(He also kicked the good Rev. Al Sharpton under the table a few times too. Just for funzies, I imagine.)

Said West of his former colleague:

“I have a love for the sister, but she is a liar, and I hate lying,” says West, adding that Harris-Perry later said on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” that West attacked Obama’s White mother in the interview with Truthdig.com. “I don’t talk about people’s mamas. She’s reinforcing all of the vicious perceptions of me as a racist, and she knows better than that.” 

Harris-Perry’s scathing critique, West says, has more to do with the fact that the Center for African American Studies unanimously voted against her when she came up for promotion from associate to full professor, adding that her work was not scholarly enough. 

“There’s not a lot of academic stuff with her, just a lot of twittering,” says West, who added that her book Sister Citizen, released last year, was “wild and out of control.” 

“She’s  become the momentary darling of liberals, but I pray for her because she’s in over her head. She’s a fake and fraud. I was so surprised how treacherous the sister was.”

Read the full article here.

Now. I don't know Harris-Perry or West, but ... what the hell was that? She didn't agree with West when he went after the president on a litany of issues ranging from anti-poverty programs to not receiving inauguration tickets, so now she's a tool of the white liberal establishment trying to silence him?

I didn't know Harris-Perry was a Bond villain! 

Or that West was James Bond, for that matter.

Again though, this did not help West's larger cause of wanting to bring to the attention the plight of struggling African Americans. All of his "points" about government, politics, the president and our policies is now somewhere tangled up in Harris Perry's trademark microbraids, ruining any shot at West's complaints being taken seriously. Because now it seems much less about speaking truth to power, and more petty vendettas against who is doing what and who isn't.

West, who in the interview talks about how he was the one who brought Harris Perry to Princeton, claims the academic later "turned" on him and called West and a cohort Dr. Eddie Glaude “hypocritical leftists." But no where does West explain how he and Harris Perry went from being mentor and mentee buddies to now the subjects of slams and slights.

Why did Harris Perry suddenly decide West was no longer a mentor but a "hypocritical leftist?" West leaves out any real detail, other than crapping on her most recent book and saying she wasn't good enough to be down in his Honeycomb Hideout of black intelligentsia. 

It's not that West isn't entitled to his opinions but what was the objective here other than to hurt Harris Perry? What was said here that couldn't have been dealt with privately? Who benefits from this egg being laid and left out to rot on the pages of a periodical? 

Even if Harris Perry was ruthless in her critique of West's opinions (and she has been), she still attacked his opinions. Not Cornel West the human being. She responded to the things he wrote and said about the president and his administration. I find it interesting that even at his most personal, those being targeted by West's attacks remain in neutral with nuanced responses. 

West practically calls Rev. Sharpton and Harris Perry tools of the establishment in this article and the most either can usher in a response is different versions of "Wait? What?" and "I respectfully disagree."

On Al Sharpton:

“Whoever thought that Brother Al wouldn’t be protesting any administration?” asks West, who served as an adviser to Sharpton’s 2004 presidential campaign. “You watch his show on MSNBC and you want to say, ‘Brother Al, you come out of the Black prophetic tradition like me. Tell the truth about the White House,’ but he won’t say a mumbling word.”

(...)

“What has hurt his cause is that he got into name-calling,” says Sharpton, adding that West attacked him, forcing him to respond. “I always had admiration for him, which is why I was surprised he took the position that he did and never talked to me.”

Sharpton says that some of West’s critiques of Obama are blatantly unfair. “Cornel was running around the country and campaigning for Obama in 2008 and had access to him,” says Sharpton. “When did Cornel have this awakening about President Obama? Obama never said he was going to do all this stuff that Cornel wants him to do.”

