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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taro who wrote (443259)	12/30/2008 2:36:45 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572348

Republican Racism "Obama Bucks" When a 19 year-old white supremacist was recently elected to the Palm Beach Republican Executive Committee, his victory created such an outcry that embarrassed local politicians used a technicality to block his taking office. The entire process was slapstick, although the views of the controversial son of the KKK Grand Wizard were anything but amusing. Events such as the stunning success of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, being elected to Congress in Louisiana occur every few years within the GOP, a reminder of the party's large and still-active racist faction. Even more frequent now are the off-key comments about President-Elect Obama's uppitiness, the GOP Senators whistling Dixie, GOP mailers featuring watermelon and fried chicken, and most recently, a party-endorsed CD that included "Barack the Magic Negro." All of this spite and hatred is just a symptom of the Republican Party's larger problem: it does not represent 21st century America. GOP Congressional representation is uniformly white and overwhelmingly male. There is not one African-American GOP member of Congress (out of 219 or 220); nor are there any black GOP governors. There are just four Republican Latinos in Congress, all Florida Cuban-Americans. And one of them is resigning. Among African-Americans, John McCain lost by 91%, and by a 2 to 1 margin among other ethnic and racial minority groups. The future hardly belongs to a party losing the nation's fastest-growing voter constituencies, who will be voting for decades to come. As it shrinks, the GOP is inverting; becoming whiter, more male, older, more Southern, more Christian-centric, and increasingly less able to appeal to voters or candidates who do not fit its narrow mold. Conservatives have long hidden behind a disdain for quotas, political correctness and diversity to explain away the supremacy of white men in the forefront of the Republican Party. The subtext, of course, is that selection and election are based on competence, not on gender, race or ethnicity. And it's just a coincidence that the most competent candidates are white. Always. Concerning Bush's presidency, we can be grateful for one thing: the white male leadership of the Republican Party finally showed the entire world that GOP cronyism, loyalty, corruption, and discrimination completely outweigh any shred of competence. Heckuva job, Brownie. The GOP can no longer count on white male votes to carry its divisive, racially-prejudiced agenda because there are proportionately fewer white male voters and because outside of Dixie and Appalachia, white voters are increasingly repelled by the Republican Party's negative, regressive philosophy. GOP leaders have watched this trend while one predominantly white suburb after another has fallen to the Democrats. And for years they have been hanging their hopes on the perceived social conservatism of African-American and Catholic Latino voters. The 2008 elections put the final nail in that coffin. Presumably conservative non-white voters stayed away from the GOP in larger numbers than ever before, despite the standard tactical Republican gay-baiting and Muslim-bashing. Those who wanted to take a stand in California, Florida and Arizona, voted against same-sex marriage rights, but for liberal candidates. Young voters in particular turned on McCain with revulsion, although he hardly represents the party's most socially conservative wing. The GOP's rush to out-Christian itself is not likely to draw voting blocks other than evangelical Christians, while excluding rapidly-growing voting populations of Latinos, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and agnostics. If the GOP cannot hold on to religious America it is doomed. The Republican Party's Southern Strategy, which seemed so cynically brilliant as recently as the 2001 election, has backfired so badly that even parts of the Confederacy, such as Virginia and North Carolina, are now dominated by liberal Democrats. It is no coincidence that at the same time, the GOP has shriveled into a more evangelical Christian white man's party. Like a restricted country club that would rather die than admit coloreds, the GOP is marginalizing itself for the sake of the wealthy white men who own it. "Barack The Magic Negro," "That One" and the election of the Palm Beach Klansman are only emphatic manifestations of a party that has wallowed for so long in the privileges of its Christian white male supremacy that it cannot realize that everyone has fled the plantation and they are not coming back. folsomtelegraph.com