It’s about the racism, stupid

In works of Shakespeare and in other “sensitive” human contexts (such as… dictatorships) the only character permitted to speak the actual truth is the fool or the jester. In keeping with that tradition, the Grey Lady permits us to hear an uncomfortable truth (or perhaps tells itself, since we have known for quite a while) through the vehicle of the usually “lighthearted” Maureen Dowd. That unpleasant truth is that the binding and driving motivation of extremists from Joe Wilson to the Scaife/Coors, et al. sponsored “teabaggers”… is… wait for it… racism. Shocking, I know. But millions of Americans just want to scream (in company beyond their own walls, that is) “Hey, everybody, the President’s a N-word”… MoDo tells us that Joe Wilson’s outburst of “You lie!” had an implicit “You lie, BOY!” in it. [Technically, it was “You lie, N-word! but we all get the idea.]
It just upsets the core of their being for a significant share of the American populace that “one of them” has risen to the position of President; this simply cannot be allowed to happen in their view, and on the “health care debate,” simply put, there are millions of people who would rather die in the street of an otherwise curable illness than have that N-word get a political victory. In that sense, this companion piece in the Grey Lady by Frank Rich both hits and misses the mark… yes, the summer was wasted on sideshows when President Obama should have taken charge, but no… no matter what he does… see above.
Well, it’s good that at least someone at the Grey Lady’s priviliged “inner-circle of geniuses” has finally woken the f*** up enough to just out and say what’s really going on out there. Maybe we can have a real “national debate” out in the open now… the subject of “the debate won’t matter too much (i.e., “it’s about the racism, stupid”), but at least we can out and say that rather than hiding behind code-words and surrogate issues and pretending that anything other than race matters to so many people. Because it doesn’t.