And, later, Harris Perry's non-response:

Harris-Perry declined to be interviewed for the story, but wrote in an e-mail message that she disagrees with West’s assessment of her latest book. “I am very proud of the book, but academic promotion is always about submitting to the assessment of senior colleagues,” says Harris-Perry. “God knows leaving Princeton was the best thing to happen to me in a decade, so my only response is, ‘Thank You.’ ”

In this possibly never-ending academic slap fight, I really hope West is sincere in wanting to help eliminate poverty. Because that's a noble thing. Acting as someone who is molded in the "Black prophetic tradition that has a commitment to truth and justice," rather than just saying that's what you are means far more. I would hope in his effort to do that he would stop mingling his anti-poverty movement with the pettiness of professional rivalry. It cheapens both him and his admirable goals.

And I leave with something I wrote the last time West went after one of his colleagues:

You can't be a leader if you can't get anyone to follow. And you can't get the power you need without followers. So with that being the reality, where does our true strength really lie -- In the vocal subterfuge of our champions, or the men and women behind the curtain?

Stay on message, dude. You're losing them.

First Lady Michelle Obama participates in a tug of war with Jimmy Fallon in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House during a “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” taping for the second anniversary of the "Let’s Move!" initiative, Jan. 25, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

While on the three-day "Let's Move" tour, Mrs. Obama will visit Des Moines, Iowa; Little Rock, Ark.; the Dallas-Ft. Worth area in Texas; as well as the cities Homestead, Longwood and Orlando in Florida. But the First Lady is already making her rounds on talk shows. From discussing Mitt Romney's "beautiful" singing on Jay Leno to having push-up contests with Ellen DeGeneres. 

But what has to be my new favorite thing is Michelle Obama challenging late night's Jimmy Fallon to a series of athletic contests, running through the White House with glee.

None of this, of course, is helping my love for seeing the First Family run about, being themselves. So ... now seems like a good of time than any for a decent dosage of Obama Photo Crack.

(All photos courtesy of the White House.)

Live by the tweet. Die by the tweet.

Like you share photos with your Facebook friends or friends on Twitter. Maybe only your closest friends actually comment or care. But maybe you have more than just your "personal" friends following you on Facebook or Twitter. And maybe some of those people wouldn't think all that much of sharing your "private" messages and photos with the very "public" world. For most of us, our anonymity, in that we are not well-known, on television or famous in our respective fields will protect us a little from ourselves. A little. (But not really.) But if you're Roland Martin you can't really take that for granted.

Professionally, Roland Martin is in hot water over something that can be easily seen as kind of petty. He fired off some Super Bowl tweets that were crude and unfunny, but hardly out-of-character for his Twitter stream which is a typical mix of seriousness and humor, prolific in the sheer amount of tweets and their variety. 

The problem was the unfunny tweets could be interpreted as being offensive to men who are attracted to other men and are fond of wearing the color pink. Which gay rights activist group GLAAD interpreted as being offensive to gays and lesbians. They quickly called for CNN to fire Martin as a commentator. But rather than simply rest on the tweets, they also brought up blog posts Martin had written, his past praise for religious-based counseling that "cures" homosexuality and his defense of comic Tracy Morgan's anti-gay stand-up last year as evidence that Martin was an alleged homophobe.

Meaning ... GLAAD was probably waiting for this. For anything really, to take Martin down.

But they weren't the only ones. Because a lot of people don't agree or like Martin and relished in the dust-up. Glenn Beck, who's not exactly the friend of gays, jumped in, calling him an "idiot."

From Huffington Post:

The radio host called Martin "a dope," an "idiot," and a "bad guy," among other things. "He's harmless because you see him coming a mile away," Beck said. "You're like, 'really, Roland, you think that you're fooling anybody? You're a clown.'"

Beck and his co-hosts agreed that the tweets could only be interpreted as anti-gay statements. He smacked down Martin's claim that he was mocking soccer fans, calling it "the most ridiculous thing" to say.

He also pointed to Martin's history of dicey statements about gay people, and said, "If they're in context, the guy clearly, clearly has issues."

