Ku Klux Con Job Award
for Smearing Conservatives With Phony Racism Charges
Winner
Harold Meyerson (69 points)
“Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today’s Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it.”
— Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, April 8.
Runners-Up
Sally Kohn (53 points)
“It would be unfair, or I think dishonest of us to not be clear that part of what he’s [Trump] speaking to is a part of the American public that for the last seven years has felt outraged. They talk about taking the White House back. They’ve said, and he retweeted this, they want the White House, capital W-H-I-T-E again. You know, there is a disaffected, highly racialized, highly us-versus-them part of the American electorate that he is firing up....”
— CNN analyst Sally Kohn on CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello, July 21.
Chris Matthews (37 points)
“It [the Republican Party] is no longer the party that voted overwhelmingly for civil rights and voting rights in the mid ’60s. In fact, its most consistent ambition these recent years has been a relentless push to limit voting rights, especially for minorities, by the imposition of new voter ID requirements, and with this, it’s doing what the Jim Crow enforcers did with poll taxes and outlandish literacy tests.”
— MSNBC host Chris Matthews wrapping up Hardball, March 2
Chris Matthews (32 points)
“Let me finish tonight with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who was shot 150 years ago today.... Why do the people running the Republican Party, starting with Reince Priebus, oversee a national effort in three dozen states to create voter laws that make it hard for minorities, especially older minorities, from exercising the right that Abraham Lincoln died fighting to get them. This is a scar on the Grand Old Party....Who can not blame the Republican Party itself from reverting to the bad old days of Jim Crow and poll taxes and bogus literacy tests?”
— Host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, April 14.
http://www.mrc.org/notable-quotables/worst-worst-best-notable-quotables-2015?cat=2
