What Is It With These People and Racism?

If there's anything many left-wingers have realized over the last few years, it seems to be that they can make race an issue about anything. Ever.

In a recent segment on MSNBC, Contessa Brewer, Dylan Ratigan and Toure attempted to write off protesters showing up to Barack Obama's Town Hall meetings with guns as white racists out to harm a black President.

There was, sadly, only one detail that didn't add up -- the man featured in the newscast wasn't everything its hosts claimed he was.

"There are questions about whether this has racial overtones," Brewer said, as the image of a man wearing a white shirt with an AR-15 assault rifle appeared on screen. "Here you have a man of colour in the Presidency and white people showing up with guns strapped to their waists or to their legs."

"It sounds simplistic when you put it that way, but it is real that there is tremendous anger in this country about government, the way government seems to be taking over the country, anger about a black person being president," Toure added. "Just several upheavals in the country over the last ten years from 9/11, to the economic tsunami, to the black man becoming president and, you know, we see these hate groups rising up and this is definitely part of that."

"Angry at government and racism, you put those two together," later added Ratigan.

Fortunately, MSNBC's cameras weren't the only ones on hand at the Arizona rally.

CNN's cameras were also present, and interviewed this "white man with a gun". Who, unfortunately for Brewer, Ratigan, Toure and MSNBC, wasn't actually white.

Oops.

But portraying conservative activists as racists has recently proven to be the bread and butter of MSNBC. When Janeane Garofalo insisted that protesters at Tea Bag rallies were "about hating a black man in the White House. This is about racism straight-up," host Keith Olbermann could do nothing but nod his head in agreement.

Garofalo has since remained unrepentant about her foray onto the political low road. Olbermann himself has also had remarkably little to say about his participation in a blatant bastardization of racial politics.

So many of those paying attention to the American left-wing media must surely be beginning to wonder more frequently: what is it with these people and racism? If they so desperately need to edit their footage so as to obscure the race of the subject of a newscast, perhaps their fixation has become an evidently unhealthy one.