My experience confirms what my eyes see. I grew up in a racist culture, in the early 1950s in southeastern Pennsylvania. I worked in the steel mills; I served in the Navy. I know what subtle, as well as not-so-subtle, racism looks like. I know the stereotypes, the jokes, the epithets. And I know racism when I see it.
It doesn't help the lions' protest that that darling of the radical right, "Joe the Plumber" (AKA Sam the Fraud) recently published on his blog a piece by Kevin Jackson explaining why "America Needs a White Republican President" (not dignified with a link; look it up yourself).
Jackson sympathetically explains to his readers, "Before you start feeling like a racist, understand that you are not."
Sorry, but I have to call road apples on that. Racist is exactly what you are.
Were it not so, you would have realistic political goals, economic goals. You would have plans. You would have strategies. You would have contingencies. You would have an endgame. And there would be consistency, logic, and coherence in your arguments. You would stand for something.
But there is none of that. Instead, you know only what you are against. And, at the fundament of it all, you are against Obama. You oppose everything he thinks, touches, or stands for.
You won't even take free government money to extend Medicaid to your neediest citizens, most of whom voted for Obama -- if you allowed them to vote at all. You sure don't mind taking free government money to help farmers and oil companies, though. And you sure as hell don't mind taking free government money to help yourselves, do you?
This can't last; it won't last. If matters are not sorted out in the 2014 mid-term elections, they will be clarified after 2016. Then we will see with our eyes just how much commitment and how much staying power the tea party factions of the extreme right really have.
My guess is that the answer will be, "Not much." After Obama leaves office and the Affordable Care Act is fully and successfully implemented, the tea party and its minions will demonstrate finally to their financiers that they are more of a liability than an asset -- to the country and to their own parochial interests.
At that point the denizens of Wingnuttia will tea-party hearty into the sunset, grumbling to each other about how they coulda, shoulda, woulda impeached that black so-and-so if only they had stood their ground on the shutdown and default. Or on immigration. Or gun control. Or the birth certificate. Or whatever.
Then we will know: it was never about Obamacare at all. It was always about Obama.
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