Dog Whistles–Silent No More 1
Yesterday, Bob Cesca posted that the odious Republican Southern Strategy has returned.
I’m afraid he’s wrong. It never went away.
What’s different in this campaign is that the Republicans are no longer attempting to camouflage it; everyone can hear the dog whistles.
Writing at the Guardian, Teresa Wiltz recounts the almost constant appeals to racism by Republican candidates and concludes, quite rightly, that
They just don’t give a flying fig.
Gingrich, Santorum and Paul are using the same playbook as DW Griffith did back in 1915 with Birth of a Nation: painting black folks as the boogeymen.
January 8, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Something worth adding is they prosecute it with great vigor and efficiency. And it has done well for them, giving the numerically minority party a solid base of bigots determined to attack all the “others”, a base which — because of procedural rules, allows them to gum up the works of the country with the greatest success. A party of extremist haters never debates anything or brooks any questioning of its aims. And the result has been a polity so infuriated and alienated they retaliate virtually blindly against whoever is in office on voting day.