Nick Confessore at Tapped has more on the Sharpton-Stone scandal, quoting this Wayne Barrett investigative piece from the Village Voice. The organizer (on Jim Baker’s orders) of the “bourgeois riot” that shut down the Miami recount in 2000 — a riot designed to prevent black votes for Al Gore from being counted — is pulling the strings in the Sharpton campaign.
I had always thought that the effect of the Sharpton campaign was to make black people look bad by presenting an utterly unqualified and unprincipled thug as their national spokesman, and to make Demcrats look bad by forcing them to be polite to a professional extortionist who was also the inciter of two deadly race riots. But I hadn’t realized until now that those effects were actually the purpose of the Sharpton campaign: not Sharpton’s purpose, but the purpose of his puppeteer.
This story hasn’t been getting the ink it deserves. David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy, for example, thinks that the Democrats should be ashamed of having tolerated Sharpton, and the Republicans of not having called the Democrats on it. But his post doesn’t even consider what seems to be the case: that Republican conduct around Sharpton has been considerably more shameful than mere silence.
Note to Wesley Clark, John Edwards, and John Kerry: There’s a major Sister Souljah opportunity available here. That didn’t seem to do Mr. Clinton’s standing among black Americans any harm, did it?
As the South Carolina results demonstrate, most African-Americans don’t actually accept the Sharpton clown show as representing them. Some of them are pretty damned disgusted by it.
And a note to Terry McAuliffe: No more space at the debate table for Fat Albert. No convention speaking gig. We’ve always known he was a sonofabitch, and we now know he’s not even our sonofabitch. He should be encouraged not to let the door hit him on the way out.
More on the Stone-Sharpton scandal
More on Sharpton’s record of thuggery
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