Idiot of the Week #7 ~ Elizabeth Hasselbeck

Somehow Elizabeth Hasselbeck manages to compare Jeremiah Wright's occasionally fiery orations from the pulpit to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before moving on to people. Even before she went there (and nobody could figure out where there was, including Elizabeth herself) four minutes into the segment, she criticized Obama for not distancing himself more from Pastor Wright, while pretending that Republicans like John McCain don't cozy-up to preachers with less than mainstream views. Apparently she wasn't paying attention when McCain recently embraced the likes of John Hagee and Rod Parsley (Hey, Elizabeth, here's their words of wisdom), two wingnuts who make a lot less sense than Jeremiah Wright, yet McCain remains "proud" to have their support.

Later on in that episode of The View, perkily dim Elizabeth mimicked the Fox & Friends idiots, who can't wrap their simple minds around what Obama meant when he used the innocuous phrase "typical white person." Elizabeth thinks that she does not see race. (She also thinks she wouldn't be intimidated running into a gathering of black boys on a city sidewalk, yeah, right.) She doesn't comprehend that, whatever one thinks of Wright's more inflammatory statements, there is a big difference between black "racism" (i.e. anger) in the face of centuries of oppression and white racism in the face of centuries of oppressing. (Joy Behar tries, unsuccessfully, to illuminate the distinction.) Of course black people, like white people, can be guilty of misplaced racial anger and hatred. There are black wingnuts just as there are white wingnuts. But to focus on Wright's and, by association, Obama's alleged racism is to ignore true racism, the dark elephant in the room that Obama eloquently and honestly took on. Elizabeth and her ilk think they are "opening" up the discussion by throwing back accusations, when actually they're closing it down because they can't tolerate a "typical black person's" unfamiliar anger at them. So instead of thinking about where that anger might come from, they, like Barbara Bush, who didn't want to waste her beautiful mind thinking about the ugly consequences of war, prefer to keep their beautiful minds in a beautiful white place. The issue of race becomes about us, the beautiful white people, not them, those loud, pissed-off black folks.

Meanwhile, keep a close watch on Obama's lunch. It may contain white bread, and who knows where that could lead?