Right-wing commentators on Fox News had a field day Wednesday morning dissecting a newly-revealed tape of President Barack Obama speaking to a mostly black crowd in 2007 at Hampton University in Virginia. Their main charge was that Obama used a false accent and racially-charged language to instill fear in his audience.
"The cadence and his accent and everything is very different from what we hear out of the Rose Garden or anything like that," said Charlie Hurt, a columnist for The Washington Times.
"This is a put-on, this is phony," Tucker Carlson said to Fox News's Sean Hannity. Carlson went on to say Obama was using "racial rhetoric designed to make people fearful."
Even Fox and Friends's Steve Doocy weighed in, remarking that "this doesn't sound like the accent [Obama] grew up with in Hawaii."
The video of Obama was obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller and released in conjunction with Fox News and the Drudge Report, which hyped its importance on Twitter and with a full-page splash on Tuesday afternoon.
In the video, Obama criticizes the government for being more generous with federal aid to victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Andrew than it was to victims of Hurricane Katrina, implying that racial demographics may have played a role in its response.
Both The Daily Caller and Drudge Report have prompted criticism for releasing video from an event that took place over five years ago, and which was covered by a variety of media outlets at the time, including Fox News and Tucker Carlson (who had his own show on MSNBC in 2007, when Obama delivered the speech.)
Watch the video above to see reactions to the Obama video, and tell us what you think in the comments section below.
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