Black Kettle
by digby
Limbaugh is so upset about the fact that Obama is turning back racial progress, that he's writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal about it. I'm not kidding:
I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama -- the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change -- has gone where few modern candidates have gone before.
Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.
You can picture the smirk on his face as he wrote it.
One might have thought that no major newspaper would even think of printing such disgustingly hypocritical nonsense, but one would have thought wrong. Because Limbaugh is cleverly using the language of the left to make a mockery of the cause of civil rights, it's considered a-ok.
Limbaugh is a racist. He was fired from ESPN for making a racist statement on television, fergawdsake. But that's the point --- it's so outrageously hypocritical, and is done with such confidence, that it leaves his adversaries sputtering. How do you deal with people who don't even acknowledge the concept of hypocrisy?
It's pure in-your face, know-nothing bullying, essentially defying all challenge and saying that truth, logic and reason are no longer operative --- and daring you to say differently. It simultaneously degrades the real argument, creates a false equivalence and dog whistles to other racists that these topics are now up for grabs. It's very powerful.
Just so nobody thinks Limbaugh has even the tiniest, baby leg to stand on:
LIMBAUGH: U.S. blacks -- young U.S. blacks believe in politics, according to a new study. "Many U.S. blacks are as confident" -- and we're talking about the clean ones here, folks, I must stipulate this -- young, clean U.S. blacks -- "believe in politics. Many young U.S. blacks are as confident as their white and Hispanic peers that they can use politics to make things better, but a majority of young blacks feel alienated from today's government." Why would that be? The government's been taking care of them their whole lives. Why would they feel alienated from -- maybe "today's government" means the Bush administration.
That's the tip of the iceberg.
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