On Wednesday afternoon former Congressman Joe Walsh asked CNN political commentator Angela Rye one question: “Are you gonna let me speak, or not?”
Rarely one to hold her tongue, Rye quickly snapped back: “Are you going to say something, while your mouth is moving?”
While the Walsh-Rye feud didn’t begin on Brooke Baldwin’s program, their social media spat reached new, aggressive heights as the pair argued about race and politics.
On “CNN Tonight” Monday evening, during a conversation about the standards for President Donald Trump, Rye commented that President Barack Obama “had to be the next best thing to Jesus.”
After watching Rye’s remarks, Walsh used his Twitter account to offer a very different view.
“We LOWERED the bar for Obama,” Walsh, now a conservative radio talk show host, tweeted. “He was held to a lower standard cuz he was black.”
It was a position Rye took issue with — as she explained to Baldwin and her viewers. “You all decided to give Joe Walsh a platform today, I’m not giving him the time of day,” she said. “I’m not interested in trying to convince and change the mind of a bigot, someone who will openly troll me and say things that are offensive, that he knows are not true.”
Sticking to his stance, Walsh backed up his Twitter comments.
“Never in our country’s history have we had a president so coddled and pampered and protected by the media like Barack Obama,” he said. “That’s not a high standard, he was held to a very low standard because the media so loved him.”
Rye’s repeated that she felt the former president was held to a higher standard as a result of his skin color. “It’s very frustrating and I’m tired of people telling me that black people are beneath a standard when we have to be twice as good all the time,” said Rye.
“That is why I said I’m not interested in having a dialogue with someone like Joe, who has demonstrated a propensity towards bigotry, and he did that on Twitter yesterday, in 140 characters no less.”
Baldwin encouraged the conversation, but pleaded for respectful discourse.
“I think we heard from both of you. I’m sorry, I had no idea it would go this way,” she said.
“Let’s just please be respectful to one another. We can have different opinions but let’s respect one another.”
