Next It Will Be Sheets and Hoods

It has been going on since the election... the lowest and most vicious of Obama's opponents have been subtlety adding a racial 'color' to their attacks. For the most part it has been very carefully worded but if you took a second look you could hear the dog whistle. Most recently it was Saxby Chambliss warning the president to show humility during his speech or Joe Wilson's shout "You Lie! and carefully leaving the 'boy' word unsaid but understood. Apparently, the time for carefully shaded remarks is over and unvarnished racism and race-baiting is now the order of the day.

It apparently started with a headline on Drudge: "White Student Beaten on School Bus; Crowd Cheers." What makes a fist fight among teenagers on a school bus in St. Louis national news is beyond me but since it was a black kid hitting a white kid it was evidently serious enough for the far right to make it important on a national scale.

While a number of wingnuts jumped on the story as an excuse to accuse President Obama of creating a new era of black on white hate, Rush Limbaugh took the prize for the most unvarnished race-baiting of the day when he decided that somehow President Obama is responsible for this tragic event.

"It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,' and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white."

It doesn't appear to matter that the event wasn't racially motivated but rather the result of some bullies who like to dictate who sits where on the bus. Of course, the truth doesn't matter when it comes to the real goal of the far right which is to try and transfer their racial hatred of the president to as many of their mouth breathing listeners as possible. The mostly sane and somewhat civilized among us recognize and revile this kind of crap for the hateful and dangerous thing that it is. Many of us lived through Jim Crow and the pain of the civil rights movement and remember how this kind of talk strains the fabric of our society. I had actually believed that except for a small fringe of society that we had moved beyond this sort of thing and never would I have believed that such transparently racist language would be on national media. The real tragedy is that it will get worse and that it will most likely trigger some kind of violence but even if no one gets hurt physically it will generate emotional pain and foster hatred and sadly Limbaugh and his cohorts will not suffer any consequences for their nasty discourse.

This is a terrible fire the far right are unleashing and something that will burn us all.

Update: Some more reading.
MoDo thinks it is.

Jimmy Carter thinks it is.

Cynthia Tucker thinks it is.