Liberal PBS NewsHour analyst Mark Shields is one of those journalists who refuse to admit there’s any context to President Trump describing criminal aliens like MS-13 gang members as “animals.” On Friday’s news roundup, Shields protested "you have got the leader of one party calling people animals."
David Brooks argued the Democrats are evolving into putting racial issues front and center:
DAVID BROOKS: The party is becoming much more the party of intersectionality. And that’s just where politics is breaking now. The Republicans probably started it by putting immigration so central. Now Democrats are going to put immigration central.
And that is honest on one hand. I’m a little nervous about it, frankly. Race is the big divide in our country’s history. It’s been a nasty divide. And if our political divides overlap with this racial nightmare we have had for 250 years, you could get some pretty bad things.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that what you see, Mark?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, when you have got the leader of one party calling people animals, it’s tough to say that race is not going to be a factor in American politics. It has been. It’s an enduring factor.
Neither PBS anchor Judy Woodruff or his fellow pundit David Brooks raised any objection that Shields was using a rather out-of-context “quotation.”
But then again, in 2015 Woodruff didn't mind Hillary Clinton comparing Republicans to terrorists, as long as it worked: "She's talking a little bit tougher on the campaign trail -- comparing how Republicans view women with how terrorists view women. Is she -- is she turning this around? I mean, how do you see her vulnerability right now?"
