Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell’s widow, Janet Dewart Bell, has a message for the right wing mob: “Have you no sense of decency?”

Some other messages too. You’ll want to watch this video.

The right wing attack dogs at Breitbart.com are continuing their jihad against renowned Harvard Law Prof. Derrick Bell today. Now they’re trying to tie him (and by extension, President Obama) to Louis Farrakhan, with the blaring headline: BELL: FARRAKHAN ‘GREAT HERO FOR THE PEOPLE’.

They’ve posted a video from a 1992 episode of PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, showing Prof. Bell talking about Farrakhan.

A transcript:

Anything out of the accepted is seen as a problem, by an awful lot of us. When Louis Farrakhan speaks to his audience he upsets a hell of a lot of white people, you see. But while he is speaking to the needs and the hopes and what have you, of the people to whom he is speaking, and that’s just going to happen.

[EDIT]

I see Louis Farrakhan as a great hero for the people. I don’t agree with everything he says, and some of his tactics, but hell, I don’t agree with everything anybody says.

To recap: Prof. Bell said Farrakhan is a “great hero for the people,” meaning African Americans — and that’s a simple statement of fact. Whether you agree or disagree with Farrakhan, you can’t deny that he has a large following. Bell followed up by saying he did NOT agree with everything Farrakhan says or with his tactics. So the whole basis of this attack by the mini-Breits is flat out distorted and dishonest; their own video shows this.

It’s nothing but standard right wing race-baiting. Louis Farrakhan is the classic scary black boogeyman. But they haven’t shown any association at all between Bell and Farrakhan; all they have is a video of Bell talking about Farrakhan. This isn’t weak sauce — it’s nonexistent sauce.

And please note the very obvious edit they made, right in the middle of Bell’s remarks.

They’re lucky Prof. Bell is no longer alive to answer their ongoing smear attempts.

In yet another humiliating attempt to catch the Obama campaign in a hidden video conspiratorial outrageous outrage, the heirs of Andrew at Breitbart.com have creatively edited a video of a lecture by Harvard Law School Prof. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., to make it look like he was admitting hiding a supposed damning bit of “evidence:” that Barack Obama was a closer friend to Prof. Derrick Bell than they wanted known.

Unfortunately for the reactionaries at Breitbart.com, they had to cut out some important context to make it look that way.

[Link: www.breitbart.com…]

Footage of Barack Obama praising and hugging Professor Derrick Bell. It was spliced and diced by the media to avoid showing just how close Obama was to Bell. More than that, a close associate of the Obama campaign, Harvard Law School’s Professor Charles Ogletree, admitted on our exclusive tape, ‘We hid this throughout the 2008 campaign. I don’t care if they find it now.’

— Ben Shapiro

[Emphasis mine]

Here is a short video showing that Prof. Ogletree wasn’t talking about the Obama campaign hiding that portion of the video; in reality, he was completing a humorous jab at some of his colleagues who also attended the same 1991 gathering as Obama and Bell.

Uh, and this is … you can see this is 1990, so this is 21 years ago.

None of these people look like this today [laughter] and I know they’re going to be afraid or mad that I found this but it’s a good example.

[quiet laughter]

Let me see if I can get this, uh, to work…

Now what makes this so interesting, when you think about it, uh it’s uh, of course we hid this throughout the 2008 campaign so don’t… [laughter] … I don’t care if they find it now but uh, because it just told you that his growth had been, uh, astronomical in terms of his sense about race …

Please notice: he was joking about his colleagues and himself looking older, not seriously “admitting” to hiding anything.

Just so it can’t be claimed my edited video segment was intended to change the meaning, here is a longer version.

Here is a link to the entire lecture.

Buzzfeed has posted video of Barack Obama from 1991, when he was president of the Harvard Law Review, speaking at Professor Derrick Bell’s protest for diversity. Andrew Kaczynski explains the context of this clip: At Harvard, Obama Dived Into Diversity Fight.

It was perhaps Barack Obama’s most intense immersion in the charged campus racial politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s: As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1991, he aligned himself with Professor Derrick Bell’s dramatic protest for diversity on the faculty of Harvard Law School.

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of “critical race theory,” which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard’s denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school’s professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — “until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty,” and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.

Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as “the first black president.” He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.

“”How Obama would react to Derrick Bell’s protest was a matter of some interest,” New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his exploration of Obama and race, The Bridge.

It was a situation in which clear lines had been drawn, and Obama sided with Bell.

Could this be the BREITBARTOCALYPSE promised by the shiny-faced mini-Breitbarts earlier this week? If so, I sure hope Buzzfeed didn’t spoil it for them.