Hannity Lies And Lies To Defend GOP's "Paucity Of Blacks"

On last night's edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, conservative pundit Sean Hannity asked why the mainstream media isn't "outraged" over a comment last week from sports commentator Bryant Gumbel.

Gumbel, remarking on his HBO show Real Sports that he never watches the Winter Olympics, said, “So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world’s greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention.”

But in spite of Hannity's question, the media has hardly rallied to defend Gumbel's comments. For example, a USA Today columnist said Gumbel's comments "don't ring true." A Knight-Ridder Newspapers columnist implied that Gumbel's comments were racist. A columnist for the Annapolis (Md.) Capitol agreed. The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch called Gumbel's comments "harsh."

Of course, Hannity doesn't really care about the "paucity of blacks" at the Turin Olympics. The reason he brought up the Gumbel comment was to launch a defense of the GOP, and to imply that the "liberal media" is giving Gumbel a free pass because they hate President Bush.

So Hannity relies on a false claim -- no "outrage" against Gumbel -- to refute the notion that the GOP has a "paucity of blacks." On that point, Hannity said last night that Gumbel's comment was "not accurate" and not "productive."

But, in fact, the Bush Administration has a "paucity of blacks" when compared with the Clinton Administration.

While Bush has made several high-profile appointments of blacks, most notably Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell as successive Secretaries of State, a 2004 analysis of the 2,800 political posts that form an administration found that blacks held 7% of administration jobs under Bush, compared with 16% of administration jobs under President Clinton.

In other words, Hannity makes a false claim in order to make ... another false claim.

***

Beyond relying on false claims, Hannity is a hypocrite.

Which is worse: Gumbel's comment about the GOP, or conservative pundit Ann Coulter's "joke" that liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned?

Even if you think the two comments are of equal concern, would you be surprised to find out that Hannity, while outraged over Gumbel, said nary a word about Coulter?

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," Coulter said at a January speech at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

Coulter appeared on Hannity & Colmes the next night, but neither Hannity nor guest co-host Bob Beckel asked Coulter about her "joke."

***

This item first appeared at JABBS.

I'd rather swim in a cesspool than devote 2 seconds to a discussion about them.

Watch me jump in.

Which is basically, "Black people are too stupid to figure out for themselves that the GOP is the better political party to belong to, so I have to tell them how much better off they are under the racist, punitive policies of the GOP than they are with the Democrats, who actually have some black people in their power structure, not just as window dressing."

Yeah, it's a run-on sentence, but Hannity is none too bright, and that's the best I could translate while channeling his crazed thoughts.

There's Condi and.... hey, where'd that other black guy go? The military fella?

They say the right thing, but there's no follow-up.

They say, "we want better schools," but no funding follow up

They say, "clean air," "healthy forests," etc., but improper follow up

They say, "look at Condi and Colin" but no follow up at lower levels.

This is what happens when you put marketing concerns above making good policy.

When the lights are turned off and the backdrops are rolled up, it's back to business... literally.

Hannity looks like the kinda guy that was severly bullied at school. The GOP's lcose links with the extreme right and the vice presidents vote against the civil rights act (read this somewhere, not too sure though can anyone confirm?) could be an explanation of why there are few Black Republicans. When Fox finds one they like to parade them around.....

And I agree with your post. :hi:

was a wrestling announcer before he got into conservative politics.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

when someone tells the truth. Paucity of blacks in the gop? That's the truth. Lack of blacks at a gop convention? More truth.

the achievements of the best of the athletes that are there are remarkable. I'm sure he didn't mean to denigrate them but just to note that there are a lot of people, many of whom are black, who don't have the opportunity to participate for economic and other reasons, and thus it's really not fair to say they are the world's best. As for the GOP convention--a very apt comparison.

I loved this article:

White Blindness: The Winter Olympics and Defending Bryant Gumbel

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Dave Zirin

The right-wing media hordes, in a mad dash to deflect attention from Dick Cheney's shooting spree, may have found their target of mass distraction: Bryant Gumbel. At the end of his HBO show "Real Sports," Gumbel unleashed a prolonged rant about the utter unwatchability of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino. The Winter Games certainly are a worthy target. On ten-hour tape delay, NBC has been force-feeding us highlights of sports that seem concocted on Madison Avenue to sell Mountain Dew. As Gumbel took the Xtreme winter games to task, he said, "So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of Blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention." Immediately, and predictably, the bloviating bigots of the blogosphere started splattering Gumbel's statement all over the web.

