Category 13 of 16

The Ku Klux Con Job Award for Smearing Conservatives with Phony Racism Charges

Winner

Lawrence O’Donnell (856 Votes)

Clip from RNC ad: “Stop Obama and his union bosses today. The Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.”

Host Lawrence O’Donnell: “The Republican Party is saying that the President of the United States has bosses, that the union bosses this President around, the unions boss him around. Does that sound to you like they are trying to consciously or subconsciously deliver the racist message that, of course, of course a black man can’t be the real boss?”

Ex-Governor Jennifer Granholm (D-MI): “Wow, I hadn’t thought about the racial overtones....”

— MSNBC’s The Last Word, February 25.


Runners-up

Piers Morgan (609)

“I’ve had a lot of guests on recently getting very hot under the collar about the Tea Party....black Americans, leading black Americans who say the Tea Party is racist. And I know that your fairly humorous response is to say, ‘I looked in the mirror and I appear to be a black man, and I’m in the Tea Party,’ which I get and you’re perfectly entitled to say that. But you all know there are elements of the Tea Party who are racist. It’s a trade secret. How do you deal with that as a black man who is now leading the Tea Party charge?”
— Host Piers Morgan to GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, October 19.


Andrea Mitchell (457)

“Let’s talk about the current issue of Ebony. Some very provocative articles here about whether he [President Obama] is tough enough and whether or not the politics that we’ve been seeing — Tea Party politics, and the like — really reach a new level of white supremacism, of anti-African-American rhetoric.”
— Andrea Mitchell to publisher Desiree Rogers, who was Obama’s White House social secretary in 2009-10, on her MSNBC 1pm ET Andrea Mitchell Reports, January 11.


Thomas Roberts (241)

“I get out of all of these things that many of these candidates would rather take legislation to build a time machine and go back in time to where we had, you know, no women voting, slavery was cool. I mean, it’s just kind of ridiculous.”
— Daytime anchor Thomas Roberts on MSNBC Live, September 23, talking about the previous night’s GOP debate.


Richard Wolffe (181)

“The interesting question is: what is it about this President that has stripped away the veneer of respect that normally accompanies the office of the President? Why do Republicans think this President is unpresidential — unpresidential, and shouldn’t dare to request this kind of thing? It strikes me that it could be the economic times, it could be that he won so big in 2008, or it could be, let’s face it, the color of his skin.”
— MSNBC political analyst and ex-Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe talking about the brief contretemps over scheduling Obama’s speech to Congress, The Last Word, August 31.