Howard Kurtz gave what I thought was a pretty fair rundown of the now-famous confrontation between Sean Hannity and Congressman Keith Ellison. But he let Hannity off way too easy by saying he “surrendered the high ground” by likening Ellison to a black Ku Klux Klan member. Hannity didn’t just hit low, he deliberately ignored the facts, grabbed the ugliest mud he could find and got some like-minded friends to help sling it. More importantly, race baiting is an all-too-familiar Hannity tactic.

As I wrote when Hannity compared Ellison to the KKK, he never managed to come up with a single person who claimed to have been discriminated against by Ellison nor a single official act of discrimination or radicalism – even though Ellison has served in Congress for six years. Even worse, as I noted when Hannity continued his racial attacks on Ellison the next night, the telltale indicator of bogusness was the lack of any Fox News reporter on the job. Does anyone doubt that if there were a black, radical, anti-Semitic, Muslim Democrat in the House of Representatives, Fox’s “objective news” arm wouldn’t be covering that story zealously?

Meanwhile, Hannity still owes viewers some ‘splaining about his own racial history. As I wrote in 2011, Hannity is Fox’s go-to show for race-baiting against African Americans.

In other words, the “KKK” comment was far from an anomaly or anything unexpected. The fact is, Hannity has been smearing Ellison as some kind of black, radical Muslim for years. Chances are he would have done the same during that epic confrontation with Ellison if he hadn’t pre-emptively struck and taken the framing out of Hannity’s hands. Kurtz and any other media critic worth their salt ought to know that and acknowledge it.