It’s laughable.

Tom had the clip of Harris-Perry ripping into Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as a racist move earlier today.

But here’s something even more egregious…

(Link in case the embed doesn’t load)

The quote…

“The thing I really have against him is actually how he and Gov. Romney have misused the Declaration of Independence. I’m deeply irritated by their notion that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ means money for the richest and that we extricate the capacity of ordinary people to pursue happiness. When they say ‘God and nature give us our rights, not government,’ that is a lovely thing to say as a wealthy white man.”

And then a little more…

“When you sit in a body like mine as an African-American woman, you know that God and nature have in fact made us — inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But we could not have them until there was a Civil War that allowed the federal government to impose those nature and God-given rights would actually be respected by our government. And I think that they cannot continue to go down this line on the Declaration of Independence.”

Absolutely amazing.

First of all, Melissa Harris-Perry protests too much. Melissa Harris-Perry has never been oppressed in her life. Melissa Harris-Perry, for all her howling about the abysmal treatment of “her” people, is only half black. Her mother was white, which she doesn’t seem interested in telling anybody.

And as for the terrible life American society would have imposed on her but for the heavy hand of the federal government, her father William H. Harris was dean of Afro-American Affairs at the University of Virginia. And Melissa Harris-Perry’s rough upbringing included undergrad at Wake Forest, a PhD at Duke, then a doctorate from Meadville Lombard Theological School, then a stint as a Master of Divinity Student at Union Theological Seminary. Then she taught poli sci at the University of Chicago, then poli sci and African American Studies at Princeton before landing at Tulane last year.

Not exactly life in the gutter, is it? She hasn’t the first clue what she’s talking about where this oppression business is concerned. Hammering on “wealthy white men” is pretty rich coming from a pampered academic with a TV gig on a cable news network.

Second, Harris-Perry might know political science. She has no clue about history. If she did, she wouldn’t bring up the Civil War – because she would know that it was Democrats, as in the party she shills for, who wanted to preserve slavery and Democrats, as in the party she shills for, who seceded from the Union because a president from the abolitionist Republican Party was elected.

That’s a bit inconvenient, of course. Harris-Perry isn’t interested in the fact that she’s attacking the candidates of the party which not only prosecuted and won the Civil War as a means of ending slavery but also spent much of the next century attempting to put civil rights legislation in place at the federal level to undo the damage her fellow Democrats were doing to the rights God and nature had given people who share her father’s ancestry. She won’t tell you that people like Robert K. Byrd – a Democrat like she is – were in the Senate filibustering civil rights legislation. Or that people like Orville Faubus – a Democrat like she is – was fomenting chaos by stopping integration of schools in Arkansas and a Republican president (Dwight Eisenhower) was sending in the National Guard to enforce a Supreme Court decision to that effect.

No, that’s not interesting to Melissa Harris-Perry. She’s only interested in denying Republican candidates the right to use the Declaration of Independence as the foundation for their philosophical argument. And casting something which has nothing to do with race as racism is her stock in trade.

When is someone going to call this troglodyte out for her hypocrisy? Why aren’t we talking about Melissa Harris-Perry’s racism? If someone were to assail Barack Obama for making statements from a black perspective – or attempt to deny the credibility of a black American to speak based on actions or behaviors more than a century old, we would decry that as bigotry of the capital sort. But MSNBC gives her free rein for nonsensical statements like the one above, and it doesn’t even cause a ripple.