Conflict is the lifeblood of cable news programming. Nearly every single night on the opinion media landscape, a viewer can find the sort of oversimplified and often hyperbolic _____ vs. _____ type of coverage. What’s increasingly rare, however, is when a participant of such a conflict comes out as the clear winner of the debate. This was the case last night when MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell got the “last word” in an ongoing feud with Rush Limbaugh over race, racial politics, and the very cynical ploy of making irresponsible charges of racism toward ones political opponents.

RELATED: Rush Limbaugh: Herman Cain ‘Hit-Piece’ Is Purely About Blacks ‘Getting Too Uppity’

Some background. A secondary headline to have arisen from Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations story is the issue of race politics, and accusations of racism by some conservative pundits, in particular Limbaugh, who described the media coverage of what proved to be an accurate report of Cain’s harassment story as a racist “hit-piece” by a liberal media who saw a black candidate ‘getting too uppity.’

RELATED: Touré Ridicules ‘Constant Minstrelsy’ Of Herman Cain’s Presidential Campaign

On Monday night O’Donnell had on MSNBC contributor Touré, author of the recently published book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, to make sense of what O’Donnell described as a “blender of Republican racial politics that’s gotten mixed up together.” Touré called out Limbaugh for loosely (and inaccurately) using charges of racism as nothing more than a cynical ploy that not only confuses racial politics with racism, but also limits an important, and yes, difficult, discussion. Limbaugh responded on yesterday’s radio program with a denial that he was, in fact, a racist, before oddly (and perhaps defensively) calling Touré a racist himself.

RELATED: Rush Limbaugh To Touré: ‘For 23 Years I’ve Been Told I’m A Racist. I’m Not And You Are’

This brings us to O’Donnell’ Re-Write segment from last night, in which the MSNBC anchor made a clear and winning case of what is a semiotic mess of words, meanings and racial politics. Most importantly, O’Donnell described Limbaugh’s defensive charge of calling Touré a racist as nothing more than an admission that the conservative radio host does, in fact, use racist charges as a “ploy.” He then followed by airing a montage of clips that were pretty damning evidence of Rush Limbaugh’s loose, and yes, sometimes racist, political rhetoric.

During the Rally to Restore Sanity, Jon Stewart called out what he called the “conflictinator” of cable news programming and its hurtful effect on American politics. And while most cable news conflicts are the trumped up sort that seem closer to pro wrestling than reasoned political rhetoric, sometimes the back and forth (and back and forth) between opinion media foils like O’Donnell and Limbuagh are important and useful exercises in making sense of difficult subjects. In this instance, the “conflictinator.”

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