Sullivan today, on Republicans and race:
These people are going off the deep end entirely: open panic at a black president is morphing into the conscious fanning of racial polarization, via Gates or ACORN or Van Jones or a schoolbus in Saint Louis. What we're seeing is the Jeremiah Wright moment repeated and repeated. The far right is seizing any racial story to fan white fears of black power in order to destroy Obama. And the far right now controls the entire right.Do they understand how irresonsible this is? How recklessly dangerous to a society's cohesion and calm? Or is that what they need and thrive on?
Yes they do. And what we've been seing in recent days is not so much the replaying of a Jeremiah Wright Moment but a Willie Horton Moment, because that's how long they've been playing politics with the white man's Negro Terror. Why? Because they found out that Fear Works---that the stoking of racial anxieties is a powerful motivator in the lives of many rural white voters. Bill Clinton, a political prodigy of the dingbat South, was able to preempt the GOP on the issue in the '92 primary season with his self-righteous scolding of an obscure rap artist, but otherwise, race-baiting Democrats has been a staple of the Republican Party playbook for decades. They've just got a bigger microphone, and a much more powerful amplifier, than they had in the late 1980s, which is the only reason why their deliberate fomenting of racial hysteria seems so much more pronounced today.
And unless Barack Obama can somehow change the color of his skin . . . well, we are in for an ugly ride for awhile.
---Vitelius
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