Media Says Criticism Of Kamala Harris’ Embarrassing Border Interview Result Of ‘Racism And Sexism’

After NBC’s Lester Holt embarrassed Kamala Harris by pointing out her misleading comments about visiting the U.S.-Mexico border, the legacy media have reverted to their standard role as PR agents of the Democratic Party by claiming that any criticism of the vice president is fraught with racism and sexism. Women, especially “black women, are often held to” a “standard of perfection,” said a guest on CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight” Wednesday evening.

“Is she being held to a different standard?” asked Don Lemon on his eponymous CNN show.

“Vice President Harris is an historic figure, the first woman in her role. Is some of the criticism she’s receiving related to that?” he asked CNN political commentator Ashley Allison. “Is she perhaps being judged by a different standard?”

Allison was only too happy to agree.

While she admitted Harris’ cackling and misleading claim that she had already been to the border “wasn’t a perfect answer,” she called criticizing Harris for not visiting the border “unfair.”

“To say that her career, or her trip, or her substance should be criticized by one answer is often what happens to black women. We have a standard of perfection,” Allison said.

“Black women are often held to a different standard and are scrutinized at a level, called defensive, called flippant, called all these things, because we get one thing wrong,” she said.

Lemon agreed that hypercriticism is “often something that happens to women, especially women who are in power.”

The same thing “happened with Hillary Clinton who is a white woman,” Lemon said. “They talked about her voice, and that she was defensive, and she was robotic and whatever.”

Turning the conversation back to Harris, CNN’s national political reporter Maeve Reston said, “She’s held to a higher standard and … she needs to continue to point it out.”

To their credit, Lemon and Reston both ultimately said Harris should have had a better answer to the predictable question. Reston initially called the vice president’s answer “flippant” and “defensive,” apparently triggering Allison’s response.

Lemon made but one of many such media defenses of Harris, seen by some as the president-in-waiting while serving as vice president to the oldest president in U.S. history.

Mika Brzezinski on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” made Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas laugh on the air when she said Kamala Harris deserves “some credit” for all the times she didn’t screw up on camera.

“I get it, it wasn’t the greatest answer. [I’m] not defending that,” Brzezinski told Haas. “But she’s on these trips meeting with these world leaders, talking about the origins of why these people want to leave their countries, and she’s getting nailed on whether or not she’s been to the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“I get it, her answer could have been better,” Brzezinski repeated. “But isn’t the question about what is happening on these trips?”

She added that the media should focus on asking, “What are the tough conversations that she’s having with these leaders about why people want to leave and what do we know about what happened there?” Such negotiations occur in a “very difficult, I’d say almost impossible-to-navigate landscape, when you’re dealing with countries that have a lot of corruption, that have a lot of reasons why people want to leave, and she’s going there and getting in their faces,” said Brzezinski, the daughter of Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Doesn’t she deserve some credit for that?”

Haas briefly laughed on the air at the suggestion, although he then agreed with her general assessment.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rsByeimFJ5w&start=2290&feature=oembed

Similarly, on Wednesday’s “CBS This Morning,” senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe dismissed the entire line of questioning as a veritable Republican witch hunt.

“Look, this issue of whether or not to go to the border is rooted in pure politics,” he said. “The GOP knows Harris remains a popular rival and may one day run for president herself.”

“The vice president viewed the trip as a success, and she did demonstrate an ability to go toe-to-toe with world leaders,” he said, although those meetings took place behind closed doors and few details have yet to emerge from them. “But her inability to more quickly bat away criticism of critics clouded the focus of the trip.”

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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