Brendan Calling

PALIN SUPPORTER: “HE’S A NIGGER.”

Look, I know quite a few Republicans of good will. Their good name is sullied by the race-baiting tactics of McKKKain-Palin and their supporters.

No wonder the right-wing kooks at the aptly named Bloviator Central Hot Air blew such a gasket over Valania’s column: every time a Palin supprter yells “nigger” or holds up a monkey doll and calls it “Little Hussein Obama”, normal Americans see the pockmarked, spittle-flecked face of right-wing hysteria and race hatred, and they don’t like it.

The fact is that while many white Americans (as well as a lot of people of a variety of races and ethnicities) may indeed carry racial prejudices, most of us are embarrassed by them and work hard to destroy them. It takes a very fucked up kind of person (the kind who reads Hot Air for example) to proudly embrace the hatred. The GOP has benefited mightily from these kooks, but only as part of a broader coalition. Minus all the other interests that typically support the GOP, the kooks are incredibly small and ugly faction that is now disproportionately hogging the spotlight, much to the chagrin of the GOP’s more subtly racist and classist supporters.

Or as Lee Atwater once put it,

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

The GOP doesn’t have Atwater (or Rove) anymore. They don’t have anyone clever enough to go abstract: all they have is “Nigger, nigger,” and so they are getting hurt as mainstream America is increasingly repelled by their outrageous and unacceptable behavior.

One Response to “PALIN SUPPORTER: “HE’S A NIGGER.””

1. From Pine View Farm » Listen Closely at 17 Seconds Says:
   October 27th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

   [...] Brendan. [...]