Sunday, July 07, 2013

Truest statement of the week II


At this point, the heads of both prosecutor Reid and tough cop Harris-Perry simultaneously imploded. They both lost it, unintelligibly shouting over each other for more than ten seconds. After they stopped shouting, Hrafsson tried to say the issue was the substance of Snowden's revelations, that the US government was illegally collecting, literally every email, text message, phone call, facebook post and electronic brain fart on the planet and storing it for future data-mining reference. Bad cop Harris-Perry would have none of it, angrily declaring that the issues were Snowden's illegitimacy, because he won't turn himself in, and his possible contact with foreign countries who might mean “to do us harm.”
Prosecutor Reid replied to the Nixon quote with unintentional irony, asserting that Snowden didn't reveal any illegal behavior, because of course the government had done nothing illegal, and as host, ended the segment.
The camera cut away quickly, maybe so we couldn't see the Wikileaks guy laughing.
A day or two later Harris-Perry channeled the cop again, with a Snowden segment on her own show. Harris-Perry insisted from her comfy TV chair, that any whistleblower or dissenter who failed to meekly submit to whatever punishment authorities deign to mete out is illegitimate at least, possibly self-serving as well, though just how the self is served in such cases was unclear. She brought up Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, the state senator who filibustered in Texas, and the folks who get arrested for “Moral Mondays” in North Carolina every week, and later in the show, Dan Ellsberg..
Harris-Perry might be a bright professor, but on TV she's a lousy cop and a worse historian.


-- Bruce A. Dixon, "Joy Ann Reid, Melissa Harris-Perry as Prosecutor & Cop Go After Snowden, Wikileaks, & the First Amendment" (Black Agenda Report).
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