Dan Rather: Some of My Best Friends are Black or Something

Desperately trying to extract his foot out of his mouth for his watermelon comment the other day, Dan Rather pops up at the Internet's premier home of hate, the Huffington Post, to try and explain away his comments.

But anyone who knows me personally or knows my professional career would know that race was not on my mind. Reporting on the injustices of race was part of the reason I became a reporter. I grew up in segregated Texas on the same side of the tracks as the African American community. At the time, enlightened people called them Negros. Many people called them much worse. When I covered the Civil Rights movement, I saw sheer hatred in ways that still haunt and shock me. For doing my small part in reporting on the South in the 1960s, I was called a traitor to my roots and other names not fit for print. I was threatened with death by people who would have welcomed me to their church on Sunday on account of my white skin if they didn't know what I was there to do. I do not take this issue lightly.

Wait a minute. If he grew up in segregated Texas, how is it possible he was on the "same side of the tracks" as the Negros? And how could he have "reported" on injustices before he became a reporter?

I can understand why someone who just happened upon my comments could take offense or want clarification. But what has caused this comment to "go viral" is the trumpeting of an online and cable echo chamber that claims the banner of news but trades in gossip, gotcha, and innuendo. Furthermore, even for those who brook no prejudice, when everything is condensed to 140 characters or a small YouTube clip, many people who got this "news" did so without any context, just a headline that popped up on their phone or inbox.

Now is Rather a racist? Who knows? But the larger point made here and elsewhere is the egregious double standard those on the right have to deal with. Rather can't be so naive to believe that if a Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Don Imus even facetiously said something akin to what he did the liberal media would be on a 24/7 witch hunt for their scalp and no amount of apologies would assuage the mob until that person had been personally and professionally ruined.

Nearly every day we see absurdities such as MSNBC hosts ominously detecting "racism" in comments such as "Harlem Democrat" when used by non-approved media outlets while ignoring the use of the same term by their own co-workers. Every day liberals casually call conservatives racist without any basis and we're supposed to be frozen in our tracks, rendered null and void just because the self-appointed arbiters of all things racial want to ruin others. And the cable "echo chamber" regurgitate the same talking points churned out by the hateful left.

Do we believe anyone at the Huffington Post would give a pass to Rush Limbaugh if he had blurted out the same thing as Rather? Of course not. And it's the unfair and contemptible double standard that people are pointing out.