Just what we needed to close out the year: Another Al Sharpton suck-up piece by the MSM. This one’s from the Washington Post’s Keith Richburg, who can barely manage to mention Sharpton’s latest legal troubles: “Sharpton has thrived this year with his high-decibel microphone-to-megaphone activism, even in the face of a federal investigation of his 2004 campaign finances.”

That’s it.

The rest of the slobbery piece gives Sharpton premium newspaper space to pat himself on the back:

Even by his own frenetic standards, the Rev. Al Sharpton has had a busy 12 months.

Late last year was the police shooting in Queens of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man leaving a bachelor party, and Sharpton organized the protests. There was the spring controversy over racially insensitive remarks by shock jock Don Imus, with Sharpton leading the calls for Imus’s firing.

Sharpton put together a march in Jena, La., in support of six black teenagers jailed in the beating of a white student, and he held a protest rally outside the Justice Department in Washington to demand more prosecution of hate crimes.

And now, he is being wooed by the leading Democratic presidential candidates, all of whom seek his endorsement. “I think this has been a banner year, to say the least,” said Sharpton, smiling contentedly over coffee. “This year proved the real revival of civil rights activism.”

Richburg insists on helping Sharpton maintain his posture of respectability:

Once shunned for his street antics, jogging suits and bling, he is now courted by local and state politicians who dutifully troop to the Harlem headquarters of his National Action Network every January for his celebration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

“He seems to have evolved into a new respectability, at least in the city,” said Norman Siegel, a lawyer and former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who has known Sharpton for 20 years. Regarding the King celebrations, Siegel said, “Every single elected official, no matter what they said about him in the past, they’ll show up.”

But Siegel said Sharpton still has a negative reputation among many white New Yorkers; Siegel has acquaintances who ask him, somewhat derisively, whether he is still friends with Al Sharpton.

Sharpton derives his role in large part because of a continued sense of dispossession and racial injustice that persists among many in black America.

No. He derives his role in large part because of the MSM’s continued need for minority charlatans to provide demagogic soundbites and deliver good ratings for the cable clown shows.

“Reverend Sharpton is the catalyst that continues to bring people together on issues of empowerment and injustice,” said Charles Ogletree, the Harvard University law professor and scholar on race and equality matters. “Whenever there is any event involving racial injustice, he is always the first responder.”

First responder? Try first exploiter–with a dutiful entourage of microphone- and tape recorder-wielding useful idiots behind him.

Some readers wonder why I continue to write about the Sharpton-MSM lovefest. Why? Because the enablers deserve to be held responsible and shamed publicly until they stop.

If you hold up the mirror long enough, one of these fools is bound to glance over and see what slavish, race-hustling tools they all appear to be. And are.

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Side note: As dispirited, disappointed, and uncertain you may feel about the GOP presidential race, just remember this:

Only one party is the Party of Al Sharpton–and it’s not the GOP.