Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Does the Republican Party have any shame when it comes to exploiting racism?

Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1984 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, as an unspoken salute to the Klan (and later made an explicit salute to Nazis at the Bitberg cemetery).

Poppy Bush spooked white America with the specter of Dukakis unleashing hordes of crazed, convict negroes on law-abiding citizens.

And W push-polled 2000 primary voters in South Carolina with questions about challenger John McCain's "black" baby (the Arizona senator has adopted a child from Bangladesh).

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(No doubt that this year, some in the GOP will be eager to tell white cracker voters that John Kerry's Mozambique-born wife is... an African!)

Dawn's distaste for Republicans is matched by contempt for white American voters, so easily led to vote against their own economic interests in order to demonstrate their precious whiteness. Of course, Democrats' anemic approach to race (and class) is also contemptible. Why doesn't candidate Kerry demand W explain just what he was doing when querying voters about McCain's "black" baby? Why doesn't Kerry hammer away at all-but-Klan-members Bush has appointed to the judiciary?

The United States was conceived in a malodorous silence about the most pressing moral issue of the time: slavery (which, no matter how you look at it, trumps any tax on tea when it come to moral weightiness...). Our constitution never mentions the "peculiar institution." The rot was finally exposed during the Civil War, only to be allowed to re-fester as Jim Crow set in.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights struggle once again lanced boil, but, as before, the wound closed over with the putrescence still fermenting.

Today's political racists, like W, know not to mention the n-word (at least, not around an open mic...), but make no mistake, they're playing on the same bigotries that have delivered so many national elections to the GOP in recent decades. The "solid (white racist, i.e., Republican) South" is a product of LBJ's signature on civil rights legislation. That signature should be a political asset in a land of fair-minded people. Let's hope Kerry finds his voice and a way to-- again-- lance the boil....