New Republic Owner Martin Peretz Calls Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton "Thugs"

Martin Peretz blogs this entry in The Plank:

But, if Lamont is trying to put himself forward as a new face in the Democratic Party, the two men who planted themselves right in back of him on the stage at the victory party gave it all away. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are hustlers, and racist hustlers at that. They have accomplished nothing for African-Americans, nothing. Jackson keeps himself alive by conning big corporations out of bags of cash. He is a one-man reparations racket. Sharpton is the reverend with the big silver jewelry, and it isn't a cross. He sups off his perennial political campaigns and has been known not to pay taxes besides. His ugly history includes leading the riots against a Korean-owned grocery in Brooklyn, the violent picketing of a store on 125th Street store that ended in a fire and in a death, and the 1991 rampage in Crown Heights during which an Australian Orthodox Jew was stabbed to death. And, of course, Sharpton was the chief incendiary of the utterly fraudulent Tawana Brawley case in which vicious lies tripped off his mouth for a year and more. Ned Lamont, the candidate from gentle-mannered Greenwich, should be ashamed to have had two such thugs as his intimate supporters.

Democrats say the darndest things sometimes.What Martin Peretz is pointing out is the Democrats have room for racists:it's part of the "big tent".