Al Sharpton: ‘Media Promotes Black on Black Fight’
By Don Irvine April 18, 2011
The never-shy Rev. Al Sharpton played up the race card during a panel at the National Action Network meeting last week.
Sharpton took issue with the panel’s moderator Roland Martin who wanted to know what Obama’s falling approval ratings among African-Americans means with the election only a year and a half away:
Sharpton: One, we’ve got to see if we believe all the polls. Let’s start there because…
Martin: But we believed it when it was high.
Sharpton: No we believed it when we voted, high, and it was clear that the polls were reflecting the vote. So I think that what the media has tried to do is to have this black on black fight with the black community and President Obama.
Sharpton seems to have forgotten how friendly the mainstream media have been to Obama and that they’ve done all they could to prop him up against withering criticism from the right. Instead of accusing them of trying to fan the flames, he should be thanking them for protecting Obama as much as they have.
As for Sharpton’s claim that Obama has been held to a higher standard than white presidents, it was Obama himself, and his supporters, who set the bar high. After all, he was declared to be the first post-racial president, and he said that lobbyists would have no place in his administration. That wasn’t the media’s doings, but his own.
In response to a question from the audience on when people of color would form a political party to counter the Tea Party, Sharpton brought up his counter-rally to Glenn Beck’s last summer as an example of his successful effort to combat conservative activists. The only problem is that his rally drew much smaller numbers, left a much bigger mess, and was more racially divisive than the peaceful Beck event.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of our society when liberals like Sharpton, having failed to win the ideological battle, resort to using the race card to gain sympathy. This only divides our country even more.
http://www.aim.org/don-irvine-blog/a...n-black-fight/