McCain the Maverick Guttersnipe Brings on the White Girls, the Black Guy and Race

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin

Editor and Publisher

August 1, 2008

Okay, McCain challenges Obama to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama accepts the challenge and tosses in Europe (tracing a path McCain took earlier this year) and is greeted as a hero.

So the McCain camp panics and starts trashing Obama for being "uppity" (you know, as in "uppity negro" -- a characterization that the Washington Post is helping perpetuate) -- and the right-wing talking points spread across FOX and the GOP radio shill circuit that Obama was acting arrogant, usurping foreign policy, and drawing crowds only because there were opening bands that people were interested in seeing. (We are not making this up.)

Meanwhile, most of the mainstream corporate media -- having nothing better to do and continuing to perpetuate the myth that their role is to report both sides rather than to ascertain the truth -- goes along with actually seriously discussing a bizarre, Rovian (remember that he is an advisor to McCain) series of "attack ads" on Obama, squeezed in before the Olympics in a moment of panic. The panic is due to the fact that, on Obama's overseas tour, foreign leaders -- especially in Iraq -- took a distinctive tilt toward Obama's foreign policy goals. In fact, even Bush and McCain himself (depending on which McCain was speaking) started sidling toward Obama's positions in regards to the never-ending war and European relationships.

Fortunately, some of the corporate press did denounce the ludicrous attack on Obama for not going to a military hospital as bunkum. BuzzFlash stated that the McCain campaign had two headlines prepared for the Germany military hospital trip. If it didn't happen they were going to say, "Obama snubs soldiers." If it did happen, they were going to say, "Obama opportunistically exploits our injured soldiers." It turns out, from reports yesterday, that we were correct. The McCain campaign had prepared two such contradictory message points.

Now, McCain is unleashing what has become known as the Harold Ford "Black Man is Keen on White Women Primal Racism Fear" ad. Why toss tabloid fodder like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in with Obama? Yes, perhaps to claim that he is all celebrity and no substance, but it was also to subliminally bring the "Harold Ford" factor into play: you can't trust a black man with white women.

It's the most basic racist fear that the Republicans have played on for years: black men threaten white women, which threatens white men, and subconsciously brings the whole issue of race to the forefront of the campaign.

So when Barack Obama joked the other day that the add was made to remind people that he didn't look like the other presidents on dollar bills, McCain's campaign manager, with a straight face and feigned indignation, accused Obama of injecting race into the campaign.

Then McCain himself chimed in, as prompted, to say that he agreed that Obama was bringing race into the campaign and how scurrilous that was.

You see, this is called, according to George Lakoff, keeping the elephant in the room, a most appropriate metaphor considering that dangerous Republican demagogues are on the loose. The more that McCain's campaign can bring up race, while blaming it on Obama, the more that race becomes an issue in the subconscious mind of many voters when they cast their ballots.

Racism isn't rational. Obama is monogamous; trust us on this one. So what threat, even in a bizarre hypothetical, would Obama pose to white women? Why none, but we are talking about exploiting the deep racial fears that hide in the deplorable recesses of the American soul going back to slavery, Reconstruction, and the rise of the modern Republican Party. This fear led to many a lynching if a black man so much as glanced sideways at a comely Southern white woman.

McCain, at this point, should be disqualified as a candidate. He has made so many gaffes that if elected it would be like having Captain Crunch run the nation, along with his financially and morally compromised Phil Gramm, who will pick the pockets of all those male racists out there who shoot up "liberal" churches because they blame progressives for their lot in life, when it's the Republicans who have economically fleeced them.

McCain ought to be confined to a neo-Confederacy assisted living center and finally leave his wife in peace.

To call the Spears, Hilton, Obama ad a new low in politics is to underestimate McCain's ability to sink lower than David Duke in Hell.

White male Americans don't need to protect their wives from Barack Obama. They need to protect the United States and their wallets from John McCain.

The guy is an immoral liar, who long ago lost his right to be called a hero.

Now, he's just a rabid junkyard dog with moral dementia.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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