I didn't see the Reverend Joseph Lowery on Hannity & Colmes, but judging from the transcript, he did a fine job standing up to Sean Hannity and the haters Hannity was speaking for. Some excerpts:

HANNITY: ...Reverend Lowery, let's be honest here, the president of the United States goes to Coretta Scott King's funeral, and you knew what you were saying. I've known you a long time. You knew what you were saying and you knew you were taking a shot at the president. You're going to be honest here and acknowledge that, correct?

LOWERY: I'm always honest, and my speech was the same, whether the president were in Atlanta or Athens, Greece. It had nothing to do with the president. I was doing my job. I was carrying out my assignment. I was asked...

HANNITY: Reverend...

LOWERY: Listen.

HANNITY: All right.

LOWERY: I was asked by the family to give a civil rights and human rights tribute.

HANNITY: Well, it...

LOWERY: What did you expect me to talk about, wine and roses?

***

COLMES: ... I want to put up on the screen, Reverend, some of the words used by Martin Luther King himself in a eulogy for young victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 16, 1963.

LOWERY: Four little girls.

COLMES: And he talked about those four little girls. And here's what he said. He said, "They have something to say to a federal government that's compromised with the un-Democratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans."

And you don't hear people criticizing Martin Luther King. If that's not politicizing the president...

LOWERY: They did. They did at the time. But now that he is safely dead, they praise him.

COLMES: Right.

LOWERY: But dead men makes such convenient heroes. They cannot rise up to challenge the images we mold and fashion for them. Besides, it's easier to build a monument than it is a movement.

***

HANNITY: ... The president of the United States came to honor this woman. It should have been about her life, not you using the occasion of her funeral to take a shot politically at the president. That's where you and I disagree. I don't think that was the right thing to do in that environment.

LOWERY: I talked about her life.

HANNITY: You were taking a shot at the president. You were...

LOWERY: That was her life.

****

COLMES: ....These issues of poverty, of war, they didn't start with the Bush administration. What you said, what Jimmy Carter said could have been said decades ago, because the same fight continues. They're making it about Bush when it wasn't.

LOWERY: You're exactly right. Let me tell you what else was said decades ago. It's not the appropriate time.

When we started the bus boycott in Montgomery, it was not the appropriate time. When we went to Birmingham to fight segregation and public accommodations and brutal oppression on the part of the police department, the preachers said to Martin, it's not the appropriate time.

****

HANNITY: Reverend hang on. The top 10 percent of wage earners in America, Reverend, pay over 70 percent of the federal tax bill. Ten percent pay...

LOWERY: The top 20 percent...

HANNITY: How much more do you want them to pay?

LOWERY: The top 20 percent own more than 80 percent of the wealth, and those are the people who are getting the tax cuts.

HANNITY: You want perfect socialism in America? You want redistribution?

LOWERY: Sean, there's something wrong -- you can call it names. There's something wrong when a handful of people have more than they'll ever need while the masses of people have less than they always need. I'm not satisfied.

HANNITY: Listen, I want every American -- I'm not satisfied either.

LOWERY: America can do better.

HANNITY: You know something?

LOWERY: American can do better.

HANNITY: Reverend, where we ought to agree is that the public school, the government school systems are destroyed in America today, Reverend. And yet the people that are standing at the door forcing these kids into people's -- into these failing schools are on the left.

Join with conservatives and give people choices in education. Because if you solve that problem, you solve your crime problem, your drug dependency problem. You solve, you know, a whole host of government problems.

You get the last word.

LOWERY: The problem in the public schools is we don't support them. We don't put the best teachers there. We don't put the best resources there.

HANNITY: Can't get any worse.

LOWERY: You're trying to destroy public schools for something called vouchers. Throw helpless people out in a jungle where they get chewed to pieces by the tigers and the fat cats. That's not good.

Keep fighting, Reverend.

(Link via Democratic Underground.)