Via Caleb Howe, New Year’s cheer from American cable news’s beacon of progress. Here’s why even a terrific year-end MSNBC lowlight reel shouldn’t be attempted until after December 31st: There’s bound to be clipworthy stuff right up to the minute the ball drops. In fact, as bad as this is, arguably it isn’t even the most offensive Melissa Harris-Perry clip having to do with kids this year.

In a nutshell:

https://twitter.com/DanFosterType/status/417728023689846784

Yeah, the interesting thing about this is that they put the photo on the air even though they obviously didn’t have anything to say about it. Ostensibly it’s comic fodder for Harris-Perry’s panel of comedians to riff, but all they can muster is (1) hey, one of them looks different, (2) a Kardashian joke from MHP herself, and (3) a predictable dig at the GOP — which would have worked just as well as a dig at Obama’s 2012 campaign team, actually. It’s not that the photo’s inherently funny or that a white family adopting a black child is wrong — imagine them reacting to a photo of Tom Cruise with his adopted son — it’s that, I think, they felt they couldn’t let it go unremarked upon that the GOP’s last nominee seems happy to have a black child in his family. On MSNBC, racism is the only reason to become a Republican. They’ve got to mock, even if they’re not exactly sure what they’re mocking, to delegitimize the inconvenient possibility that Romney isn’t prejudiced. Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit; maybe they do have a problem with interracial adoptions, a controversial subject in family law for ages. A lot of people who’d normally insist that race is nothing more than a social construct tend to get fidgety when a black child goes to live with a white family because it risks depriving him of his “authenticity.” Maybe that’s happening here, although I lean towards the “look at this Republican with a black kid!” gawk theory.

In other “all conservative thoughts spring from prejudice” news, apparently making fun of a grown man for wearing pajamas that a three-year-old would wear is proof of anti-semitism.