Mark Levin went on a tirade about all the wonderful things the GOP has done for African Americans. Unfortunately for his thesis, Levin’s subtext was that blacks are just too stupid to get it.
Levin visited the Hannity show last night to do his part to get out the disaffected conservative vote, which was the show’s focus.
Right at the beginning, Levin undermined his later contention when he smeared Al Sharpton. After a clip of Obama calling into Sharpton’s radio show was played, Levin sneered, “I didn’t know Al Sharpton could speak in complete sentences and I’m still not certain that he can.”
Hannity didn’t object. Not long after, he complained, “I often point out that during every election, I see the Democrats play the race card. …What are we to make of that tactic? How should they (Republicans) respond?”
Levin offered this stuck-in-the-sixties diatribe as a defense of Republicans vis-à-vis race:
What we’re to make of it is this is a hateful race-baiting party that has really no good ideas, let alone new ideas and I hope African Americans around the country understand that the Democrat Party has always used them. The Democrat Party stood for slavery against Lincoln. It stood for segregation – all the way up from the Civil War into the 1950s and 60s. The first Civil Rights Act was actually 1957, Dwight Eisenhower. He sent the Army into Arkansas to open up that school when a Democrat governor was blocking the doorway, Faubus
You can look through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Most Republicans voted for it. The 1965 Voting Rights Act – most Republicans voted for it. You can look at FDR’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Hugo Black, was a former lawyer for the Klan in Alabama. You can look at Robert Byrd, that wasn’t that long ago when the Democrats rallied behind him and made them their majority leader in the senate – former Klansman.
Republicans don’t have a history of lynching anybody. They don’t have a history of blocking school doors. They don’t have a history of racism of any kind. And for once, I’d like a Republican to stand up and rub the Democrats face in their real history.
Besides the fact that Levin can’t seem to think of anything the Republicans have done for African Americans in the last 50 years (while accusing Democrats of having no new ideas), the underlying assumption is that if African Americans don’t vote Republican (which they don’t), they must either be too stupid or too ignorant or too gullible - or all three - to know better.
But Levin clearly doesn’t have a very sensitive hypocrisy detector. In the same segment in which he complained about President Obama being “very divisive,” Levin said that Obama’s “full Mussolini” will come out after the election. “He’s going to do everything he can in the last two years of his presidency to further screw up the country,” Levin predicted.
And just to prove how he’s such a uniter, not a divider, Levin concluded his ranting about how awful the Democrats are with, “They need to get a good swift kick in the ass in this election.”
“Well said,” Hannity said approvingly.
Watch it below, from last night's Hannity show, and see why Levin almost certainly did nothing to help get out the black vote for Republicans.