Earning Cred, Republican Style

So, suppose you're a Republican running for arguably the most powerful internal position in the GOP: Chair of the Republican National Committee. You're running for the job to be the person in charge of the GOP's new strategy to take back Washington. How do you go about raising your profile among GOP bigwigs over the holiday season?

Well, if you're former Huckabee campaign guru Chip Saltsman, you put out some swag bags complete with holiday tuneage.

RNC candidate Chip Saltsman’s Christmas greeting to committee members includes a music CD with lyrics from a song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” first played on Rush Limbaugh’s popular radio show.

Saltsman, a personal friend of conservative satirist Paul Shanklin, sent a 41-track CD along with a note to national committee members.
“I look forward to working together in the New Year,” Saltsman wrote. “Please enjoy the enclosed CD by my friend Paul Shanklin of the Rush Limbaugh Show.”

The CD, called “We Hate the USA,” lampoons liberals with such songs as “John Edwards’ Poverty Tour,” “Wright place, wrong pastor,” “Love Client #9,” “Ivory and Ebony” and “The Star Spanglish banner.”

Several of the track titles, including “Barack the Magic Negro,” are written in bold font.

The song, which debuted on Limbaugh’s show in late March 2007, latches onto an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times of the same title. That column, penned by cultural critic David Ehrenstein, argued that Obama could serve as a balm to whites who felt guilty about past treatment of African Americans.

Limbaugh first highlighted the column the day it ran, according to a contemporary report by Media Matters, the liberal watchdog agency. Media Matters reported Limbaugh repeated the phrase more than two dozen times the day the column ran.

The following month, Shanklin debuted his version of the song, sung to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and performed in Shanklin’s impression of Al Sharpton.

“See, real black men, like Snoop Dogg, or me, or Farrakhan, have talked the talk, and walked the walk, not come in late and won,” one verse in the song says.

The GOP. Because being a racist asshole never goes out of style, and that's what passes as a positive among the party elite.

As I've said time and time again, if you think the campaign season was the worst the GOP could possibly get, wait until the wing of the party that honestly believes they lost because they were way too soft on the President-Elect finishes purging the moderates from the party, and galvanizes every racist, bigoted, homophobic, hate-filled impulse into a party platform and long-term strategy to "take the country back for real America and God."

You ain't seen nothin' yet.