Soledad O’Brien and her CNN panel manage to stumble into Contessa Brewer territory in this appearance by attempting to paint Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak as a racist for making a point about Barack Obama’s support for a proponent of “critical race theory” during his days at Harvard Law School. Joel ends up in an argument with a woefully unprepared O’Brien on the theory itself, but the actual facepalm moment goes to one of her panelists, who asks Joel why he’s so afraid of black people:

For CNN and the uninformed — but I repeat myself — here’s Joel’s lovely wife Julia from Joel’s Congressional campaign in 2010:

The only intelligent comment from the panel comes from Amy Holmes, who asked why the media didn’t cover this in 2008, and why the MSM didn’t exhibit any curiosity at all about Obama’s days in college and his activism there. Holmes scolds the media for acting as gatekeepers in the service of protecting Obama, which is of course the Breitbart point in releasing these videos now. Of course, that’s probably because Amy Holmes is afraid of black people, or something.

Frankly, it’s clear that no one at CNN does critical thinking, on race theory or anything else. The point of Andrew’s final project isn’t so much to make Obama’s early radical ties clear; it’s to point out how the media tried to keep them quiet. This uninformed attack from O’Brien and most of the CNN panel is a great demonstration of the very point that Andrew wanted to make with these videos. All they needed to say — and what Holmes tried to say at one point — is that plenty of people toy with radicalism in college, but drop those passions when they get into the real world, and that college activism isn’t terribly germane twenty years later with a term as President already in place. They fell into the trap set by Andrew and Joel, and somewhere Andrew is enjoying a mighty laugh over it.

By the way, I got a chance to see Joel and Julia this week at the memorial service for Andrew Breitbart, and meet their beautiful new daughter Maya. I’m quite sure that Julia also got a big laugh out of this segment, and I’m equally sure she won’t be the only one who does.