This was to be expected. But more striking was the reaction to Gumbel on ESPN Radio's "The Dan Patrick Show." Normally, in the red meat world of sports radio, Dan Patrick seems happy to be veal: no gristle or fat, morally offensive to some, but generally just plain and easily digestible. But Dan blew a gasket on the air, going after Gumbel like he was president of the Willard Scott fan club. He called for Gumbel's job, saying that if Rush Limbaugh was fired from ESPN for making racially insensitive comments - a firing Dan says he opposed - then Gumbel should suffer the same fate.

Comparing Gumbel to Limbaugh is like comparing apples to an obese drug addict. Gumbel is an award-winning journalist who has had a foot in the world of hard sports commentary for three decades. Limbaugh is a gaseous hop-head who once asked, "Why do all composite criminal photos look like Jesse Jackson?" and telling an African-American caller to his show - who somehow got through the screeners - to "Take the bone out of your nose." Gumbel hosts a critically lauded show. Limbaugh was hired by ESPN as a gimmick by their ownership group, Disney, as part of their mission to make America stupider.

But when you actually compare their respective comments, the Dan Patrick argument not only collapses, but becomes intellectually dishonest. Limbaugh, of course, said on ESPN's NFL show that Pro-Bowl Philadelphia Eagle Donavan McNabb was "overrated" because of the "media's social concern" to see a successful Black quarterback. This was exactly the kind of ignorant garbage Disney hired him to spew. What the rat shack didn't count on was thousands of phone calls and emails demanding the fat man's Sosa-sized head.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/02/con06069.html

break his good friend Dan Patrick out of his neanderthalish mindset. But those are notoriously hard to change.

Boy didn't they love To parade that bullshit around not saying what they meant. I have been getting a strange feeling that racism is my fault even though I am not part of the majority. And, if I make the mistake of bringing up the issue I am jumped on as trying to blame the past on them. Big NO NO. I just have to say that just because I'm not being called N..... doesn't mean socially and politically I am not being treated like one. :nopity:

My Republican boss brought that up to me (the Cosby thing) and he went on to tell me about how upset all of those in attendance and all of the black community was....I heard the same thing later on Fox. I then listened to what I could find coming out of the black community and asked all the blacks that I know and work with (there are many) they all agreed with Cosby.

The right had a whole conversation with themselves. This is an old RW radio tactic-talk about how the other side (LIBERALS) feel and are saying about a given topic.

The Schiavo debacle was more of the same.

They have to build these "straw men" so that they can knock them down.

As I point out in another thread, people like Hannity don't need logic to get angry. They can take any issue and turn it into a reason to attack Democrats. It's much easier to say simple things like "they hate Bush," or "they're opportunistic" or "they care more about the terrorists" than to actually have a meaningful discussion.

Another thing about Hannity is that he often will refer to his friends in the administration. So should we assume that his "friends" are giving him the coordinated talking points for the conservative media, which he then trots out to whoever he talks to?

The one thing we as Americans have a hell of a time doing is taken responsibility of this issue. No matter witch side of the issue. Just as me now, to Begin this conversation defensively sends it down hill from the start.

like Richard Barrett and Hal Turner....

"During the 1990s, Turner made a habit of calling into Hannity's WABC radio program as "Hal from North Bergen," one of the show's regular callers. "Hal" liked to say increasingly outrageous things: in August 1998, according to the One People's Project profile ,
he remarked on Hannity's show that "if it weren't for the white man, blacks would still be swinging from the trees in Africa." Hannity not only failed to rebuke "Hal" for the remark, he continued plugging into Turner whenever he called.
ll this culminated in 2000, when Turner stepped forward to run for the Republican nomination for Congress in his home district in New Jersey. He appeared on Hannity's Fox News program and received his old friend's endorsement. Turner himself has claimed that during this time, he and Hannity were "good friends." Hannity himself has since remained mum on the subject -- because as noxious as Turner may have been before 2000, afterward, his true stripes became unmistakable."

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/03/hal-turner-rights-ward-churchill.html

For the gift of this information. It has been emotionally draining to stand my intellect up to this on slot to my value as an American and as a human. I wish you could see it when I do my talking points. This broadens my understanding :headbang:

Bad publicity is sweet for ratings nevertheleless