A long, long time ago, back in 2008 when the only people who read this blog were my sisters, my best friend Tiffany and my cat, I made a throwaway comment that Martin was an Barack Obama supporter. This was in January of 2008. Somehow (I assume through the magic of Google Alerts), Martin found my blog and complained that he was impartial, said nice things about Republicans and Hillary Clinton and how dare I insinuate he was an Obama supporter. I was shocked. Not that I was wrong or that he wanted a correction (and I did admit to wrongness and did issue a correction), it was more like ... why was Roland Martin who is famous and on CNN almost daily emailing the owner of a free blogger account that only 200 people a day were reading?

I mean ... shouldn't he be really, really busy?

After that it became a sort of hallmark of my blog where I would gently poke fun at Martin for what I saw as a flaw of over sensitivity. Because really? Why did he care? All he did was elevate something that absolutely no one would have known about and no one was paying attention to "HEY EVERYBODY LOOK OVER HERE!" status. But he did that over and over again, and not just with me, but with countless other bloggers big and small. And all had the same bewildered response because it was oddly personal and aggressive considering he was much better known and better well-off than any of us and the comments, in totality, were the type most people of his stature just ignored. Especially if they were on television and the chatter was coming from Twitter -- the Internet's official peanut gallery.

Criticism is part of putting yourself out there. I get criticized all the time. By readers. By other bloggers. By people online. But even I, who is no where near as accomplished as Martin, don't go on Moby Dick-style quests, fighting with random conservative commentators and anti-spanking opponents on Twitter alike. At some point, you're just supposed to be above the fray. And that was truly Martin's only problem. He never could seem to get above the fray when he relished being in the middle of it. He took a joy in slugging away, cracking jokes and being prolific in his attacks and counter-attacks -- whether it actually benefited his personal reputation or not.

But when you're as big as Martin is, at a certain point, people expect you to clean it up. To rein it in. To accept the responsibility of being a public figure and clean up your private language that is actually public because you're saying it on a social networking forum anyone can read.

Martin, after all, wasn't Tweeting from a private account in a special code only black people could comprehend. People who don't like you can access your public blog. People who don't agree with you can listen to you on the Tom Joyner Show and then accuse you of being biased on CNN because of what they heard on that show. Tom Joyner, like Twitter, is not broadcast on a special radio signal that only black people can hear. But it's easy to forget that because often these are worlds that people outside the black community don't typically wander into.

Twitter CAN feel like a conversation between fans and friends. The Tom Joyner Show can feel like it's only being broadcast in "Black America." But that's a false security. Especially when you're a commentator and journalist who wants (and expects) to be taken seriously, but in your public "personal" accounts you're anything but. Hence providing endless fodder and fuel to any and everyone you've ever offended, wronged, annoyed or just don't plain like you.

Martin, after at first dismissing the issue, has since decided he will meet with GLAAD. CNN has suspended him. The National Association of Black Journalists has called this a "teachable moment." But if you wonder why there isn't a greater cry from peers and pundits about all this -- even about how inconsistent CNN looks right now with what's OK for pundits to say (on and off the air) and what isn't -- remember that this probably isn't about the offending tweets at all, but Martin's long history of doing what most people who are at his status wouldn't bother doing.

Think about all the other black commentators, journalists, academics and pundits on Martin's level or greater and think of how many of them get into regular fights, on Twitter, over any and everything, and Tweet in Kanye West, stream-of-consciousness style of things from the serious to the mundane to the potentially offensive. How many of them seek corrections from blogs with near non-existent readerships. When was the last time you heard someone have these complaints about being too casual online, too personal, too sensitive or just tweeting too much about Melissa Harris Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Jamal Simmons, Jonathan Capehart, Toure, Michele Bernard, Keli Goff, Sophia Nelson, Marc Lamont Hill, Soledad O'Brien, TJ Holmes, Jeff Johnson, Mark Anthony Neal, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Baratunde Thurston, Don Lemon, Donna Brazile, et al?

Maybe there was one big dust up a year or so ago with someone in that list ... but have you even heard anything since? Do they have a history of it? Of course not. Because all these people want to be taken seriously and understand that some throwaway, unfunny comments can get unnecessarily blown out of proportion because of the status they have all worked so hard to get themselves to.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The man is simply too big to be tweeting like he's a 22-year-old in the middle of a manic cycle.

