DC Trawler

Who’s minding the store at MSNBC?

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If you’ll permit me to quote myself, and you will, here’s what I wrote after Martin Bashir apologized for going on his former MSNBC show and building an entire segment around the idea of pooping in Sarah Palin’s mouth:

Bashir didn’t put all that together himself. He wasn’t the only guy in the room. He’s got a staff and crew, and presumably there’s somebody at MSNBC who reads his copy before he spews it out on the air. Nobody in that whole organization thought there was any problem whatsoever with what he said. Hell, they were promoting it two days later.

Martin Bashir may very well be sincerely sorry. Fine. At issue is the entire culture of MSNBC, which is the culture of the left. It’s okay to say the foulest, most demented things imaginable about people who disagree with them. And when one of their comrades does so, he won’t face the same consequences they demand when people who disagree with them say things they don’t like.

I was wrong about that last part, because they ended up firing him. Which I’m ambivalent about, incidentally. Either way is fine with me. But the point about the double standard remains. MSNBC paints itself as the left-wing equivalent of Fox News, but I’m pretty sure we’d have heard about it if any FNC employee had ever called for someone on the left to get a literal mouthful of excrement.

Which brings us to Melissa Harris-Perry. She got in trouble last week for another moronic segment, which you didn’t see because it was on MSNBC:

Ha ha ha! Because Romney’s a Republican, get it? He doesn’t think of people as voting blocs, but as individuals. Isn’t that hilarious?

Harris-Perry took a lot of heat for using an innocent child as yet another excuse to sneer at Republicans. She addressed it on her show this weekend:

Clearly, she regrets the insult. Unless she’s an Oscar-level actress, that’s as sincere an apology as I’ve ever seen. It was good enough for Mitt.

But again, that’s not the point. It’s not about her. It’s about her enablers. How did something like that even get on the air at MSNBC in the first place? Why didn’t a single person in that organization say, “Hey, maybe this isn’t such a good idea”?

Again: Because that’s the culture of the left.

Can you imagine if Fox News showed a picture of Obama with his mom or her parents, and somebody sang, “One of these things is not like the other”? And then the host, instead of admonishing such bigotry, laughed and danced around like an idiot? David Brock and the rest of the geniuses at Media Matters would be on red alert. It’d be a major “news” story for days, if not weeks. They’d be calling for Roger Ailes’ head on a pike.

And before you go there, lefties: Phil Robertson got suspended for something he said in a magazine interview. It wasn’t on his show. I’m as ambivalent about Harris-Perry keeping her job as I was about Bashir keeping his, but for once, you guys, please try to show some sense.

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Update: Melissa Harris-Perry Panelist Levels Racism Charge Against Republicans Mere Minutes After Host’s Apology. Oh well…

Update: According to Eliana Johnson at NRO, the answer to the question in my headline is… Rachel Maddow! That explains it.