So our cable news stars hit the air with a wave of righteous indignation over Obama's "presumptousness". All they were armed with was a second hand, misquouted, out of context line from our black democratic presidential nominee for them to begin judging. And of course, this issue is so very much more important than the collapse of the rule of law in this country that it clearly deserved such breathless analysis from our pearl clutching media elite.
TPMtv released a video today highlighting and exposing this farce:
Of course, such analysis is exactly what this definitional example of a racist dogwhistle intended to do. Digby expertly dissects this smear and points to this indicative gem from Karl Rove's Yoda figure Lee Atwater:
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."
If all of this seems depressingly blatant, it's because it is. I mean, gosh, the party that opposed integration and affirmative action still has racist tendancies despite their efforts to seem PC! Whoever would have thunk it?
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