On Wednesday night’s edition of “Politics Nation,” MSNBC host Al Sharpton and “The Cycle” host Touré claimed Roger Ailes used racist “dog whistle” language when he called Obama “lazy” in a new biography, Mediaite reported.
Sharpton started by reading a portion of the quote in the biography.
“He’s one of the most powerful voices in the country,” Sharpton said, “and he’s attacking President Obama. Quote, ‘Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.’ That’s the president of Fox News calling the President of the United States lazy.”
But like several hosts at CNN, Sharpton left out the sentence that immediately followed.
“He noticed my arched eyebrows and added, ‘I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters,'” Zev Chafets wrote.
“Deep down, underneath all the work I do, I think there’s a laziness in me,” Obama told Barbara Walters in 2011, attributing it to his upbringing in Hawaii.
But neither Sharpton nor Touré mentioned that.
After playing sound bites from John Sununu and Newt Gingrich, they continued the attack.
“This sort of ‘lazy’ term is something we heard flung at us as black people going back to slavery,” Touré told Sharpton, “which, of course, you know, we perceive them as being guilty of not wanting to work. Of course they didn’t want to work. They were slaves.”
Touré then claimed that everyone on “the Fox side of the aisle,” meaning conservatives, hold the same view of black people while offering no proof of his assertion.
“But this is a revolutionary thing that they’re doing,” he added, “saying ‘We’re going to get out of all of the work that we can,’ and then this stupid idea follows us since then. It’s this really disgusting, accessing stereotypes, red meat sort of dog whistle. On the Fox side of the aisle, they say yes, that’s right. This is what we think of black people already. And, on our side, we’re like ‘What are you talking about?’”
Since Obama’s election, liberals have bent over backward to portray any criticism of the president as racist. During the 2012 election, Touré and others claimed that practically every word uttered by Republicans was racist “dog whistle” code.
Last September, for example, Touré said that the word “crime” was racist code and falsely claimed that the GOP is an all-white party, ignoring the existence of prominent black conservatives like Herman Cain and former Rep. Allen West.
Video of the exchange can be seen here.
Related:
- CNN’s Soledad O’Brien fails in attempted attack on Roger Ailes
- Roger Ailes: Barack Obama ‘lazy,’ Joe Biden ‘dumb as an ashtray’
- Music star John Legend, MSNBC’s Touré mock black Rush Limbaugh fans
- MSNBC’s Touré claims ‘crime’ racial code word, GOP ‘all-white’ party
- Conservatives angry after MSNBC’s Touré makes charge of racism
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