black…MYstory

I don’t know what possessed me to turn it on but, I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC as I was getting ready for work. I guess the show’s normal host, Joe Scarborough, was off and his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, was running the show.

They decided to read some emails from viewer complaining about how Obama’s now-former church, his former pastor and, most recently, a guest pastor there were receiving all this media attention but, there was no one looking into Hillary Clinton’s church or no real scrutiny of John McCain’s relationship with some of the most extreme right-wing ministers this country has to offer.

I was most floored when I heard Brzezinski say the following:

“Okay, umm…first of all, I think we covered the Hagee story as much, umm…the Reverend Wright situation injected itself into the news cycle for sure, but having said that, don’t you think that there is a difference or is there not, especially given the fact that he resigned from his church.”

Needless to say, this is a flat-out lie. The John Hagee story lasted a few days, at best, and was summarily dismissed. MSNBC had weeks on end of coverage of Jeremiah Wright, from sun up to sun down.

So, to say that this was the same shows just how disingenuous some in the media really are.

(thanks to Crooks And Liars for the video)

 

 Morning Joe (Mika) on Rev. Wright Coverage: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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I had to laugh at how hard some right-wingers are willing to push against reality or, at least, credibility, to prove a point.  For example, you KFYI’s (Phoeniz, AZ) right-wingnut Bruce Jacobs who decides to read, on air, a Wall Street Journal “article” attributed to Bill Cosby.  You might have seen it before, it starts off with the following:

“Rev. Wright epitomizes the thoughts and actions that have prevented and continue to prevent black America from moving ahead and achieving their potential as a people. He suggests that this United States of America made up of sons and daughters of immigrants (I’m talking of the millions of 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation immigrants in this country) of every race, creed, color and religion each and everyone of them who had nothing to do with slavery, some how owe something to a group of people who have never been slaves?”

Now, if you click on the link above, you might be confused.  You might say, “hey, that’s not the article!  This article is about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s recent speeches on reconciliation, not Bill Cosby’s article!”

Well, that’s because you didn’t scroll down to the comments section.  My quote above was from comments posted by a reader calling himself “Bill Cosby”.  So, because this person posted under the name of “Bill Cosby”, the internet has been lit up with message board posts and blog posts about what “Bill Cosby” said about Rev. Wright.  Funny enough, in all the posts I’ve seen, I had not seen one link to this supposed article.  So, I went to Snopes.com, which is an internet myth-busting site, and saw that they  had the real deal on the story.

The funny part about it is that Jacobs was reading the story like it was in an actual newspaper and not a printout of comments from a post on the Wall Street Journal blogs.  So, Jacobs deceived his listeners and, no doubt, many of these suckers went on to repeat this nonsense.

However, it doesn’t appear to be the first time he’s done this.  In 2003, Jacobs reported an urban legend about Bill Clinton as fact.  In that urban legend, Bill Clinton dodged the draft and became a fugitive from justice.  However, as a “fugitive from justice”, Bill Clinton ran for Congress in 1974 and for Attorney General of Arkansas in 1976 (okay, has this gotten ridiculous enough yet?)   They way this urban legend goes, he was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter right after Carter was inaugurated in 1977 (never mind that Presidents usually issue pardons when leaving office, not right after they’re sworn in).

In other words, Jacobs is not big on the truth.

Now, of course, he was not content with just making himself sound stupid so, yes, he put up a YouTube video.

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