On national television this past Sunday Dan Rather said that despite being "articulate," President Obama ""couldn't sell watermelons if you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic." Naturally, his comment caused an uproar, since it could fairly be interpreted as being racist - and almost certainly would have been labeled as such if a conservative had said the same thing.

Here is Rather's 1,251-word response to Watermelongate, which basically boils down to a lament about the new media age, a reminiscence of how great things used to be, and a plug for his new show.  But about halfway through Rather gets to the nut:

All this is the backdrop for what I said on the Matthews show. I was talking about Obama and health care and I used the analogy of selling watermelons by the side of the road. It's an expression that stretches to my boyhood roots in Southeast Texas, when country highways were lined with stands manned by sellers of all races. Now of course watermelons have become a stereotype for African Americans and so my analogy entered a charged environment. I'm sorry people took offense.

I always laugh when I see such a weasely apology. Not "I'm sorry for saying something that played right into an obvious racial stereotype." Instead, he's sorry any "people" out there took offense to his comment. In other words, it's not his fault for saying what he said, it's your fault for taking offense to it.

Nor does his "gee whiz it's just a boyhood saying from South Texas" offer absolution. There are plenty of sayings from days gone by that may not be considered appropriate in certain contexts today - and it's nothing short of amazing that Rather wasn't bright enough to recognize his comment would fall into that category.

Rather's response is especially ironic, because even if we take him at his word and assume in this instance he's fallen victim to a hyper-sensitive, politically correct culture boosted by cable news steroids, Rather is one of the members of the left wing media elite who spent a few incredibly influential decades helping to create this PC-crazed environment in the first place.

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