The Great Smoky Mountain Journal

Staff, Wire Reports

Posted: Sunday, January 21, 2018 06:35 PM

Fox News Hosts Rips MSNBC O'Donnell's Insinuation Gen. John Kelly's Statement's About Wilson "Racist"

Martha MacCallum criticized MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell for bringing race and the 1950s segregation-related violence into the analysis of Gen. John Kelly's statements about Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.).

O'Donnell said Kelly was being intentionally racially divisive when he characterized Wilson as an "empty barrel" after she criticized President Trump's response to a fallen soldier.

"Talk about sweeping judgment," MacCallum said of O'Donnell, who alleged that Kelly's childhood in an Irish neighborhood in Boston, Mass. during the Civil Rights era led him to make the comment about Wilson.

"The absurdity of this argument would be funny if it was not so incredibly disrespectful," she said, calling the former "West Wing" writer/producer's monologue "completely off-base."

"How do you get away with that?" she asked.

O'Donnell said Kelly witnessed rocks being thrown at buses full of minority children and allegedly did not go to school with people "who looked like Congresswoman Wilson."

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MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell accused Gen. John Kelly of "dehumanizing" Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), and blamed it on his upbringing in an Irish-Catholic Boston neighborhood.

O'Donnell, who noted he also hails from a similar part of Boston, said Kelly was raised in Oak Square, Brighton.

"[They] have more in common than John Kelly realizes," O'Donnell said, defending comments Wilson made in which she labeled Kelly's "empty barrels" comment racist.

As FoxNews.com reported:

Wilson claimed that one of Kelly’s terms for her – an empty barrel – was “racist,” even though she also said she hadn’t heard of an empty barrel before.

Pressed on the matter during Friday’s press briefing, Sanders said Kelly was “stunned that Rep. Wilson made comments at a building dedication honoring slain FBI agents about her own actions in Congress, including lobbying former President Obama on legislation.”

He said Kelly's neighborhood in the 1950s was "segregated by custom and practices," while Wilson's Miami was segregated by law at the time.

"John Kelly never sat beside a student like Frederica Wilson in his elementary school," O'Donnell said, adding that racist language directed at minorities in the South mirrored that of Irish precincts in Boston.

O'Donnell said he grew up in a different Irish-Catholic neighborhood but went to school near Kelly's home and said people yelled epithets at minorities and egged Sen. Edward Kennedy's (D-Mass.) motorcade because of his politics.

He claimed that Kelly used the "empty barrel" phrase in a ethnically derogatory manner, saying that it would've been "the nicest thing" a child in Kelly's neighborhood would say to Wilson.

O'Donnell clarified that he understood some of Kelly's criticisms of Wilson since the general is a Gold Star Father, but said that his story about Wilson dedicating an FBI office was uncalled for.

Kelly first used the phrase "empty barrels make the most noise" when Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) questioned his military service.

Kimberly Guilfoyle called O'Donnell's comments "racist, awful and horrific."