The Double-Wide of Manufactured Crises


Kristol's latest spew is just one of a series of wingnut measures attempting to define the election downward until "choice" becomes something gutteral, or beneath logic.

And it's not like they haven't had a history of this sort of behavior, from the Southern Strategy to "strapping young bucks buying T-Bones with their Food Stamps" to Philadelphia, Mississippi to Cadillac driving welfare queens to Willie Horton...with the odd detour or two depending on particular circumstances.

Indeed, Reverend Wright--a United States Marine--has managed to land the at the very top perch of a particular wingnut's list of "n******s" (see Greenwald's penultimate post)--I'm surprised said winger didn't include Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, but 'nuts having a hissy fit aren't exactly cool-headed...forty years ago no doubt the list would've included Muhammed Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr., and perhaps a reference to the late Malcolm X and how he should be blamed for his own assassination. But the point here is that this is merely another version of Swift Boating, in this case reaching for the smelling salts and loudly sighing/falling on the fainting couch over a non-issue.

If Reverend Wright were white, it would all be alright. Anyone trying to argue otherwise is blowing smoke, and ultimately making a racist appeal. Period. End of story. And far from being the wrong time to examine race in America, now is as good a time as ever. Because the real fact is that wingers like Kristol, in insisting that "now's not the time" are in reality asserting that "it will never be the time," and are instead hoping to maintain THEIR policy of denial and cover-up of a significant issue...and if they can keep THAT from being discussed, imagine what else they can push aside with a "not now" wave of the hand...issues like a disastrous war...or a city surviving despite being actively abandoned by the federal government (a majority black city, by the way).

Now IS the time. And they don't have a defense for their racism...which is why they're so desperately trying to avoid the subject, even as they make it a pillar of their effort to defeat Barack Obama.