Eric Boehlert has been goin' on LA Times blogger Andrew Malcolm for the last couple of days over Malcolm's coverage of the Burris fiasco, in which he seems to go out of his way to suggest that Harry Reid doesn't want to seat Burris for racial reasons. At this point, no one really knows if that's the case, but Malcolm doesn't seem to care.
In the true Illinois political tradition of an elbow to the mouth just for fun, Gov.Blagojevich deftly leaks that Harry's Senate recommendation was not to pick any of the three black possibilities but to go with the white woman or the Asian American one. But like many Chicago pols, Rod's played hardball since pre-K. He proceeds to nominate another black, Roland Burris, an experienced statewide officeholder who's never lost to a Republican.
So Harry, who denies opposing blacks like Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., finds himself in the public perception of lobbying against three blacks and threatening to bar a fourth from taking the seat of a fifth black and becoming the only African American senator.
I don't understand what "in the public perception" means, but I was trying to remember where I last heard Malcolm's name. And then I realized that Malcolm was the main MSM instigator of the Drudge-fueled Fingergate non-story last year. You remember Fingergate, it's when the entire Republican Party and Andrew Malcolm regressed to a fourth-grade level and insisted that Obama had flicked off Hillary Clinton when he was just scratching his face. So this type of reporting is really just his thing.
-- A. Serwer
