Bill O'Reilly, Kirsten Powers, and Monica Crowley discussed race in America on The O’Reilly Factor Tuesday night (video here).  What might have been just another ho-hum segment on the never-ending topic turned into a scene out of a Samuel Beckett play. 

O'Reilly and Powers entered the absurd zone when the host accused the blond pundit of making snorting sounds while Crowley was talking.  O'Reilly told her to "knock it off" and show some respect.  The accusation rattled Powers so much she immediately denied the charge and responded, "Why don't you knock it off, Bill?"

But the climactic moment came when Powers insisted that "a lot of people" in America are still racist.  She called racism "a serious issue."

"I don't know why you are so unable to see that," she said to O'Reilly.

O'Reilly told Powers that if she can't see the narrative being "sold" by some that America is a racist country, then she "must be living in a hut somewhere with no electricity."

"I'm living in the real world... I defend America all the time," she countered, as she continued to flagellate our country for its past history of slavery.

Then, to prove she's nowhere near the real world, a visibly shaken Powers asked O'Reilly how many black friends he had.

That beat-to-death “some of my best friends are black so I'm not racist” defense has not only been ridiculed by minorities, but been savaged by liberal academics.  Doesn’t Ms. Powers know that having black friends is not incompatible with holding racist attitudes?  According to agenda-driven race-baiters, even if Bill O'Reilly had a ton of black friends, he could still be a racist.

What was Powers thinking?  What world does she live in?

Last year she told Real Clear Politics' Washington bureau chief, Carl Cannon, that working at Fox has been good for her because "before that, I lived in a real liberal bubble...All my friends were liberals and I grew up in a really liberal family...I had a lot of ideas about conservatives and then I got to Fox and just, I was like, ‘Oh, they’re not all evil and stupid.’”

Back to absurd Beckett, who might have been talking about Powers and O’Reilly when he wrote, “Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know."