MSNBC’s Chris Jansing featured the liberal Jonathan Capehart on Wednesday to attack a newly released Sarah Palin video as “anti-Semitic.” The Washington Post editorial page writer berated Palin for complaining about the media’s attempts to link conservative speech to last week’s shooting in Arizona.In the video, the former Alaska governor rejected this as a “blood libel.” Capehart smeared, “…That phrasing, that phrase is incredibly anti-Semitic. And no one is calling Sarah Palin an anti-Semite but for her to use that language a lot of people think she has dug a deep hole even deeper.”However, the National Review’s Jim Geraghty pointed to an October 30, 2008 Ann Coulter column: Capehart’s Washington Post colleague Eugene Robinson complained about “…The blood libel against black men concerning the defilement of the flower of Caucasian womanhood.” Was Mr. Robinson using anti-Semitic language? Should he have been “more careful,” as Capehart instructed Palin to be?Additionally, another MSNBC contributor, Mike Barnicle, used the phrase on October 31, 2006: “The problem for Kerry here is that two years ago, Joe, he did not talk like that when he was undergoing a blood libel by the Swift Boat people.” Was he being vaguely anti-Semitic?Wednesday’s Politico asserted:Palin’s use of the charged phrase “blood libel” — which refers to the anti-Semitic accusation from the Middle Ages that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood to make matzo for Passover — touched off an immediate backlash.Capehart even asserted that Palin’s 2012 presidential chances could now be imperiled. He speculated, ” Did she provide words that aided in that healing or did she provide words that only served to inflame the conversation?”

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