From Andrew Morse at ABC News, who has been aggravated by yours truly and the 125,000 other petitioners from Color of Change since yesterday about their decision to feature serial liar, all around race baiter and professional hate hustler Andrew Breitbart, comes a letter this evening:

 

Dear Mr. Breitbart,

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

Sincerely,

Andrew Morse

Thank you, Mr. Morse, for one of the hardest things a man who has an important job ever has to do—admit that he made an error in judgment. You stood up for decency today the way the actors used to do in those ABC After School Specials I watched growing up.

You could have invited one of a number of other extremist, fringe-element Republicans to be on your election night broadcast, or its online version, and most of us out in the hinterlands would not have blinked. But when I read last Friday that Andrew Breitbart was going to participate in your election coverage, I will tell you that just seeing his name in your press release cut me to the quick. I wrote to you on Twitter that it seemed like ABC was condoning "open season on black women."

As you and your colleagues at ABC News have discovered for yourselves in the past 24 hours, Mr. Morse, Andrew Breitbart continues to demonstrate over and over that his sole purpose in life is to fight for the right to distort the truth. As for Mr. Breitbart, the only thing that keeps coming to mind are these lines from the famous poem by Samuel Coleridge, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, when the Mariner realizes that he has become an outcast:

 

"Ah! well a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, the Albatross

About my neck was hung."

Every once in awhile, it seems, good still triumphs over evil.