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There is still a vast amount of racism in the south, something still reflected in the politics of the region. John McCain lost the (North or South) Carolina 2000 primary because a Bush telephone push poll accused him incorrectly of fathering a black baby. Those GOP politics guys like karl Rove certainly know their market.Originally Posted by Lyle
And GOP racism to appeal to their southern base continues today. In 1980, while running for president, Ronald Reagan, appeared at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, best known as the site of the murders of three civil rights workers by various pillars of the community. There, he gave a speech about the need for states' rights, time-honored code in that part of the country for white racists' resentment over forced desegregation. The scene was generally taken as an unusually blunt reaching out by a major candidate to the bigot vote, and not long after, Reagan did indeed receive the KKK's official endorsement for the presidency. But the appearance in Philadelphia, while unmistakable in the signals it gave off, was still safely within the realm of the "symbolic", and it's bad form to blame someone for his tackier fans, so nobody in the mainstream dared whisper that Reagan himself actually had a racist bone in his body, not even after he expressed his opposition to the creation of a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the course of that opposition indicated that he mainly considered Dr. King to have been an uppity troublemaker and very likely a Communist agent. When it was time for Reagan to move on into his twilight years, his vice-president, George Bush the Elder, overcame his essential emptiness and lack of any serious widespread support in part by means of a TV commercial that tied his opponent to a scary-looking black man. Of course, everyone understood that Bush had no racist impulses in him but had to do what he had to do to ensure the votes of Joe Caveman. Back in 1964, Bush had campaigned hard against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; two years into his presidency, he would veto the 1990 Civil Rights Act, after having Congresional Republicans work hard shaping it to his preferred specifications. After considerable criticism, he would reluctantly sign a civil rights bill the next year, at a point when his prospects for re-election were already in free fall. Early in 1992, after the Rodney King verdict resulted in the L.A. riots, Bush would dispatch Marlin Fitzwater to explain that the riots were Lyndon Johnson's fault, and the the result of having been too nice to inner city blacks in the 1960s.
Again, as anyone in the liberal media could tell you, none of this reflected any racial insensitivity on the part of the people involved. It was "just politics", and that meant anything that worked was fair and justifiable. On the other hand, during the same period as Bush's presidency, David Duke got himself elected to the Louisiana legislature and then set his sights on the governor's mansion, and this, everyone agreed, was a crisis. No one was more upset about it than Republicans like Bush, who feared that Duke might be taken as representative of a part of the Republican party and give it a bad name. Duke didn't stagger around calling people "niggers" and calling for a return to slavery. He talked about rising crime rates and too much money going to welfare families and a society gone to hell in a handbasket because of excess tolerance of the wrong sort and government sticking its nose in where it didn't belong and making things hard for Mister and Missus Lily-White.
In other words, he talked like Ronald Reagan and like a hundred other Republicans who had learned to speak in code to white bigots who felt that some measure of their freedom had been curtailed because black kids could sit next to their kids on the bus. The problem was, Duke had been a self-proclaimed Nazi and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. If Duke had appeared out of nowhere in 1989 with no paper trail and no photos of him wearing stastikas and prancing around his college campus toting a sign reading "GAS THE CHICAGO 7", there would have been no reason for the media or his fellow Republicans to object to the obvious racist strain in his positions and statements; it would have been as okay as it had been with Reagan and Bush, because it would have been "just politics." But Duke's past made it uncomfortably likely that he wasn't simply pandering to open-mouthed hillbilly bigots. Everyone agreed that he had no place in American politics, because he meant what he said.
Rush Limbaugh called jesse Jackson a chocolate chip cookie. He told aa African-American caller to take the bone out of his nose. Just google him, he's made endless racist comments throughout his career. Are you seriously claiming he hasn't made racist comments?
You can ignore national commentators with audiences of millions yet one comment by a boxer and this is more evidence to you that you're an oppressed ethnic group. No the wonder America is so fucked up.
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I don't get that one.....he's definently pushed the envelope but I figured you were going to use the "Barack the magic negro" as your example, when it was originally a story done by a guy at the LA Times and Rush just made fun of it....I'm not a fan of his, especially recently with his opposition to John McCain and Mike Huckabee.
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