Jeff Jacoby wonders why the field of Democratic presidential candidates and the media refuse to even mention the despicable race-baiting, riot-inciting, anti-Semitic track record of Al Sharpton. Instead he's treated as just another respectable, viable candidate to be President of The United States. And what's worse, he functions as the de facto resident civil rights watchdog of the campaign statements by the other Democrats. And they let him get away with it. An excerpt from Jacoby:
It is as if David Duke were running for president and the leading figures in politics and the press decided not to make an issue of the fact that he had been an Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Is it even remotely conceivable that Duke would be regarded as just another candidate, let alone a candidate qualified to criticize the racial failings of others? Yet there was Sharpton at the CNN debate in Boston last week, lecturing Dean on "brotherhood" and quoting Martin Luther King."You're not a bigot," he said, "but you appear to be too arrogant to say `I'm wrong.' " This from the slanderer who to this day refuses to apologize for his role in the contemptible Tawana Brawley hoax, and for his poisonous libel of an innocent man.
They are paralyzed by the possibe political backlash of challenging Sharpton on his history of hateful statements and actions, simply because he happens to be a black man. So he is given a pass. It would be nice if his fellow Democrats could signal in some way that they are at least slightly uncomfortable with Sharpton's candidacy for our country's highest office. Their failure to do so is, in Jacoby's words, "a moral and political disgrace". Read it all.
Posted by dan at November 10, 2003 7:06 PM