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Next time.

Your response was nothing more than a rant to get another “brownshirt” off your chest.

Nice dodge.

It used to be that Republicans were the party of Abolition, and Democrats the Pro-Slavery faction. This dichotomy was the result of economic and historical conditions, not philosophical positions. During the harsh Reconstruction after the Civil War, the Southern Democrats came to resent the Northern Republicans who they correctly perceived as the source of occupation, oppression and the Carpetbagger. This helped solidify racism as a truly toxic psychosocial pathology having little to do with political or economic issues. It led directly to the KKK and Jim Crow, black voter suppression, segregation and all the rest. Black folks, for their part, tended to vote Republican.

What I personally witnessed growing up in the Deep South (with the helpful perspective of a Latin not culturally saturated by, and therefore realistically aware of, local prejudices) was a reversal of this traditional division. America was undergoing the Civil Rights movement, and the GOP’s Southern Strategy was to systematically exploit this ancient regional divide and Southern Democratic fears for political advantage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

The strategy was first adopted under future Republican President Richard Nixon and Republican Senator Barry Goldwater[6][7] in the late 1960s.[8] The strategy was successful in winning 5 formerly Confederate states in both the 1964 and 1968 presidential elections. It contributed to the electoral realignment of some Southern states to the Republican Party, but at the expense of losing more than 90 percent of black voters to the Democratic Party. As the twentieth century came to a close, the Republican Party began attempting to appeal to black voters again, though with little success.[8]

In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the NAACP for ignoring the black vote and exploiting racial conflicts.[9][10]

Since then, conservative apologists and revisionists have vainly attempted to rewrite history and dissociate their party from this strategy, (perhaps because they themselves are not personally racist?) but it was real and it was obvious at the time. I saw it, I knew what was happening while I saw it happening around me, before it even had a name. I was there.

It is this personal experience that has led to my remarks on this topic. It is not that Conservative principles lead inevitably to racism. That is nonsense, after all, there are black Conservatives.

But the truth remains, the modern Republican Party continues to follow this policy, not only in regards to racism, but as it applies to other social and cultural pathologies that characterize the constituencies they have come to increasingly rely on for votes. This includes religious fundamentalism, extreme nationalism, nativism, militarism, anti-science attitudes, conspiracy theories, irrational suspicion and downright hatred of women, homosexuals, intellectuals, academics and the press.

You’ve seen it happen yourself; some racist bigot stands up in a town hall (or even in Congress) spouting venomous birther nonsense and the Republican candidate (who may not be a racist or extremist himself) simply winks and nods and makes no attempt to correct or chastise the rabble-rouser. As far as I know, only one Republican (Sen John McCain) made the effort to put one of these redneck yahoos in their place, and it only earned him the hatred and mistrust of his own party.

This is pandering to the worst aspects and sickness in the American psyche for a few votes, and the Republican Party will pay a bitter price for this perverse sycophancy. It has unleashed a monster, created a Frankenstein, and events now in Congress and on the street testify that this beast will not go away after it has helped the Right achieve political domination. They will turn on you, as a matter of fact, they already have. The GOP can no longer control its own Brownshirts. Welcome to Weimar Amerika, RINO.

Being light-skinned and married many wonderful years to a dark woman of Jamaican descent, I could spot them, but only when I was with her, and particularly when I held her hand. On my own, I hadn’t a clue, which was occasionally heartbreaking when a friend met my wife and the racist was revealed. To clarify a bit, I could sometimes see it in other races, but not with the Red Man, and not the White Eyes. Funny that. I may be blind to those, but they flare out when a mixed marriage is found.

It seems my experience that most racists simply need a bit of educating, but we must bear in mind the dark, sinister seed that’s been growing throughout their childhood is wired into their thinking, and so remains. There is no way to completely abolish it.

Like hard drugs and hard drinking, there is really no clear cure to the addiction. For some it lessens, where logic wins a slight foothold, but even then it remains an ongoing battle, all the way to the racist’s deathbed. Not entirely hopeless, but not always all-consuming either.

Cheers to all here.

You wouldn’t know the whereabouts of a good shoeshine would you? The leather on my jackboots is a little dry.

And of course, I’m paying attention. I’ve been trying to avoid overt political commentary lately, but you certainly can’t expect me to ignore a direct challenge, especially when so gleefully posted on Flame.

Seriously, though, the germ of truth in any workable joke is there, otherwise the joke would be a non-event. Where that germ might lie, though, could require a modicum of research.