In the last of the five O’Reilly Factor segments in which Bill O’Reilly used Martin Luther King Day to play the racial victim, he consulted Karl Rove for an explanation as to why the Obama administration is opposing Republican voter ID laws. O’Reilly was puzzled because in his mind, standing up for African Americans is a turn off to everyone else!
In a previous segment, O’Reilly had prohibited Alan Colmes from discussing how such laws disproportionately impact minorities and place barriers to their voting. Now, O’Reilly deliberately made the discussion more political by turning to someone like Rove for answers. Not surprisingly, Rove readily jumped on the race-baiting bandwagon by accusing the Obama administration of pandering to African Americans in order to win re-election.
O’Reilly asked, “Do you have any idea of what this racism thing is all about… I don’t get this.”
Rove said, “The President runs the risk of not being re-elected unless the African American community turns out to the degree it did in 2008… He got 97% of a very large African American turnout… They’re not wired up as much as they were…“
O’Reilly was doubtful. In his mind, standing up for African Americans risked offending all the other ethnic groups. He said, “By doing all of this race stuff, (Obama) alienates independents who voted for him the first time around. So yes, he might be able to mobilize the African American community en bloc… but then white voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters in the middle… are going to go, ‘This is absurd.’”
“Here’s the deal,” Rove said. “They’re making a calculation that whatever damage they suffer from people saying, ‘You are unfairly injecting race into this,’ is offset by whatever advantage they get from the African American community. I don’t claim it’s a smart calculation.”
Later, Rove was even more explicit in his race-baiting. He said, “This is offensive, frankly, and it involves things like Eric Holder going out today and depicting laws that require you to show a voter ID as being racist in nature.”
Pulling out a tried and untrue Fox race-baiting meme, Rove went on to say that Obama dropped the New Black Panther Party case because “It didn’t want to have the flashback from the African American community from prosecuting this kind of intimidation.”
As had happened when Monica Crowley earlier brought up this discredited “controversy,” O’Reilly didn’t offer a bit of challenge, didn’t object to THAT kind of talk of race.
Isn’t it funny how the only victims of race on Fox are whites and black conservatives?