While I won’t dignify the individual posts of Mr. Scaife’s loyal retainers Goldberg and Reynolds by actually linking to them, Glenn Greenwald does, in the interest of demonstrating that the preemptive race-baiting among Republican mouth-pieces has begun. Son of Lucianne gets things started for us by suggesting that “some people” will not take kindly if Obama is either out-played by Clinton for the Democratic nomination, or worse, screwed (Gore or Kerry style perhaps) in the general election… you know (wink, wink)… “race riots”. “He’s right, you know.” The Old Perfessor quickly adds, in a pile-on (extraordinary reminiscent of “Mr. Hilter’s” assistant in the Monty Python sketch where a certain ex-dictator appears in North Minehead to run in a bye-election). It won’t be long before Michelle piles on as well, if she hasn’t already.
Well, well. The Scaife-employee generated nastiness comes… one… TWO days after Obama’s historic victory. Amazing, no? The thing is, an Obama nomination will confound the crap out of the right… the GOP is stoked to face Hitlery or Shrillery or the Feminazi or the Bitch or… some other slur based largely on misogyny (which it evidently believes it can express publicly, at least as to Senator Clinton). Overt racism will be an extraordinarily dangerous game to play against Obama; but for “Macacagate,” the GOP field would be in far less disarray as Virginia Senator George Allen would very likely have just dominated the Iowa caucuses… but Macacagate happened. As Paul Krugman has surmised, we are a different (and to that extent, better) country than the one Sen. George Allen grew up in.
But it’s there… certainly in the hearts and minds of some if not many likely Republican voters, it’s always the racism, stupid. It explains the current mania with immigration as an issue; direct attacks on people of color are no longer cool, so some “acceptable” outlet must be created. (The irony is that Karl Rove was trying to expand the GOP base to include Latinos, but his own party bolted on him, and turned it into an issue likely to piss off Latinos for the foreseeable future.)
But is this trick going to work against Obama? Willy Horton codes work fine against a White candidate… but just how dangerous in the post-macaca world is it to try that against a Black candidate (especially one running what amounts to a “trans-partisan” “trans-race” campaign)?
Well, we shall see. In my view it’s an attack almost tailor made for a counter-attack from Obama– “the old politics of fear” rearing their ugly head. Why can’t we all get along? Given the popularity of a similar message on the Republican side from the non-money-man and non-war-monger Mike Huckabee, a man whose “moral values” might actually mean genuine Christian charity for his fellow man… this might not be the best time for this particular attack.
But old habits die hard, I suppose.
tdog
The Grand Old White Boy Club is panicking. The ‘Brave New World’ will multi-colored and “barely tolerant” of the old way of doing business. Brains and hearts are packaged in every body … what that body does with their brains and hearts is subject to culture.
The perfect is certainly the enemy of the good. And Obama sure as bleep isn’t perfect. At issue, however, is whether, given the very imperfect choices we face, Obama is the best of the lot. The voters of NH will tell us their view on Tuesday.
With Constitution State Dodd safely dropping out, my own choices among Dems have come down (like that of every other progressive) to Edwards and Obama. Fortuitously for him or not, Obama did not vote to authorize the Iraq war, whereas Hillary and Edwards (who sat on the Intelligence Committee no less!) did.