Especially when you know someone is looking for any excuse to come after you.

But seriously, the press asks, "Why does everyone HATE Mittens?"

Is it because Trump-de-Dump-Dump-Dump endorsed him? That couldn't have helped. Is it because Tim Pawlenty's endorsement was worthless? Is it because he's a Mormon? Is it because he has off-shore accounts he uses as tax shelters for his money? Is it Ron Paul? Is it because every time he goes off script he says something that sounds completely out of touch and "elitist"? 

Or was MSNBC's Ed Schultz right all along?

Unlike Newt "Epic Flameout" Gingrich, Santorum is a much more disciplined and reliable candidate. Can he win in a general? Hahahahahaha, probably not. But could he mount a real challenge to the increasingly beatable Mitt Romney? Maybe!

As we all know, Twitter is a constant causation of any and all drama these days. Rappers used to put out entire albums beefing with each other. Now folks just spit their insults over Twitter. It's fascinating. Just makes me want to run up and slap the iPhones out of people's hands.

The trouble started this time when Martin was enthusiastically tweeting while in the throws of America's greatest secular holiday, Super Bowl Sunday.

So you know? Jokes. Which of course is always trouble, whether you're a comedian or not.

GLAAD responds with a tsk, tsk, tsk ...

Martin then responds (because that's what he does).

Martin also tweeted this line, of which GLAAD also took offense.

GLAAD, whose memory is long, mentions in their Roland Martin post that Martin defended comic Tracy Morgan's homophobic jokes last year even though Morgan went back and apologized for them.

While Martin (and others) didn't see what big deal was, GLAAD and other groups are making a concerted effort to get people to pay attention to how they talk about gender and queer issues, namely curbing violent rhetoric. Even though they are "jokes," violence against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people continue to be extremely routine. And yes, routine, even in the age of RuPaul's Drag Race and the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The United States is a big country and all the gay people just aren't hanging out in Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, the DMV and the Bay Area. Some people are gay in Montgomery, Alabama or Columbus, Ohio or Kansas City, Missouri. Being "out" in those places varies from "not that bad" to "afraid for my life" depending on where you live, work or go to school.

So yes, hahahaha wack jokes. But also ... not that funny if people are actually still getting beat up for wearing pink, killed for living their lives and shunned for expressing attraction towards the people they are attracted to. The jokes were in poor taste. Much like how pretty much all rape jokes are in poor taste. Or all wife beating jokes. Or all "nigger" jokes. Or all jokes about the disabled. Like, ha ha, but don't be super shocked if your turn of phrase offends members of the group you're lazily mocking.

It's like how when I was 13 I used to call everything uncool "gay" and my mother pulled me aside and asked me why I would say that when she knew I had no issue with gay people. Why would I associate something being tacky, negative or boring with also being tied to gay people. And I told her I didn't see the two as tied together. In my brain Uncool/Gay and Gay/Gay where two entirely different things. But she explained to me that to others who didn't know my heart, who could tell the difference?

She asked me if I would have liked it if someone had said something was a "girl" thing in a negative way. That if girl (or many of the offensive ways you can say "girl") were tied to the word uncool. Well, 13-year-old me understood sexism (which is why the first time I heard a rape joke at 14 I recoiled in horror, then tried to explain to the boy who told it to me how screwed up that sounded), so that day I stopped saying something was "gay" or even using the word gay unless it was used in its proper context.

I don't think Roland Martin is some "beat up the gays" kind of person. But considering his age, background, religious beliefs, personal feelings about homosexuality and the fact that he was shit-talking during the Macho Nacho world of sports, he probably doesn't know or care about how careless his language came across. Because it's something he's probably always said and done and he doesn't think that much of it and those around him don't think that much of it because they all say things like this too. None of them plans on beating up a transsexual tonight (I hope), but they also can't see the connection between what is just a lazy joke for some and real violence for others.

I don't think ol' Rolly Rolls should get fired, but ... you know? Clean it up a little, man. It's not like that joke was super original and awesome. Getting called out for simply being lazy in your language usage is pretty pedestrian. To paraphrase the great Kanye West, "I'm on (Twitter) talking like it's just you and me."

