Posing a hypothetical on his show Tuesday night, “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur asked flamboyant conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart if it would be fair to say to all conservatives: “Stop having gay sex in bathrooms!”
The bizarre exchange was part of Cenk’s rebuttal to Breitbart’s recent outburst at “Occupy” protesters who gathered at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). In video of the confrontation, Breitbart shouts that members of the 99 Percent movement should “stop raping people,” a reference to reports of crime and sexual assaults at some “Occupy” camps.
Breitbart, to his credit, called the comment a “stunt” meant to leap past mainstream editors and into the public dialogue immediately, and he went on to castigate media outlets for failing to cover crimes committed at occupy encampments. Cenk fired back, bringing mainstream excerpts and a clip from The Huffington Post, insisting that Breitbart is wrong to characterize the media as absent.
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That’s when Cenk hit a line-drive off Breitbart’s rape comment.
“So what you’re doing is you’re smearing the entire movement with what some people — who oftentimes, in almost all these instances came into abuse the people that were in that movement — can I then paint with the same broad stroke that you are part of a group, Republicans and conservatives, who like to have gay sex in bathrooms and then gay sex with prostitutes and then smoke crack off their ass? And then I come up to you and your group of friends and started saying ‘Hey! Stop having gay sex in bathrooms! Stop having gay sex in bathrooms! Behave yourselves!’ Would that be fair?”
Breitbart joked that he couldn’t wait to “isolate that clip for the fun of it” and publish it on the Internet — which, ironically, is precisely what he did to former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, taking a portion of a speech she gave to the NAACP and editing it to make her sound like an overt racist so he could claim evidence of a pro-black conspiracy within the Obama administration.
After she lost her job for what turned out to be a speech about tolerance and overcoming prejudice, Sherrod sued Breitbart for defamation, insisting that the video was “deceptively edited.” The defamation lawsuit is still lingering in the court system, but last week an appeals judge placed it on hold pending a lower court’s explanation of why it denied an earlier motion to dismiss.
This video was broadcast by Current TV on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012.
