When you get past all of the crosstalk and yelling, I’m at a loss as to how my old friend Kirsten Powers thinks objecting to a club-carrying guy in a Black Panther uniform isn’t “intimidating” or how she can suggest that objecting to it can be dismissed as the “doing scary black man thing” (though later in the discussion she seems to back track from that — and she scores some other points well enough).

If a club-wielding tough in a Klan outfit was standing in front of a polling station, it would be outrageous for a conservative pundit to dismiss the controversy by saying MSNBC is “doing the angry white male thing.” That should be obvious (it should also be obvious that no mainstream conservative would be as blase about such an outrage as many liberals are about the Philly Black Panther incident).

Now if you want to object that the Klan is worse than the Black Panthers, that’s perfectly defensible. But winning such a contest against the Klan is hardly a major triumph (“We’re slightly less evil than the KKK!”). Look, the original Black Panthers were a murderous, racist, terrorist organization. I don’t know much about the “New Black Panthers” but I at least suspect they thought the old Black Panthers were pretty nifty, and that alone makes them a bad outfit. Trying to suggest, no matter how obliquely, that objections to a Black Panther goon at a polling station stems from conservative hang-ups about race is beneath Kirsten.