Stoopid Stuff

It's Like if you Went Through the Looking Glass, Only to Find Another Looking Glass

Sure, Michal Steele is willfully tone-deaf on any kind of social justice issue, and sure, irony crawled under George Bush's personal oval office carpet, curled up and died nearly a decade ago, but some things are just so amazingly, blatantly idiotic that even after you go back and read it a second time, you still think you must have mis-read it.

Stuff like this, from Think Progress this morning. Yes, THAT Michael Steele. The black one. The one who seems to think that the key civil rights issue facing Americans in 2009 in the oppression and unfair treatment of white men. A man who, in his own lifetime, has seen black men murdered, wrongly incarcerated, prosecuted and executed at a rate that far outstrips their representative population. One can only shake one's head when you realize that, yes, the Republican party IS actually going to base it's platform on resistance to the oppression of white men. The sense of entitlement, and it's coinciding sense of victimhood as their grip on total power slips away, is breathtaking.

And now there's this. Bay Buchanan, a terrifying aggregation of her husband's hate and bigotry and her own massive dishonesty had an assistant who was convicted of a hate crime. She knew about it, but it wasn't widely distributed knowledge, and ultimately he only more honestly expressed the actual beliefs of the organizations that employed him, so she quite happily kept him on staff. Of course, in Washington, everything eventually comes out, and so this ugly, sordid story exploded on the Internet this week. And while this guy was rightfully pilloried for his bizarre and ugly felony, his employer saw fit not just to defend him, but to describe his treatment as a "lynching". That's right. Lynching. As if there was some equivalence between pointing out that an organization actively involved in attempting to preserve the traditional privilege of white males employed a man convicted of a race-based hate crime and the torture and murder of people for no other reason than their skin was a different color.

The grip the extreme right has come to exert over Republican party politics cannot last. Virtually everything they do, every position they take, and every time they cling to ideology to the detriment of the vast majority of the American people they lose more ground. They really only represent the deep South, where their constituency lives in fear of freedom, human rights and diversity, and will only elect leaders who they believe will shield them from the future. Whether there is a path back to sanity and electoral success for the Republicans, or another party will arise to provide modern, realistic opposition to the center-right Democrats in power remains to be seen. But is does seem clear that while they are in the wilderness, struggling for relevance in a world that has passed them by, they are prepared to unleash an obscene, violent attack against the basic values that America stands for, and the more unhinged among them will serve as their shock troops. Of course, as with the previous administration, only those foot soldiers will be held accountable for the bloodshed...

posted by mikey @ 2:22 PM