Soledad O’Brien Goes After Emanuel Cleaver Over “Chains” Remark

You read that right: Soledad O’Brien. She must have been confused. Maybe it’s that whole “stopped clock” thing.  Or, perhaps CNN is looking to attract more people as their ratings hit rock bottom, so she decided to question Black Caucus leader Emanuel Cleaver hard

(Mediaite) But the supposedly “biased” Soledad O’Brien wasn’t taking the President’s word for it Thursday morning, pressing Rep. Cleaver on the meaning behind Biden’s words. Cleaver told O’Brien that he didn’t give the line a second thought when he first heard it.

“I would never have even paid much attention to it,” Rep. Cleaver said, “except for the fact that campaigns nowadays are waiting for any kind of little nugget to try to create an atmosphere of more and more discord,” adding that the sound bite “is now being used to make Vice President Biden appear to have been throwing out these words in order to somehow attract dumb African-Americans who, if they hear the words ‘chains,’ are going to automatically vote for him and President Obama.”

“I think you’re extrapolating on the ‘dumb African-Americans part of that,” Soledad responded, then zeroed in on the subtext. “You cannot tell me that if we were talking about Mitt Romney saying a line like that, and if we were discussing that and the quote was he wants to ‘put you all back in chains,’ and that was part of Governor Romney’s speech, that people would not go crazy and crying about race and talking about tone and tenor and coded language. I think we would, wouldn’t we?”

Cleaver responded that it “depends on the context,” and asserted that there was only a “sprinkling of African-Americans there.”

Soledad explained to him that the “sprinkling” was actually about 50% Black. She also went on to grill Cleaver about the way he makes a big deal out of fictional “code language,” like with the contempt charges against the stonewalling, lying Attorney General Eric Holder.

Had a conservative/Republican said anything similar, they would have been deemed a raaaaacist and blasted constantly by the media, Democrats, Black “leaders” like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and told to resign right now.

Of course, the “unbiased” Mediaite says this proves that Soledad is not biased, which was the point of the article, just like Mediaite (I should have know this was written by Tommy Christopher)! And tries to provide cover for Biden by explaining away the comment, plus

In context, it was a clumsy non sequitur, and a trivialization of slavery, but what folks who ask what would happen if Romney made a similar remark don’t get is that Joe Biden and the modern Democratic Party have earned some benefit of the doubt that Republicans, particularly Mitt Romney, have not.

See? It’s cool if Democrats trivialize slavery and make these kinds of remarks, because they’ve done great work for Blacks, such as destroying their family units, keeping them agitated about race issues, putting so many deeper in poverty and the Welfare Nation, attempting to stop the original passage of the Civil Rights Act, lionizing a former high ranking KKK member, implementing Jim Crow in the Deep South, treating Blacks as a single voting unit rather than as individuals……is there anything good that they do for Blacks and other minorities?

Video at link.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

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One Response to “Soledad O’Brien Goes After Emanuel Cleaver Over “Chains” Remark”

  1. Gumball_Brains says:

    HEH.. and Cleaver doubled-down on it with this…

    throwing out these words in order to somehow attract dumb African-Americans

    Did he just call blacks, dumb african-americans ?? And, are we going to get passed trying to say that black americans are born in Africa? Or have Africa blood? Or are born to parents who are African citizens?

    Does this not continue to perpetuate the continuing association of blacks to slavery?

    I am not a European-American, or Irish-American. I was born in America to American parents. I am an American that is white. Can’t we get beyond this idea that blacks have dual loyalties?

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