Juan Williams isn???t the only liberal driven around the bend by the first night of the Republican National Convention. Newsbusters brings us the Really Deep Thoughts of impartial journalist David Chalian, Washington bureau chief for Yahoo News:
In video broadcast Monday night by ABC and Yahoo over the Internet, Chalian can be heard claiming that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann are unconcerned about the fate of residents of the New Orleans area who are currently being hit by Hurricane Isaac.
???They aren???t concerned at all,??? Chalian can be heard on the live broadcast. ???They are happy to have a party when black people drown.???
That line elicits laughter from several employees listening in on the joke.
From the audio, it appears Chalian was talking to an unknown individual named ???John??? who appears to have made some sort of quip which cannot be heard on the video.
As Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters notes, Chalian seemed entirely unconcerned with the actual sitting President of the United States, Barack Obama, holding fund-raising parties while ???black people drown.??? Unlike Mitt and Ann Romney, Obama has official duties directly related to dealing with Hurricane Isaac - and according to the governor of Louisiana, he has not been performing them very well.
This looks like a ???hot mike??? blunder, which says nothing good about the general atmosphere of the room from which this ABC News/Yahoo broadcast originated. It also reflects the kind of lazy racialism and hatemongering that has settled into the liberal mindset, which has no difficult designating the targets of its hatred as virtually inhuman, in order to justify opportunistic political attacks. Was the entire GOP convention supposed to be canceled because of Hurricane Isaac? Or should we have just gone ahead and canceled the 2012 election?
Update: Politico reports that Yahoo News has, appropriately, terminated the employment of David Chalian.
Update: Chalian apologized via Facebook: "I am profoundly sorry for making an inappropriate and thoughtless joke. I was commenting on the challenge of staging a convention during a hurricane and about campaign optics. I have apologized to the Romney campaign, and I want to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to Gov. and Mrs. Romney. I also regret causing any distraction from the exceptional coverage of the Republican convention by Yahoo News and ABC News."
Update: Amazingly, Chalian is not without his defenders, most notably Gwen Ifill of PBS. She caused jaws to drop across the Internet by saying on Twitter: "One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God's gift to political journalism. #IStandwithDavid."
If this outrages you so much that you want to stop supporting PBS - well, tough. Support for Ifill's employers is unconditional and compulsory.
