The latest controversy surfacing on the Web are the recent comments of pontificator-in-chief Lou Dobbs. A video capture from CNN on Friday is quickly being passed around the Internet ether, and so far it’s one of the most watched clips of the day.The video is posted below, but first the back story:

Dobbs was (sort of) disagreeing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assessment Thursday that America’s history concerning race makes discussing the issue difficult. Rice said that America’s founding amid so much slavery is a kind of “birth defect” that we have yet to overcome. She was speaking to editors and reporters at the Washington Times, a conservative beltway newspaper.

She was asked her thoughts on the topic, in the context of the presidential race, the approaching anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, and and Sen. Barack Obama’s recent speech

I’ve transcribed the key quotes from a recording of the segment:

“America doesn’t have an easy time dealing with race. Obviously when this country was founded, the words that were enshrined in all of our great documents … they didn’t have meaning for an overwhelming element of our founding population. Black Americans were a founding population.

“Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together, Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. And that’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.

“I think that particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today…. Slaves therefore did not get much of a head start. And I think you continue to see some the effects of that.”

Dobbs, with his usual bombast, defends of America as diverse and socially conscious and suggests that the only thing we fear is people who would twist our words and the debate for their own political purposes.

“The fact is most Americans don’t have a problem talking about race, what we have is a problem of talking about race without fearing recrimination and distortion and someone using whatever comments are made for their own purposes, usually political purposes.

“The reality is that this is the most socially, ethnically, religiously, racially diverse society on the face of the earth…. Nearly always we fail to point out that there is no country on the face of the earthy as progressive and as racially and ethnically diverse as our own. It’s something to be proud of.”

“And to hear a politician, whoever it may be, talk about how difficult it is to talk about race, well the heck with them.”

Dobbs apparently missed the full context of Rice’s chat. She continued that while America labors under some of the latent effects of slavery, it has also progressed. Again, Rice:

“The tremendous efforts of many, many, many people … to be impatient with this country for not fulfilling its own principles has led us down a path that has put African Americans in positions and places that I think nobody would have even thought at the time that Dr. King was assassinated.

“We deal daily with this contradiction, with this paradox about America, that on the one hand the birth defect continues to have effects on our country and indeed on the discourse and perhaps on the deepest thoughts that people hold, and on the other hand the enormous progress that has been made by the efforts of blacks and whites together to finally fulfill those principles.

“To my mind, where our understanding of and conversation of race has got to go … is that black Americans and white Americans founded this country together and I think we’ve always wanted the same thing and it’s been now a very hard and long struggle to begin to get to the place that we can all pursue the same thing.”

The kicker is that as Dobbs finishes his soliloquy, he shows just how deep the divisions of race and slavery are embedded in our society. He catches himself about to call use the folksy epithet “cotton pickin’” — considered a racial slur by some — on Rice and in the larger context, perhaps Obama.

“We’re living with the issue of race. We ought to be able to talk about it. And I can guarantee you this, not a single one of these cotton (pause, stumble), these just ridiculous politicians should be the moderator on the issue of race. We have to have a far better discussion than that.”

Some of the buzz around this incident likely comes from media watchers and other blogs (Media Bistro, Media Matters, Huffington Post, Think Progress) jumping on the issue. Notable however is that CNN’s transcript (way at the bottom) appears with no reference to the “cotton” slip.

Now, the video in question: