Michael Brown was laid to rest in Ferguson, Missouri this week. But that doesn’t mean that wingnuts and right-wingers will let him rest in peace.
It was bad enough when the New York Times built its profile of Michael Brown around the idea that he was “no angel.” (What eighteen year old — male or female — is?) Apparently, young black men must now be “angelic” to be worthy of living through an encounter with the police.
What was worse? Right-wingers objecting to calling referring to Michael Brown as “unarmed.” Why? Because he was “armed” with his big black self!
- A Fox news segment asked if describing Brown as “unarmed” was “misleading,” because he was an 18 year-old black male “who is six foot four and weighs almost three hundred pounds.”
- Not to be outdone, Ben Stein appeared on Newsmax to chime in that “The idea of calling this poor young man unarmed when he was 6’4″, 300 pounds, full of muscles, apparently, according to what I read in the New York Times, on marijuana. To call him unarmed is like calling Sonny Liston unarmed or Cassius Clay unarmed. He wasn’t unarmed. He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self.”
- Fox News host Andrea Tantaros accused Attorney General Eric Holder of running the Department of Justice “like the Black Panthers would.”
- Meanwhile, Ferguson police reportedly let their dog urinate on the makeshift memoir where Michael Brown’s body lay for more than four hours, and then drove over it. Still, no one knows what black people in Ferguson are so angry about.
Here’s the best of the worst in wingnuttia this week:
- Bill O’Reilly tried to debunk white privilege with “Asian privilege,” only to get schooled by Megyn Kelly, of all people.
- Fox News hosts defended catcalling, declaring “Let men be men.”
- Rush Limbaugh longed for open discrimination, and lamented that businesses “must serve anybody who walks in the door.”
- GOP candidate for the Colorado legislature Gordon Klingenschmitt declared that gay Democratic congressman Jared Polis “would soon be aligning himself with ISIS and begin beheading Christians here in America.”
- New Mexico GOP senate candidate Alex Weh doesn’t see anything wrong with using an image from the murder of journalist James Foley in his latest campaign ad.
