Luckie Duckie Black People

by dday

It takes a special dementia and a deep-seated sense of aggrievement to come up with this statement:

On the June 2 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, while discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, Rush Limbaugh asserted that the Democratic Party was “go[ing] with a veritable rookie whose only chance of winning is that he’s black.”

I think we can take a look at the 230-year record of African-Americans in the electoral arena and make a decent judgment on this one. But this is standard-issue Nixonland backlash stuff. “The blacks” get the jobs, the government handouts, the special treatment, and now they’re being handed the Presidency. That’s the particular view of the world that Limbaugh is endorsing here. The Republican Party, demoralized and frustrated, is hoping to rile up the country with an identity politics-based campaign intended to speak to white people as a captive, persecuted minority against the big, bad un-American black majority waiting to install themselves in the White House and send every Caucasian to a re-education camp. As Jesse Taylor (welcome back!) at Pandagon writes, by the end of this campaign…

Obama is going to become Blackazoid, the Nubian Avenger, here to right all the perceived wrongs black people illegitimately feel were heaped on them since we solved racism in 1963. Reparations? He wants them. Islam? Prepare to pay a prayer mat fee for your kids’ next school year. I can’t wait to hear the shit we didn’t even know was racist – did you know Obama wants to put elastic bands on all our pants? And ban straws?

Blackness is about to become the best privilege imaginable, and stories of disadvantaged white people the new currency of the Republican realm.

This is inevitable, and as the election grows closer it’s only going to get more overtly offensive.

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