Credit For What You're Supposed To Do

Joe Scarborough got lashed on twitter yesterday for saying this about Pat Robertson:

MSM will now obsess over Pat Robertson's "devil" comment but will pay no attention to his organization's remarkable relief work worldwide.

It should be said that Robertson does deserve credit for, as Scarborough puts it, his remarkable relief work. But I have no sense of why that has any relevance to what Pat Robertson said.

Let's leave aside the fact that Scarborough is a part of the very MSM he condemns. Three years ago, Louis Farrakhan claimed that BET had been taken over by "satanic Jews." The correct response to that comment is not, "Yes that was awful, but Farrakhan has turned around the lives of countless black men." (Though, I've heard some rendition of that defense.) The correct response is to call it what it is--the rantings of an antisemitic bigot.

There are terrorists who are renowned for their charity work. There are white supremacists who gave money to support black colleges. One doesn't mitigate the other. I thought the best response to this kind of slippery morality was offered by none other than Christopher Hitchens, on the death of the hateful Jerry Falwell.