Remember when Bill O’Reilly mocked those who disingenuously use emails to make a point and act as though it’s coming from someone else? That was little over a week ago. O’Reilly must have counted on his audience not remembering or not caring. Because tonight, that’s exactly what he did as an excuse to level yet another racial attack on Congresswoman Barbara Lee.

What first set O’Reilly off was Lee’s objection to Rep. Paul Ryan’s comments about the “culture problem” in the “inner cities” of “generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” It never had anything to do with O’Reilly. But in an especially zealous effort to “look out for you” – if you’re white and have a racial chip on your shoulder - he set off on a vicious jag of racial attacks against her.

First, on March 24, O’Reilly went after Lee with Fox News’ George Will. O’Reilly called her a “race hustler” and Will compared her to Joseph McCarthy.

The next night, Ryan visited The Factor. Ryan made it clear he was fine with Lee’s remarks. But O’Reilly reiterated his “race hustler” slurs. Under guise of concern for the black community, O’Reilly painted himself and Ryan as the real racial victims:

(People like Lee) don’t want to solve the problem. These race hustlers make a big living and they get voted into office by portraying their constituents as victims and it’s all your fault and it’s my fault, it’s the rich people’s fault, it’s the Republicans’ fault.

It’s everybody’s fault except what’s going on. And what’s going on, as you know, is the dissolution of the family. And you don’t have proper supervision of children and they grow up with no skills and they can’t read and speak and they have tattoos on their neck and they can’t compete in the marketplace. And that’s what’s going on.

But if you say that, you’re a racist.

In a subsequent press release, Lee called O’Reilly’s remarks “disgusting and divisive” and said they “should never be accepted in our national discourse.”

So O’Reilly doubled down:

Ms. Lee claims she’s not a race hustler? How about “Pinhead,” Congresswoman. Do you like that better?

…(N)ot only is she a pinhead, a race hustler, she’s a liar. That’s who we have representing a California district.

As I explained in my post, O’Reilly is quite the race hustler himself:

He’s the one who insisted on turning a national discussion about the George Zimmerman verdict ...into a whitesplaining harangue against African American culture; he’s the one who refused an invitation to go into an African American community to see the exact measures he was calling for being put into action; he’s the one who “discusses” President Obama’s initiative to help young black males succeed by briefly praising it and then quickly moving on to malign other aspects of black culture.

Now O’Reilly is using his viewer email as yet another excuse to hustle a racial attack on Lee. O’Reilly closed his “Mad as Hell” segment with an email from a viewer saying he’s mad “because there’s no serious dialogue about race in this country. Barbara Lee calling Paul Ryan a racist (which she did not do) does no good at all.”

O’Reilly responded:

OK, now you’re correct. …We invited Congresswoman Lee on The Factor and she declined. She doesn’t want to engage in serious dialogue about serious problems, this woman. Her California district is heavily black and she sees her job as getting as much taxpayer money to her constituents as possible and portraying them as victims of a white-dominated power structure. Ms. Lee’s been doing this for 16 years. That’s what she does! Get that money in her district, OK? Because everybody’s a victim there and O’Reilly did it and that’s what she did. And Ryan did it. And it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

Apparently, Lee did not get the message that having a “serious dialogue” requires appearing on The Factor. Nor that the real racial victims in America are persecuted white guys like O’Reilly and Ryan.

Video below via Media Matters.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey via photopin cc