Yeah I think Jonah Goldberg has been spewing similar nonsense recently.

Black is really white. Up is really down. Liberals are actually fascists.

Go give the pantload a hug. Tell him I said hi.

So while Rush using the word “spade” is both shocking and odd to my ears. It kind of goes back to the Malcolm X northern racist vs. southern racist thing. In someways I’d rather hear it because it’s much easier to label and call it out. It’s racism in its underwear. You can kind of laugh at it and go “Really?!?? You’re reaching back to the 1930’s for your racial slurs.”

But the graphic of Obama is another issue. It’s meant to play on all our xenophobia and racism without coming out and saying it. In alot of ways it’s much more dirty and ugly to me. You really gotta’ read the article that goes along with it to get the full impact of just how underhanded it is. It makes a bunch of statements of “fact” about Obama many of which are unarguably true. I’ve had more than a few people point out to me that his middle name was Hussein in an arched eye-brow “You know what that means wink-wink nudge-nudge” sort of way. Then I’ll call them on it and ask, “Why is that important to you?” and before long the conversation devolves into “Are you calling me a racist? That really is his middle name.” And I’m never really sure how to handle it.

Remember: it was the Democrats who were brought kicking and screaming to the Civil rights Act.

And within days of arriving in California, I started hearing people attack “Orientals” as a category. There was this guy for instance who was leaving Caltech (just as I was arriving, all full of enthusiasm and pride I had managed to get in) and gave as his reasons that there were “too many [gays, though that’s not the term he used] and”–actually I think that maybe he actually said “Asians” which was remarkable in 1983. Or maybe he said “Chinese.” Whatever; although one of my “gee, there’s more racism than I thought in my own circles” epiphanies I had before leaving high school did involve people being racist against a half-Asian girl, I had thought that anti-Asian bigotry was especially a thing of the past. Nope, alive (well, undead anyway) and “well” here on the West Coast.

Anyway except for the n-word, most of the more outrageous slurs I have only heard in movies or read in books.

But I really don’t get out much.

After all, “son of a Luo tribesman” isn’t a common insult either (although it does sound like something Captain Haddock might say).

This is the way he and his listeners need to be dealt with: like children.

What I didn’t understand is that we heard very little about how swiftboater Jerome Corsi said things like “Hellary,” “Chubby Chelsea” and “Mullah Ali’Gore-ah is proud of his regulation Osama beard” on freerepublic–and the only things that happened were that his role in the “Unfit for Command” book was slightly “reduced,” but he got exposure to consider moving to MA to run against Kerry in the Senate.

Whereas Amanda and Melissa get run off a campaign for making far less controversial comments about Catholics.

Tell you what, Rush. Maybe I’ll head out to my garden shed and fetch my real spade and hoe. I’ll shove one down your throat and one up your fat ass.

Sorry, you were saying something?

1. Just because it’s old and uncommon doesn’t mean it’s not offensive any more.
and
2. Racists do so looooooove to use those “dogwhistle” words… and thus “spade” is back as a term of offense.