On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume was discussing remarks made by Attorney General Eric Holder last week, in which he, like the President has before him, suggested that his race has caused him to be the object of inordinate scrutiny and criticism. A claim that Hume finds to completely opposite of the facts.
This has become such a tired refrain under the Obama administration. Nobody has ever treated the President with such disrespect. Nobody has ever treated the Attorney General with such disrespect. Nobody has ever … yawn. It’s patently, demonstrably, provably, historically false. Just made up out of whole cloth strictly to innoculate this President and his appointees from criticism, and is just one more weapon in Obama’s arsenal of tools for silencing speech and oppressing freedom of the press.
CHRIS WALLACE: Attorney General Eric Holder complaining about treatment of him and also the president after another testy exchange with House Republicans on Capitol Hill. And we’re back now with the panel. Well, Attorney General Holder said the Obama administration has faced, his words, “unprecedented, ugly opposition” and speaking to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, he clearly implied it’s because of race. Brit, does he have a point?
BRIT HUME: I don’t think so. And I think, you know, first of all, it’s false that no attorney general and no president have been subjected to this kind of treatment. After all, Bill Clinton was impeached. Think about that for a moment. John Mitchell went to jail. I mean the list is long of attorneys general and other officials who have been subjected to some very rough treatment on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. And this strikes me as kind of crybaby stuff from Holder. My sense of that this is that both Eric Holder and Barack Obama have benefited politically enormously from the fact that they are African-American and the first to hold the jobs that they hold. And this, I don’t know if he’s specifically meant race or not. I suspect perhaps he did. But to those two men, race has been both a shield and a sword that they have used effectively to defend themselves and to attack others. And I think it is depressing at this stage in our national life after all we’ve been through on this issue and given the overwhelming consensus on the issue of civil rights that this kind of stuff is still going on.