Phooey. James Taranto beat me to this one.
Sing it, Sam. Join in at any point, Juilan: “Don’t know much about history…”
When I read that a reporter had interrupted President Obama today as he was announcing his illegal immigration amnesty program for young illegals, and saw that an MSNBC guest had made the fatuous suggestion that a white President would never be treated so disrespectfully, I immediately thought, “What? Have these people never heard of Dan Rather’s heckling of Nixon?”
Taranto wondered the same thing, and printed this, from David Schoenbrun’s 1989 book,”On and Off the Air: An Informal History of CBS News,” in his blog:
“When Dan Rather, the White House correspondent, arose to question [President Nixon], boos and cheers rang through the hall. The boos came from Nixon acolytes spread through the room, the cheers from fellow correspondents expressing their support for Dan. As the noise erupted, Nixon, on the stage, looked down at Rather and asked with heavy sarcasm, ‘Are you running for something?’ Dan, always impulsive, snapped right back, ‘No, sir, are you?’ More boos, more cheers! Not the most dignified scene at a presidential news conference. Dan was in trouble. It is one thing, perfectly legitimate, to challenge a president with tough questions. It is something quite different for a reporter to engage in a sassing contest with the nation’s chief executive, no matter how obnoxious and wrong the president may be.”
Since Democratic strategist Julian Epstein is ignorant of history, however, and also committed to the desperate and insulting Democratic strategy of ascribing any criticism of this most foundering of Presidents to nascent racism, he embarrassed himself with this silly rant:
“This is just so unprecedented and outrageous, that you have to ask the question, would the right-wing president be doing this if we had a white president there? I think it’s a very important question because I think this is the first African-American president. We’ve never had a white president been told by the opposing party to shut up in the middle of a major address to the Congress. We’ve never had a president like this heckled so disrespectfully. We’ve never had this otherness afforded to any other president and I think the right wing has some explaining to do because to me it’s patently obvious.”
Sure, Julian.
1. It’s patently obvious to you because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
2. Rather’s treatment of Nixon, who “I think” was white, was far worse than what the reporter did today, and it became routine with him
3. Nobody thought to ascribe Rather’s conduct to “otherness,” though trust me, Nixon was about as “other” as you can get. Rather’s conduct was just rude and disrespectful, just like that of the reporter today.
4. I wonder how much more of the reflexive response to call every critic of Obama a racist the public will tolerate? I know I was thoroughly sick of it in 2008.
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Sources:
Graphic: Gold Play Music
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Ethics Alarms 
When you combine the water-carrying of the MSM with their gross incompetence and failure to research in the age of the internet, you get a LOT of stories like the one above.
And people are very sick of being called racists. These people are so used to having the power of the word solely at THEIR fingertips, they don’t realize that:
a) they’re wearing it out through inaccurate usage, and
b) they’re only aggravating the decline of their relevance.
There will always be stupid and historically illiterate people who will buy the platitudes of the media, no matter the bias. But more and more people are bypassing them entirely (yay internets!) and they still haven’t accepted that we’re in a new era.
On a separate but related topic, I can’t count how many times I’ve been told by liberal family members “how I feel” when what they say has no relationship to the truth. Only I know how I feel. Maybe they can’t relate to my motives, but I have them and they’re readily accessible if they open their minds.
For example, I’m a Libertarian. I dislike Obama’s policies more or less across the board because he’s fascist statist, not because he’s black. His race is irrelevant. It really is that simple.
Well, Rather DID say, “No, SIR…” Why is it the “racists” always have the “explaining to do,” and not the non-racists?