By Jim Lakely

I didn’t even know comedian D.L. Hughley had a show on CNN until the controversy over Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s interview on his show blew up. And just days after D.L. Hughley Breaks the News gets its biggest publicity, CNN pulls the plug.

Don’t know how smart that is, but I do know how dumb Michael Steele was on that show. It wasn’t just Steele’s idiotic comments about Rush Limbaugh’s show being "incendiary" and "ugly." It was the way he just sat there and nodded in agreement when Hughley compared the Republican National Convention to a Nazi rally and said Republican’s don’t even care what "we [black people] think":

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I know from experience that it’s hard to keep track of everything your TV/radio interviewer is saying, log it, and make a rebuttal to each point. But letting that nonsense go was inexcusable. For Pete’s sake! Hughley even gave him an opening by beginning his rant by saying "the tenets of the Republican Party are amazing" . . . and then . . . nothing from Steele.

The proper response is to tell Hughley to start thinking independently—as his mind was almost willing to do—instead of buying into irrelevancies like how many black faces you happen to see. And that’s just for starters. As National review’s Jay Nordlinger notes:

I hate reductio ad Hitlerum, as Strauss (not Richard) once dubbed it, but which convention last summer was more worthy of Riefenstahl? The Democratic or the Republican?

I dunno. You tell me.

It was also painful to watch Steele laugh off Hughley’s backhanded compliment that he’s "brighter than [I thought] before." (See the whole thing at CNN’s Web site here.)

Ugh. No wonder some are already calling for Steele to step down. That’s a bit rash, in my opinion — which I’m obligated to say, since I cheered his election to head the party. But he’d better get a lot better at promoting a conservative agenda — and soon. So far, it’s fair to call his stewardship of the party a major PR disaster.

As far as Steele and the GOP brand is concerned, D.L. Hughley’s show was canceled one week too late.

—Jim Lakely