But see? It's not just you and your boys and fans on Twitter. It's GLAAD. And everyone else. And everyone else might not think you're that funny.

M.I.A. is my favorite radically hardcore, international hipster masquerading as a ruthless Southeast Asian revolutionary married formerly engaged to a billionaire heir trust fund baby rapper ever. EVER. And her filing her nails while riding on a car tilted on two wheels is by far the most bad assed looking thing I've seen done involving dangerous car stunts in some time. 

The song ain't too bad either.

I'm just going to ignore the fact that she performed as part of a relatively trite song by Madonna with Nicki Minaj during that nationally televised sporting event I barely watched.

The video was filmed in Morocco, but some are thinking it might be a commentary on the Saudi cleric fight to "protect" women by making it illegal for them to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. This has lead to many Saudi women protesting by driving anyway, facing almost certain punishment and imprisonment for something most women completely take for granted in other countries. 

The Snob returned to PBS' To The Contrary with Bonnie Erbe last Friday, discussing the fiasco that was Komen Foundation's defunding then refunding of Planned Parenthood as politics once again worked its way into women's health issues. Also discussed: a new documentary looking at sexual assault in the military and honoring Vernice Armour, female African American fighter pilot. Also on the panel: National Council of Negro Women Executive Director Avis Jones-DeWeever, The Heritage Foundation's Genevieve Wood and conservative commentator Tara Setmayer.

Watch February 3, 2012 on PBS. See more from To The Contrary.

Why are you doing this to me, man?* Why are you doing this to yourself?

Mitt Romney won't stop singing/ruining "America, the Beautiful," one of the best and most beloved songs from the Great American Songbook. I think he thinks singing it constantly looks patriotic rather than pandering and pathetic. But if you're going to turn every campaign stop into Country Bear Jamboree you need to actually be competent in carrying a tune.

While "The Star-Spangled Banner" is the National Anthem, my favorite patriotic song about America is and has always been the much easier to sing, less war-like and considerably more melodic "America, the Beautiful."

Like "Star-Spangled," "America" also has about five extra verses I've never learned, but it's my number one favorite patriotic jam, followed closely by "Battle Hymn of the Republic." (Which, in all actuality, is simply the best version of another American folk song "John Brown's Body.")

Then there's Ray Charles' legendary gospel version of "America, the Beautiful" that makes you almost wish it was the National Anthem. So, you'd think there'd be no way to mess it up. It's simple. Its most popular verse is easy to remember. It's hopeful and bright. Not like "Star-Spangled," a song so complicated it can render even the most celebrated singers not named Whitney Houston (early 90s edition) incompetent.

Enter Mitt Romney, destroying my favorite conflation of music and history. Why, Mittens? Why? Was it because President Obama teased us with some Al Green? Is this some twisted game of "Everything Obama can do, Mitt can do worse?"

Apologize for those who were able to listen to the whole thing. Please listen to this example of "How Mariah Carey became so rich and famous" as a palette cleanser.

* Did I mention I'm a not-so-secret Great American Songbook nerd? It was one of the few things my public school education did extremely right. I know a crazy amount of American folk songs and their histories, from Negro Spirituals to folk songs about the labor movement to minstrel songs like "De Camptown Races." As a small child my favorite of these songs was the same favorite of many Civil War, Confederacy apologists, "Dixie," which I played on the piano and sang out-loud, without irony, in our house all the time. I eventually transitioned to "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which was written by an abolitionist. Of course, as a child I didn't understand the political context of these songs, I just liked them. And to the credit of the people who raised me, neither of my parents had a problem with this and did not suggest that I play something else.

Honestly though, "Dixie" is just incredibly catchy and easy to sing when you're five. The National Negro Anthem, "Lift E'ry Voice and Sing," (which once upon a time I knew every verse of), was not as easy to play on the piano, but I loved it too. I love it all pretty much unapologetically. 

Take it away, Elvis!