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ABC's Nightline is claiming an Exclusive for its up-close-and-personal profile of Attorney General Eric Holder. Pierre Thomas filed a preview. Holder has inherited George Bush's War on Terrorism in two ways. First, his day's routine starts with continuity, receiving "the threat matrix laying out how terrorists are actively targeting America." Second, he is deciding "whether to investigate the Bush Administration's detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects." Holder repeated his famous soundbite for Thomas: "Waterboarding is torture." ABC World News, we should remember, is scrupulous in deploying euphemism to avoid uttering the T-word.
Holder also recalled for ABC's Thomas how he was racially profiled by a police officer. His car was stopped and fruitlessly searched for weapons during his student days. NBC's Andrea Mitchell was assigned to a follow-up story on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor handcuffed at his own home after accusing police of suspecting him of burglary because he is African-American. Mitchell started by setting the record straight that the police report of the arrest was inaccurate. It said that the 911 dispatcher sent them in search of a black suspect yet Lucia Whalen, the suspicious caller, made no mention of race.
Then midway through her report, using the segue of Barack Obama's "acted stupidly" soundbite, Mitchell changed the subject to repeat ad hominem attacks against the President by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck and talkradio's Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh said: "President Obama is black. I think he has a chip on his shoulder." Beck was incoherent. First he said that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture." Then, when asked to clarify, Beck explained: "I am not saying that he does not like white people." Then a third try: "This guy is, I believe, a racist."
Then Mitchell concluded by changing the subject again, mentioning the rumors among "rightwing bloggers and talkradio hosts" that Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is a forgery and that he was actually born abroad, disqualifying him from office--a conclusion that is light years away from a non-racial false alarm about a burglary near Harvard Yard.
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