You would have to figure that Rachel Maddow would try to one-up Keith Olbermann on the race-baiting front. That's right, I said race-baiting, because the Left, too, can play the race-baiting game. Maddowite liberals can simply declare that something is racist--maybe everything that isn't actively pro-Barack Obama is racist--confident that no editorial control at MSNBC/NBC/GE will stop them from making ridiculous slanders, and equally confident that MSNBC's tiny but zealous audience will lap it up.
Maddow asked her guest, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, if he didn't agree that the McCain campaign playing the race card by showing a picture of Franklin Raines, who Maddow asserted, had no real connection to Obama. Well, actually, Raines has been an adviser to Obama, and Fannie Mae was a big contributor to Obama's campaign--Obama was, in fact, Fannie's second largest recipient of campaign cash. That's a pretty close connection. To his credit, Alter disagreed with Maddow's reachy assertion; Alter declared that it was fair for McCain to connect Obama to Raines.
But then, to his discredit, Alter volunteered his own stretch, which was much stretchier than anything Maddow had said. Alter said that a McCain ad defending Sarah Palin was reminiscent of Emmett Till, because the spot included a picture of Barack Obama. Now Emmett Till, of course, was the black teenager lynched in Mississippi in 1955. That terrible and tragic incident received enormous attention at the time, a half century ago, and is widely credited with stoking the civil rights movement.
So for Alter to throw that name around is nothing less than an attempt to wrap McCain in all the baggage of all the racists and murderers of the Deep South. Now is that fair? Of course not.
But Alter said it, and Maddow didn't disagree.
That's the bad news: Alter violated elementary fairness. The good news, for Alter at least, is that he redeemed himself in Maddow's eyes after contradicting her, so perhaps he can continue to come back on her show.
H/T Breitbart.tv
