Bloodthirsty Liberal

Because I can’t stand to read anything to the left of Genghis Khan’s memoirs anymore, I would have missed this appalling piece of puff pastry in the Washington Post.

Good thing Michelle Malkin gets up earlier than I do—and has a stronger stomach:

Just what we needed to close out the year: Another Al Sharpton suck-up piece by the MSM. This one’s from the Washington Post’s Keith Richburg, who can barely manage to mention Sharpton’s latest legal troubles:

“Sharpton has thrived this year with his high-decibel microphone-to-megaphone activism, even in the face of a federal investigation of his 2004 campaign finances.”

That’s it.

No, that’s actually not it. There’s a lot more. A whole hell of a lot:

Sharpton dropped out of Brooklyn College after two years and has had no additional higher education or formal seminary training since.

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A 2002 telecast of HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel showed a 1983 FBI surveillance video in which Sharpton was taped discussing a money-laundering scheme with mobster-turned-informant Michael Franzese, onetime captain for the Colombo crime family.

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Sharpton first entered the national consciousness in November 1987, when he injected himself into the case of 15-year-old Tawana Brawley, who claimed that she had been abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a mysterious gang of six whites that included some law-enforcement officers in Dutchess County, New York. Despite a complete absence of any credible evidence, Sharpton (along with attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason) made increasingly wild accusations, culminating in charges that then-Duchess County assistant prosecutor Steve Pagones was one of Brawley’s assailants. Sharpton appeared on the Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera programs, Nightline, and other local and national television shows repeating his claims about Pagones and calling him a sexual predator. Brutal anti-Semitic statements were made by both Sharpton and Maddox about New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams.

Brawley’s account was eventually demonstrated to be without basis by extensive testing and investigation by law-enforcement officials; a grand jury dismissed Brawley’s accusations.

When Pagones sued Sharpton for defamation of character in 1997 […] Pagones won a court judgment against Sharpton for $345,000, which Sharpton never paid.

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[A]nti-Semitic riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section erupted after 7-year old Gavin Cato, a black child, was accidentally killed by an out-of-control car driven by a Hasidic Jew. Within three hours, a black mob had hunted down and killed an innocent rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton fanned the flames of racial hatred by publicly announcing that it was not merely a car accident that had killed Gavin Cato, but rather “the social accident of apartheid.” He organized angry demonstrations and challenged local Jews –– who he derisively called “diamond merchants” –– to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” to settle the score. Finally he claimed, without proof, that the Jewish driver had run over the Cato children while in a drunken stupor. Stirred in part by such rhetoric, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took violently to the streets for three days and nights of rioting. Sharpton reacted to chaos by stating, “We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

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In 1995 Sharpton led his National Action Network in an ugly boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners announced that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. Repeatedly referring to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as “crackers,” Powell and his fellow protesters menacingly told passersby, “Keep [going] right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our [black] people. Don’t give the Jew a dime.” Some picketers openly threatened violence against whites and Jews –– all under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton. The subsequent picketing became increasingly menacing in its tone until one of the protesters eventually shot four whites in the store and then set the building on fire –– killing seven employees, most of whom were Hispanics.

As Jeff Jacoby put it, Al Sharpton is a “vicious liar and a dangerous bigot”; he is the Left’s David Duke:

[I]t is impossible to imagine, say, David Duke running for president as a Republican and not being shunned by every leading figure in the party. Impossible to imagine his campaign appearances being covered in news accounts that made no mention of his history in the Ku Klux Klan and his links to neo-Nazis. Impossible to imagine that he would be treated as just another candidate, albeit one with a “controversial” past. No one would roll over for Duke. Why are they rolling over for Sharpton?

Jacoby wrote that almost five years ago—yet the whitewash (if you’ll excuse the term) gets thicker with every coat.