Can we muster an exasperated Al Gore sigh for Brian Williams last night? The NBC anchor’s idea of grand cultural analysis of Katrina is not a thoughtful debate – a leftist, matched with compassionate conservative Olasky. It’s just giving free air time to the leftist. Williams had on as his sole expert (Bill Cosby-bashing, Tupac Shakur-loving) leftist professor/author Michael Eric Dyson to denounce the “clueless patricians” running America. He “wrote the book” on Katrina and race, boasted Brian. He pandered to Dyson, peppering him with socialist lingo (“That’s a classism question”) and pleading for the people left behind: ”Were they robbed of their dignity by the government?” He wouldn’t address the actual robbing and looting that has gone on, including defrauding the government, as Olasky argued.

And Williams was choosing a doozy of a guest if the mission was to construct a vision of an all-powerful American superstructure of racism. Dyson told the New York Times Magazine in an interview about his Cosby-bashing book: “None of us want our children to be murderers or thieves. But Cosby never acknowledges that most poor blacks don’t have a choice about these things.”

This must be more of that evening-news lecture series, what Katie Couric calls “getting them to understand why they should care.”