The Mirror Universe Has A Blog

And I'm getting increasingly convinced that it's the Daily Beast website. There's good stuff there most days, but this week not only can you read Amy Siskind's Palinocrat manifesto on why Obama is a misogynist bastard (and Betty Cracker's takedown of her PUMA nonsense is a classic mainly because it's so easy that Cookie Monster can do it) but you can check out Conor Friedersdorf's truly weird mumbled apology for the GOP's racism problem:

In the more familiar narrative, the Republican Party is cast on the wrong side of racial issues. The reputation isn’t entirely undeserved: luminaries William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater wrongly opposed key civil rights advances, for example. And even loyalists who defend Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy can hardly abide his racist remarks about blacks and Jews.

Today’s GOP is much improved, Confederate flag loving politicos notwithstanding. Say what you will about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Sarah Palin, but none are on the wrong side of America’s historic racial divide—just as your typical high-ranking Republican official, asked what he thinks about race, now reflexively invokes Martin Luther King’s ideal of color blindness.

That’s progress!

To his credit, Dick Cheney hates everyone equally, so it's not racism. And Bush and Palin aren't overt racists. But let's talk about the current leadership of the GOP, and let's talk about the fact that in 2009, all the GOP Senators are white.

I’d bet dollars to Freedom Fries that racial bigotry in America is now correlated with age, education level and region far more closely than political affiliation. Every so often, however, somewhere in America, a local GOP official or rank-and-file Republican disseminates an image of Barack Obama with a bone through his nose, or a drawing of a watermelon patch on the White House lawn, or most recently, a fried-chicken eating POTUS on a poster with a subhead denouncing miscegenation.

So racism doesn't correlate to party affiliation except for the numerous examples of the Republican Party officials who have demonstrated racism. Right.

What gives? How should the Republican Party deal with these situations? Probably your answer depends on whether you believe that the GOP is substantially racist, or that these incidents are anomalies—the lamentable behavior of an anachronistic subset of the party.

I'm gonna go with the former, considering you can count the number of GOP minorities in Congress on one hand...and let's face it, it's not like the GOP is nice to Latinos or Asians either.

Among the many Republicans I’ve known and with whom I’ve interacted, racism is very much the exception. Granted, I’ve lived only in few coastal American cities. Beyond them, I don’t know what the average Republican is like (or the average Democrat, for that matter).

Try growing up as an adopted black kid in western NC in the late 70's and you have a different take on the matter of what is institutionalized across the mindset of a culture.

Sheesh.