Last night’s award for worst cable news roundtable about meaningless aspects of the Trayvon Martin case — following up CNN’s inane “cracker vs. N-word” debate — goes to Bill O’Reilly’s belated dissection of a celebrity T-shirt. At Sunday’s BET Awards, Jamie Foxx wore the face of Trayvon Martin (as he’s done to awards shows at least twice prior), and O’Reilly, in a just putting it out there way, wondered why he got a pass. Foxx, O’Reilly said, “doesn’t know what happened” the night Martin was killed (except, you know, that a 17-year-old black teenager was killed). “If a white actor had worn a George Zimmerman T-shirt, would that have been acceptable?” Let’s ask Alan Colmes!
“We have a white power structure,” Colmes, who is still on television, timidly tried to explain. Fox News analyst Monica Crowley offered that if a white celebrity wore an “I believe George” shirt, “his or her career would be destroyed on the spot.”
“But Jamie Foxx is not a racist?” O’Reilly asked, still ignoring the fact that one of these people is dead at the hand of the other. “We can assume, Colmes, that if a white actor did that, he would get a Paula Deen.” So, here we are, in the Fox News universe, where a Paula Deen is a thing that makes sense.
