Video from last night’s show here.

I think I was about to hurl when Geraldo called Al Sharpton a “great man” and one of the nation’s top “civil rights” leaders. You can hear me mutter “whose civil rights?” Certainly not the rights of innocent prosecutor Steve Pagones, who was truly scarred for life by the lying, conniving Sharpton machine. Jeff Jacoby summarizes Sharpton’s “great” record:

1987: Sharpton spreads the incendiary Tawana Brawley hoax, insisting heatedly that a 15-year-old black girl was abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He singles out Steve Pagones, a young prosecutor. Pagones is wholly innocent — the crime never occurred — but Sharpton taunts him: “If we’re lying, sue us, so we can . . . prove you did it.” Pagones does sue, and eventually wins a $345,000 verdict for defamation. To this day, Sharpton refuses to recant his unspeakable slander or to apologize for his role in the odious affair.

1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin’s funeral he rails against the “diamond merchants” — code for Jews — with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, “No justice, no peace.” A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting “Kill the Jews!” and stabbed to death.

1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Freddy’s white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. “We will not stand by,” he warns malignantly, “and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy’s are spat on and cursed as “traitors” and “Uncle Toms.” Some protesters shout, “Burn down the Jew store!” and simulate striking a match. “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers,” says Sharpton’s colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy’s, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.

If Sharpton were a white skinhead, he would be a political leper, spurned everywhere but the fringe. But far from being spurned, he is shown much deference. Democrats embrace him. Politicians court him. And journalists report on his comings and goings while politely sidestepping his career as a hatemongering racial hustler.

Israpundit has more.

There is, contrary to Geraldo’s assertion, a world of difference between Imus’s career of dumb remarks and Sharpton’s career of malicious racial demagoguery.

There is no ideological difference between the hate-mongering likes of Malik Shabazz and Al Sharpton.

Sharpton, with the help of willing media, is exploiting the Imus matter to further rehabilitate his image without having to renounce any of his past poisonous behavior. Now, he’s playing martyr with the latest reports of death threats against him.

If the media–broadcast, cable, print, and radio–really wanted to do something to “heal” race relations, they’d keep this charlatan (and all his mini-mes like Shabazz) off the airwaves and off their news pages. The only place they deserve to be is under the headline “Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.”

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Get rid of Sharpton. Meet Jason Whitlock. Here’s his Real Talk archive.

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Here is an interesting self-examination from ABC News about the media’s decisions to inflate the Race Charlatans’ role in the Imus story.