Exciting news: The Republicans have caught Obama fever!
Well, okay, not really. But in a desperate bid to get with the change in the political wind, the GOP has actually nominated two--two!--black guys to be the party's new national chairman.
Huh.
After Strom Thurmond, after the opposition to The Voting Rights Act, after Nixon's Southern Strategy, after Jesse Helms, after Willie Horton, after redrawing congressional districts to favor white voters, after the blatant suppression of black votes in Florida in 2000, after Katrina, after George Allen's macaca comment, after Sarah Palin's scorched earth attacks against Obama, after all that and so much more--this may be the single most racist thing the GOP has ever pulled.
They're basically using the two black nominees, Michael Steele and Kenneth Blackwell, as puppets, as the guys they can point to and say, "But some of our best friends are..." It's utterly shameless; is there a person within the party who honestly thinks this is going to fool anyone?
To show you how clueless the GOP really is, two of the other candidates for the chairmanship include Katon Dawson, who quit an all-white country club right before entering the race, and Chip Saltsman, much in the news lately for distributing a CD among his cronies including the parody song Barack The Magic Negro.
(About that last part: Saltsman and his many defenders within the party have tried to downplay the offensiveness of the song by saying, hey, he didn't write it himself, he didn't create it, it wasn't his doing. No, he wasn't responsible for the racist ditty, he merely shared it. On the moral relativism scale, that's kind of like saying, "Hey I don't create kiddie porn, I merely masturbate to images of pre-teen boys having sex with each other. What's the big deal?")
The sky above, mud below approval ratings of Obama and Bush suggest the smartest thing the Republicans could do right now is just shut the hell up and try to avoid bringing race up at all. Don't elect a black guy, which will look like pandering. Don't elect Dawson or Saltsman, because they're openly racist. Just deal with the fact that you lost big time, and the racial makeup of this nation no longer favors wealthy, bigoted southerners. Your time has finally passed, and if you don't rethink yourself from the ground up, you will always be an embarrassment.
And we certainly wouldn't want to make fun of Republicans, would we?
