Taranto attacked Media Matters, repeated charge that Dems are racist

Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal.com editor James Taranto responded to a December 8 Media Matters for America item, which detailed conservative pundits' attacks on Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), by renewing his charge that the Democratic Party is racist. Conservative pundits rushed to label Reid a racist after he criticized Justice Clarence Thomas during a December 5 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press.

In his December 9 "Best of the Web Today" column, Taranto wrote that Democrats' criticism of Thomas, "along with the racist attacks on [national security adviser] Condoleezza Rice we noted last month, got us to thinking about the relationship between the Democratic Party and black Americans. Some have likened it to a plantation, but it seems to us that a better analogy is a protection racket."

But the "racist attacks" on Rice to which Taranto referred were in fact, as he wrote in his November 18 column, "a series of racist caricatures by liberal cartoonists" -- not by Democrats. As Media Matters noted when the cartoons were shown on the November 17 edition of FOX News' Hannity & Colmes, the cartoons were in poor taste (examples here and here), but were in no way a production of the Democratic Party.

—K.B.