Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Stay classy, 2010 campaign

Mid-term elections are coming up later in the year. What's that mean? Well, the stupid season is almost upon us. Strike that. The stupider season is almost upon us. Case in point: the new attacks levied by the RNC and the GOP Congressional and Senate campaign committees.

Want to guess what the new attacks are? Did you guess "Oogity boogity, blackity blackity black!" Nicely done, dear readers, you've been paying attention.
The 2010 election campaign season took an abrupt and aggressive turn in the last 24 hours, as two Republican campaign committees accused the Obama White House of "shamelessly" engaging in "race-baiting" in an effort to hold congressional majorities.

In an email blasted to reporters Wednesday morning, National Republican Campaign Committee spokesman Ken Spain charged DNC Chairman Tim Kaine with playing "the race card from the bottom of the deck."
Oh my God, oh your God, oh everyone's God... what is it that Obama and the DNC are doing to stoke racial fears? Are they being accused of starting the Tea Parties? Are they being accused of enabling a news network and stream of commentators and talk radio hosts to spend day after day, hour after hour making racially charged attacks? Are they continually placing all their political hopes on aggrieved white fears of persecution? Did Barack Obama and Time Kaine travel back in time and invent racism? What nefarious scheme are they undertaking?
Kaine's offense? The committee chairman is set to outline a mid-term election strategy on Wednesday that relies heavily on the turnout of "black, Latino or young voters."
THOSE RACIST MOTHERFUCKERS! Blacks and Latinos voting and being encouraged to vote? I think I hear George Washington puking in the afterlife.

I mean sure, some might say the constant stream of outraged accusation from the right that everyone on the left is a racist, that the President is a double racist, that the President is coming to take the white man's shit and give it to lazy blacks, the GOP making direct class and race based appeals to their base, race based legislative strategies employed by states like... Arizona, and all sorts of crazy rants and rhetoric about race would mean that the GOP is the one engaged in dealing all those race cards from the bottoms of various decks. They would be wrong. Trying to get better black and Latino turnout is playing the race card. Even if the only thing you have to do to get them out is play them any random statement made by any random right wing commentator or lawmaker.

So if you thought that we had survived the last attempt to drag this country into a politically charged race war with the death of the McCain/Palin 2008 campaign, well, you were wrong. Again. You forgot just how classy a country we lived in. Now we get campaign centered around the one issue most important to Americans: "You're a racist!" "No, I'm not the racist, you're the racist!"

Gird your brains for November... it's about to get stupid. And racist. Really racist.

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