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Sometimes, even a Harvard education can’t make you a good writer or an impartial journalist. So proves one Hazel Trice Edney today, publishing one of the most obnoxious flaming paper sacks of libelous crap I have seen outside of Fox News in quite some time.

Now, we all know my boy Joe Biden has the occasional oral stumble, which is bound to happen when you’re trying to fit a 30 minute policy analysis into a 30 second sound bite on the campaign trail. Two weeks ago was no exception, perhaps, when Biden was the only presidential candidate to address the 100 Black Men of America conference, a nonprofit organization focused on increasing educational and economic development in the black community. When questioned by a small gathering of the attendees about the poor showing of new legislation that would benefit African Americans, Biden argued that the lack of attention to black issues was a result of ignorance or cultural disconnect on the part of many congressmen:

“Look guys, most of the guys and women in the United States Congress who don’t come from communities with broader black populations, they don’t know that there is a decent stream of accomplished business men and women in the black community out there. They don’t know it. Y’all are a secret. The only white boy that figured it out was Clinton,” he said to jovial laughter from the group.

Now, if there’s any offense to be taken from that remark, I’d say it should be taken by Biden’s fellow members of Congress who might feel they were just called inattentive to their constituents. However, with Hazel Edney on the case, it’s African Americans who should all be offended, because according to her, this is just another example of racial insensitivity.

She believes this to be the case so much — or perhaps is just so desperate to gin up some buzz around what is otherwise some pretty dull reporting and maybe shine in the spotlight of national scandal for fifteen glorious minutes — that she takes her little editorial scissors, cuts up Biden’s words, and rearranges them into a more dramatically acceptable gotcha headline.

“Biden: Some members of Congress don’t know there are ‘decent’ black business people,” reads the banner print at Frost Illustrated, member publication of the National Newspaper Publishers Association for which Edney is Washington correspondent. She reiterates that completely distorted — hell, let’s call a turd a turd, it’s practically fabricated — line later on in the article:

Biden’s statement about his colleagues’ lack of knowledge about “decent” black business men and women was clearly his way of explaining their inability to understand the need for certain legislation. But, it harkened back to his comment about his colleague, Sen. Barack Obama, earlier this year. Black leaders roundly criticized Biden for describing Obama as “articulate” and “clean.”

And thus, by citing the previous, terribly overblown pseudo-scandal, Edney solidifies in her paranoid mind the complete hallucination that obviously Joe Biden doesn’t think people know about “decent black business people,” setting aside the fact that Edney had to rape the rules of English grammar to make the fantasy complete.

I know a lot of you aren’t quite the fans of the Senator that I am, but you can’t be fluent in the English language and not recognize that this wretched excuse for “journalism” is complete and utter cowpie. Let me say it again, in very clear, Google-blog-search palatable terms:

Hazel Trice Edney = yellow journalism.

Yeah, I said it. If that headline ain’t libel, it is damn, damn close. So much for her fancy master’s degree! Hazel, I’d expect this kind of writing from Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, not a Harvard graduate. Oh well, nice going.

Edney tries to cover her posterior by getting Rep. Conyers to stand by her, in an awkward sentence that could really benefit from that unnecessary post-conjunction comma* in the previous blockquote:

U.S. Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who attended the organization’s convention the day after Biden was to receive the coveted Man of the Year award.

He shook his head when asked if he agreed with Biden’s assessment about the members of Congress.

“There he goes again,” Conyers said. “‘He just doesn’t get it.”

What Conyers really doesn’t get is that he was talking not to a real, respectable reporter, but someone with a notepad and a slight problem with accurately representing the truth. How much do you want to bet he didn’t get the actual quote, but rather was fed the grammatically-butchered propaganda, before asked for a response?

So if you’re ever at a political event with NNPA’s Washington correspondent, let me give you a handy list of example sentences not to utter, lest our star reporter jam your descriptors into all the wrong phrases in the interest of a little sensationalism:

• “I would kill to meet Barack Obama!”
• “Hillary Clinton’s YouTube video was an amazing example of how SexyBack gives a story legs!”
• “That fart scene was a very amusing aside in that movie about Idi Amin.”
• “Pizza is the most delicious precursor to poop.”
• “Closing Abu Ghraib would be the most applauded response to systemic torture.”

I mean, you wouldn’t want Edney to go around reporting that you “applauded ’systemic’ torture” that used “delicious” poop on Hillary Clinton’s “amazing…sexy back [and] legs” in an effort to “kill” Barack Obama? But then, I’d expect that kind of deviant behavior from someone who found Idi Amin “amusing.”

* Raise your hand if you had to read that more than once before you figured out that Biden wasn’t receiving the Man of the Year Award.