Well, the video's out -- see it below -- and the mainstream media is reacting with a collective yawn. But not so Denver talk radio.
As noted in the New York Post piece linked above, the video shows Obama circa 1991, when he was the president of the Harvard Law Review, speaking at a rally organized by Professor Derrick Bell about Harvard's reticence to grant tenure to black faculty members. Obama doesn't say anything particularly shocking, but he does encourage attendees to "open your hearts and open your minds to the words of professor Derrick Bell," who Breitbart.com editor Joel Pollak described as the "Jeremiah Wright of academia" -- a reference to a controversial preacher whose church Obama attended in Chicago -- during an appearance on Fox News.
Here's how Breitbart.com's Ben Shapiro describes Bell:
This is a man who posited that the civil rights movement was too moderate because it accepted the status quo, and believed that the entire legal and constitutional system had to be transformed in radical fashion. This is a man so extreme that, as we've reported, he wrote a story in 1993 in which he posited that white Americans would sell black Americans into slavery to aliens to relieve the national debt, and that Jews would go along with it.
Charles Ogletree, a Harvard prof the Post calls an Obama ally, admits that he did his best to keep the video under wraps during the 2008 campaign, although he says it doesn't matter much now -- and the reaction, or lack thereof, by most major media organs bears out this opinion. The story has hardly caused a sensation, with even Juan Williams, Fox News' designated moderate, casting it as something considerably less than a blockbuster.
At KHOW, however, there's considerably more interest. Host Peter Boyles spent much of his first hour this morning discussing Bell, with a special focus on the short story Shapiro cites: "Space Traders," which was turned into a satirical segment of Cosmic Slop, a 1994 TV project hosted by George Clinton, of Parliament-Funkadelic fame. The premise, as described by IMDB.com: "A conservative African American politician must choose between his people's survival and appeasing his white colleagues when space aliens propose to share their profound knowledge in exchange for all black people on earth." Featured actors include Robert Guillaume, whom TV viewers of a certain age will know better as Benson.
The tone of the piece is good-natured and goofy -- not exactly the sort of thing likely to foment violent revolution. Nonetheless, Boyles posted the clips on his web page along with the Obama video. And the page for afternoon drive-timers Craig Silverman and Dan Caplis is currently topped by a giant photo of young Obama that links to the video -- no surprise given that in 2008, Caplis assembled "The Obama Tapes," a collection of audio draw mainly from the audio version of his book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance that was more partisan innuendo than revelation.
In the end, that description can be applied to Breitbart's last "scoop." Those who hate Obama will see it as more proof of his evil ways. Those who don't will likely shrug it off and then waste another hour or so playing Angry Birds.
Here's the Obama clip, followed by the "Space Traders" material from Cosmic Slop.
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More from our Media archive: "Dan Caplis and His Jihad Against Barack Obama."
