N Is For the Word They Are Itching to Use

By Dan Hagen

Gee, why are Americans turning INCREASINGLY racist? Whatever could be the reason?

I do love all this faux-shock over the Associated Press poll that shows that Americans have become more racist during President Obama’s term in office.

Come now. This is what Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and their corporate media fellow-traveler wannabes have been working overtime for during the last four years.

Even during the 2008 elections, thanks to a relentless GOP propaganda campaign aimed at know-nothings, craven and wretched reporting by the corporate media and the general willful, thundering stupidity of the American public, what we were offered as "issues" were such topics as Barack Obama's middle name, the fear of his "secret Muslim religion," and whether he and his wife indulge in "terrorist fist bumps."

Yes. he really said it.

How can you tell when a political attack on Obama is racist? When it’s not an attack that questions his POLICIES, but an attack that questions his IDENTITY.

I know an older, comfortably retired white man with a big fishing boat, a large house, two cars and an expensive RV who is enjoying Social Security and Medicare and who is constantly complaining how those poor black people and those uppity women like Nancy Pelosi have cheated him out of something or other that he can't quite specify.

He spends his days listening to Limbaugh and watching Fox "News." And he uses a different word to describe black people. But you knew that already, didn't you?

Why do Americans vote against their own interests? Xenophobia. Shame masked as anger at their justified sense of intellectual inferiority. And the reliable old vice that makes any mark ready to be conned: blind greed.

Yes, Republicans are often racist xenophobic tools, made angrier by the feeling of inferiority they get when they realize that they don't know what "xenophobic" means.

Ah yes, the Republican Party. The party whose candidate, Ronald Reagan, kicked off his campaign with an appeal to "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi -- a town famous for a single thing, the murder of civil rights workers. The party whose candidate, George H. W. Bush, won election with the racist Willie Horton ad. The party that blocked black voters in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004. The party that proudly flies and defends the Confederate flag. The party that thrives on resentment against Mexican immigrants. The party that campaigns against fictional black "welfare queens" who drive Cadillacs and hands the keys of the U.S. treasury to the corporate CEO welfare queens who arrive in their private jets. The party whose candidate, Richard Nixon, designed a "Southern Strategy" to win the hearts and minds of racist white voters in the South. The party that thinks racism runs in only one direction -- reverse. The party actually dared to suggest in a Tea Party pledge that black families were better off enslaved. The party that compares Herman Cain to Harriet Tubman. Yes, Cain would be just like Harriet Tubman, if Harriet Tubman was a lousy pizza shill, a sexist tool and a con artist instead of a civil rights heroine.

And that would be the "colorblind party" that is shocked, shocked by any hint of what it terms "racism" -- defined as any chance that someone other than an old white guy or a sellout token might acquire some power.