Last night, the folks over at CNN’s Larry King Live decided it was a good idea to have two of the media’s most polar opposite personalities debate the Gates/Crowley situation and racial profiling in general. To his credit, Rev. Al Sharpton did attempt to have an honest debate yesterday.
Unfortunately for him, he had the unenviable position of having that debate with conservative drone, Ann Coulter. For every cogent, common sense point that Al Sharpton noted, Coulter was there with a wholly irrational counter.
Some of Coulter’s unconscionable highlights included:
“… And also, by the way, I do think there was a little racial profiling with the president assuming an Irish cop would like to drink beer, no Chablis here… that’s a little stereotyping.”
“We have one case after another of these, where there is the assumption of racial profiling or racism by cops or by teachers and you have one hoax after another from Tawana Brawley to the Duke lacrosse case. I mean if we’re going to claim that there is this rash of racial profiling in America, eventually there’s going to have to be one real case of it.“
“No, I do not think that there is an epidemic of racial profiling. I think there is an epidemic of claims of racism that turn out to be a hoax.”
“There was a scientific study setting up cameras of people speeding and it turns out that New Jersey state troopers, by scientific evidence, that the Bush administration kept rejecting and rejecting, were stopping if anything, not enough black people.”
The best rebuttal is Sharpton’s simple but effective admonishment that, “That’s just Ann being Ann.” What kills me is the total lack of boundaries that some of the talking head pundits have. They go on these shows and spew this mindless rhetoric on any issue they can. When I see Caulter and people of her ilk all I think is dollar signs. They blindly market to their niches, not allowing something as silly as common sense to cloud their talking points.
The problem is that these news organizations do everything they can to encourage this. Only a fool sees one side of an argument, but these cable stations often accept partisan drivel as normalcy. Why else would Juan Williams and Larry Elder get TV time? It’s an insult to anyone with an iota of intelligence to turn to these channels only to be bombarded by people whose perspectives on key topics are so premeditated. Until these stations start acknowledging that these people add no value to the news with their vitriol, we will be stuck with ridiculous caricatures like Ann Coulter.
