On a network filled with dimwits and nitwits, Melissa Harris-Perry stands out.
She may not be the dumbest host on MSNBC — when you’re competing against Ed Schultz, that’s a tall task — but she has convincingly demonstrated that she is among the most consistently asinine. Below are five of the Duke PhD’s stupidest statements of 2013:
1.) She downplayed the role radical Islam played in the Boston Bombings: “I keep wondering — is it possible that there would ever be a discussion like, ‘Oh, this is because of Ben Affleck and the connection between Boston and movies about violence?’ And, of course, the answer is no. Of course no one will even think this is about those things. But at the same time there’s something — I appreciate the way that you framed that as the one drop. Like, because given that they’re Chechen, given that they are literally Caucasian — our very sense of connection to them is this framed-up notion of, like, Islam making them something that is non-normal.”
2.) She compared the term “Obamacare” to the “n-word”: “President Obama has been labeled with this word by his opponents, and at first he rose above it, hoping that if he could just make a cause for what he’d achieved, his opponents would fail in making their label stick. But no matter how many successes that he had as president, he realized there were still many people for whom he’d never be anything more than that one disparaging word — a belief he knew was held not just by his political opponents, but also by a significant portion of the American electorate.
3.) She told you that your kids aren’t solely your responsibility: “Part of it is, we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
4.) She linked GITMO detainees to American slaves: “I also appreciate that the hunger strikers are not trying to die. They’re trying to generate autonomy in the context of something that strips their humanity — something we certainly know about from the experience of American slavery, and that the language of ‘before I be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free’ — just that idea of creating human freedom within the context of horrible human conditions.”
5.) She led a panel that mocked Mitt Romney for having a black grandson:
