvon Martin's friend Rachel Jeantel and call her unintelligent and uneducated because of the way she spoke during the trial.
As our friends over at Raw Story pointed out this week, she has a speech impediment caused by an underbite, which makes it difficult to speak and can only be corrected with surgery, and English is not her first language (and she's trilingual). That didn't stop Elder from taking cheap shots like this at her though:
“Rachel Jeantel needs to get her act together,” Elder said. “If my mother were alive, she would say, ‘How dare she speak like that.’”
CNN host Piers Morgan noted that Jeantel was trilingual — she speaks English, Spanish and Haitian Creole — and had a GPA of 3.0 in high school. She fell behind in school because of an illness, which is why she started her senior year of high school when she was 19-years-old.
“Does she sound to you like anyone you want to hire in any kind of capacity?” Elder responded.
The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur weighed in this Thursday and blamed Elder's behavior on living in his conservative talk show bubble for too long. I think he just knows playing the angry black man who is willing to vindicate angry racist white men is going to get his crazy ass on television and Morgan and his producers over at CNN were happy to oblige.
Elder also seems to be part of that club that thinks if you just scream over whoever you're on the set with loud enough and talk 100 miles a minute so someone else isn't allowed to make their points, you win. As Cenk rightfully noted, he couldn't even answer any of Morgan's questions when he asked him if he knew anything about Jeantel's background, or if he really wanted to call her stupid. He tried to deflect it back onto Morgan every time, because he didn't have any answers.
CNN's been about as bad as Fox this week, with digging every black conservative they can find out of the woodwork to help with them with the race-baiting following this really disgusting and disappointing verdict. I hope the wingnut welfare is worth it for Elder and his ilk.
