The Ku Klux Con Job Award
for Smearing Conservatives with Phony Racism Charges
Winner
Chris Matthews (74 points)
“What does your study tell you about the nature of the racial piece here of the Tea Party?...Is it sort of a resumption of the Old South, of the way things were before the Civil War, for example? Is it like that old dreamy nostalgia you get in the old movies, Gone With the Wind? Is it that kind of America they want to bring back or what? When there were no gays, where blacks were slaves, Mexicans were in Mexico? I mean, is this what they want?”
— Chris Matthews to author Christopher Parker on MSNBC’s Hardball, March 20. [MP3 Audio]
Runners-Up
Chris Matthews (68 points)
“The problem is there are people in this country — maybe 10%, I don’t know what the number, maybe 20% on a bad day — who want this President to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn’t President....They can’t stand the idea that he is President, and a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn’t like somebody in another racial group. So what? It is the sense that the white race must rule. That’s what racism is. And they can’t stand the idea that a man who is not white is President.”
— Chris Matthews appearing as a guest on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, May 15. [MP3 Audio]
Cokie Roberts (45 points)
“You know, having grown up in the Deep South in the era of Jim Crow, the difference is dramatic. And the fact that Andy Young was Mayor of Atlanta and John Lewis is a member of Congress from Georgia, is a great testament to the fact that when you do something like pass a voting rights bill, that it makes a difference. Which is why, at the moment, what’s going on about voting rights is downright evil, because it is something that really needs to keep going forward, not backward.”
— ABC’s Cokie Roberts on This Week, August 25. [MP3 Audio]
Joy Reid (25 points)
“Didn’t we do this before? Wasn’t it called ‘indentured servitude,’ where you come, and you pay all this money out, his money out — you’re not a citizen, but you’re legally allowed to work on the farm? This sounds like indentured servitude, is what they want....It is also a very ugly, sort of, ethnic argument, that they don’t want to add more brown people to the population of the United States underlying this argument....This whole premise is so racially ugly.”
— MSNBC analyst Joy Reid, who is also managing editor of the NBC-owned TheGrio.com, on MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner, July 11, reacting to suggestions Republicans might accept legal status, but not citizenship, to illegal immigrants. [MP3 Audio]
http://www.mrc.org/notable-quotables/year-end-awards-best-notable-quotables-2013?cat=1
