The Fix

THE GOP: FISHERS OF (WHITE) MEN

I recently had an illuminating conversation with my father. He was in management in the defense industry for years until he retired, causing him to hate Republicanism with a white hot passion. He can’t wait to pull the lever for Obama.

He had just returned from a Canadian fishing trip with five “Blue Collar American” types in their seventies. He told me he was worried about Barack Obama’s chances. “Some people are pretty racist,” he said.

I told him, “Think of it like sports. They said that Black men couldn’t be quarterbacks. Now it’s normal. Then they said Black men couldn’t be head coaches. They excelled. Then they said Black men couldn’t be owners…”

“But son,” he interrupted, “these guys don’t even like football! Get it?”

“What? Why not?”

“Too many Black people!”

I didn’t ask him why he had friends like that. If you grew up in Blue Collar America before the 1980s, the answer to that is self-evident: a person needs friends.

Anyway, having already exhausted “articulate”, “attractive”, “Muslim”, “naturally gifted”, “exotic” and the like, it is slowly dawning on the GOP’s that all of their “cleverness” might be accomplishing the opposite of what they intended: it may be inoculating people against code words. Now what?

I listened to Rush Limbaugh the other week, and he was laying out The Plan (beyond the one wherein we are winning the war). I hope you don’t have a full stomach and remember, I heard this with my own ears (though obviously I will be paraphrasing). Sigh. Here goes:

The Obama candidacy is part of a George Soros plot to rule the world. No surprise there. Then it gets ugly. Soros is so evil, so amoral and power hungry that he has trained a Black man to behave like a President! When the cameras aren’t rolling, when he doesn’t have a teleprompter to read someone else’s words, he isn’t so “articulate”. His speech is dull, slow and halting. In other words George Sauros has painstakingly trained Stepin Fetchit to ACT LIKE JFK!! WAKE UP AMERICA!

I shit you not, this is their plan (that and painting Michelle as a “ho”). Yep. Count on it. McCain will wag his finger and scold and denounce the offending miscreants, but he’ll have the smell of it all over him.

Back to Dad. “Well Dad,” I said, “these guys would never have voted for a Democrat anyway, no matter who it was.”

“Nah,” he laughed, “I don’t think that they ever vote at all.”