Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Jesse Jackson: Why Debate Farrakhan and not O'Reilly?   [Byron York]

Greetings from Cleveland, where it is still, to my great regret, snowing.  I have a new story up on last night's debate and the brouhaha over Louis Farrakhan and the denounce/reject question.  In the Spin Room afterward, Obama advisers denounced and rejected the idea that Obama had been trying to nuance the question, while Clinton advisers urged reporters to look very carefully at Obama's words.  And then there was Rev. Jesse Jackson, who wondered about the choice of topics:

[Jackson] told reporters he was disappointed that there wasn't a serious discussion of poverty in the debate; why was there no time to discuss the poor and time to discuss Louis Farrakhan?  And if there was going to be a discussion of Farrakhan, how could it then leave out…Bill O'Reilly?  "They mentioned the Farrakhan matter," Jackson said.  "He's a free speaker, but in the case of O'Reilly, who suggested about Michelle Obama's statement about love for the country, about the lynch mob — a very reprehensible statement.  He comes under FCC and Fox scrutiny.  And so I thought there was an imbalance there."

02/27 08:21 AMShare