Bill O’Reilly was more restrained than some of his Fox News colleagues yesterday in racializing a discussion of the Christopher Lane shooting in Oklahoma. However, instead of focusing on his usual targets, the “race hustlers” and “grievance industry,” i.e. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, he focused on “cultural collapse among some very distinct groups.” I think we can guess which “distinct groups” he had in mind. But guest Kate Obenshain took it a step further by using the occasion to accuse President Obama of deliberately being racially divisive. This, from the woman who was chief of staff for George “Macaca” Allen. However, Fox News Democrat Kirsten Powers was in top form and took on both the host and her fellow guest with the kind of aplomb other liberal guests could stand to emulate.
“Unlike the Trayvon Martin case, the attackers were immediately arrested,” Powers said, defending against the predictable Fox News attacks on President Obama for speaking out about the killing of Trayvon Martin and not of Lane.
“I don’t think there’s a racial overtone to this (Lane shooting),” O’Reilly admitted. He also acknowledged that he didn’t think President Obama should get involved. However, Obenshain held up the racial mantle O'Reilly dropped. She said:
I think the President and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and some others jumped at the chance to weigh in when a horror would further their political goals (as if Fox News hasn’t). …When it served the president’s agenda to sort of stir up racial animosity, he compares Trayvon Martin to what his son would look like.
…I think he absolutely wanted to stir up suspicion on racial grounds.
That was too much, even for O’Reilly. He said he thought Obama’s comments about Trayvon Martin were “a political move” not a racial one. However, he also said he thinks Obama “doesn’t believe we have a serious problem” with gangs. So, in other words, President Obama is not a racial demagogue like you-know-who and you-know-who but he’s just racially ignorant or misinformed.
Powers jumped in. “On what planet does the president not believe we have a serious problem?” she asked. She made the point that President Obama thinks the main solution is gun control, which she agrees with.
O’Reilly swatted away her comments as “ridiculous.” He said derisively, “It’s unbelievable you feel this way.”
Apparently, to Obenshain guns don't kill people, black culture kills people: “This is about a culture of violence that is promoted among our young people. …Let’s talk about rap lyrics that promote and glorify killing in any way. Let’s talk about drugs.”
O’Reilly sneered, “It’s quite apparent that Kirsten and others do not want to talk about who’s pulling the trigger of the gun. They just want to talk about the gun. …And I think that’s a fallacy. …It’s the pervasive culture, alright, that is coarsening the country and people who don’t have good parents, children who don’t have supervision are then being put in a situation where they’re gunning down people because they’re bored.”
“And the left doesn’t want to talk about it. The media doesn’t want to talk about it,” Obenshain said.
As we have previously noted, Kirsten Powers is not the world’s most reliably pro-Democratic voice on Fox News. But when she is, she doesn’t pussyfoot around, like so many of her more liberal colleagues. She gets right to the heart of what’s going on and confronts it. I will never understand why other Democrats can’t be as forthright and forceful.
And, by the way, Powers was entirely correct when she said that President Obama has spoken out on the very problems O’Reilly and Obenshain insisted he had not. As Media Matters reported, Obama spoke out on the subject at the very same time he addressed the George Zimmerman verdict (you know, the one Obenshain and other Fox Newsies used to accuse him of being too partial to African Americans), saying:
We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?
And, in February, he said during a speech in Chicago, “There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families—which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.”
But I’m sure Fox will either ignore those remarks, decide they didn’t go far enough or find something else to complain about.
Video available via Mediaite.
What an errogant clueless f#*k.