The Republican Party Breaks New Ground in Stupid 0

(Yeah, I know this is going to be blogged to death and no one will notice my little rantings back here in the last row, but, as my mother would have said, “Honestly!“)

Lead* from The Hill:

RNC candidate Chip Saltsman’s Christmas greeting to committee members includes a music CD with lyrics from a song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” first played on Rush Limbaugh’s popular radio show.

Gunnar Myrdal said that “the Negro problem in America is a white man’s problem.”

Clearly, these Republicans do have quite a problem.

I will not pretend to understand the dynamics of contemporary race relations in the United States. I will claim to understand a lot of the history of them, because I’ve studied it. And I have lived through major changes in them, from growing up under Jim Crow to living, these days, thankfully, not under Jim Crow.

Anyone who would argue that racial prejudice–not to mention religious prejudice, sex (“gender,” by God! is a grammatical concept–it has to do with words, not persons) prejudice, and other types of prejudice are not part of American society is a fool or a self-justifying bigot or a combination thereof.

Now, I’m not arguing that the “Barack the Magic Negro” guy is personally a bigot. I don’t know the gentleman and, fortunately, hope never to meet him.

I will argue and have argued that the Republican Party made itself the party of bigotry with the odious “Southern strategy.” Whether or not individual party hacks leaders were personally bigots is immaterial; the party set out to take advantage of bigotry for electoral gain (in much the same way as it cynically recruited fundamentalist right-wing Christians with its phony-baloney “family values” rhetoric).

I will say this with great certainty: Anyone who’s lived through any part of the 60 years of the current civil rights struggle and hasn’t figured out what he can’t say (or do) in public without getting into trouble is too stupid for words.

(That, of course, eminently qualifies him for RNC Chairperson.)

Steve has more over at ASZ. A nugget:

It is still up in the air whether the Republicans will ever learn that civility is the new way to win campaigns.

(The Hill via Huffington Post.)

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* It’s “lead,” as in the “lead into the story,” not “lede,” dammit. Misspelling a word does not make it more important or more special.