A tale with a moral

More evidence that pickling one's brain in OxyContin is not a good thing.

In one of the silliest clown shows we've seen in a while, Republican National Committee Chairman Kenn Mehlman told an NAACP convention that he was real sorry about his Party's notorious Nixonian "Southern Strategy": GOP Rejects Its Past in Courting Black Support by Edwin Chen Los Angeles Times 07/15/05.

"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said, according to his prepared remarks. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Though the "Southern strategy" helped Nixon win the White House in 1968, Democrats solidified their support among black voters in ensuing decades, as Mehlman acknowledged.

Bush agreed with Mehlman's remarks, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. "Ken said it was wrong to try and benefit from racial polarization. We agree fully," McClellan said. "That is why the president has always reached out to people from all walks of life."

This is all bullfeathers, of course.  And it's not aimed at winning African-American voters for the GOP.  It's aimed at giving white suburban swing voters who would like to think they were above crass racial prejudices a fig-leaf to pretend that today's Republicans still are in some tiny way "the party of Lincoln."

The Southern Strategy was a more complex business than simply pandering to white prejudice.  Nixon wanted to capture the "white backlash" vote in the Deep South without alienating too many of the moderate Republican voters.  In those days, there were even a few people in Congress who were known as "liberal Republicans."  Yes, it's true.  It's not just a fairy tale, such creatures existed!  Long, long ago it was...

Ironically, part of the way that Nixon did this was to enforce civil rights laws and court decisions on desegregation, while dragging his feet on doing so just long enough to signal to segregationist Southern whites that the Nixon Republicans sympathized with their "plight."  The final desegregation of public schools in several Southern states occurred during the Nixon administration.

Enforcing desegregation was upsetting to the diehard segregationists and to many moderate Southerners whose "moderation" didn't amount to much more than considering it too low-class to use the n-word.  But the Republicans could tell their constituents in New York and Oregon that they were proceding with enforcing civil rights laws.

One of the biggest ironies was that it was the Nixon administration that set up affirmative action as an enforcement method for anti-discrimination laws.  In those days, it was understood to be a moderate, pro-business method.  In other words, if a company was caught in blatantly discriminatory hiring practices, they could avoid fines or criminal penalties by coming up with an affirmative action plan.

So, this hokey posturing by Mehlman at the NAACP convention is standard Republican hot air.  Meanwhile, Dear Leader Bush was avoiding the convention:

President Bush has declined to attend the NAACP convention every year since he took office, and on Thursday he spoke instead to an African American business and cultural convention here, telling thousands of conventioneers that his initiatives had led to historic gains for blacks in education, home ownership and small business ownership.

But those Reps have their own weird sense of humor:

In Indianapolis, Bush was introduced at the Indiana Black Expo by Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican who served as Bush's first-term budget director.

Daniels said there was "nothing that George W. Bush cares about more" than closing racial gaps in every measure of social and economic well being.

But Mr. OxyContin himself, the man who Dear Leader calls a "national treasure"- when Bush isn't working on the thing that's dearest to his heart, closing those racial gaps, of course - wasn't too happy with all this Republicans making nice with Negroes business.  Rush didn't like that at all.  Media Matters has the story  and an audio clip, too: Limbaugh blasted Mehlman's renunciation of GOP racial tactics: "Republicans are going to go bend over and grab the ankles" 07/14/05.  In his comments, Rush uses NAALCP, which is OxyContin-speak for "National Association for the Advancement of Liberal Colored People."

Steve Gilliard, a well-known African-American blogger, summarized Mr. Oxycontin's position this way (Apologize? 07/14/05):

Translation:

Why, us Missouri folks don't apologize to niggers. In Cape Giradeau, we'd chase you out of town if you lowered yourself to apologize to a coon. We never brooked such foolishness. Niggers should be happy we let them live in this country.

See, Rush is a white supremacist. He won't say it, but despite the fact that the GOP hd small gains with blacks, should be a reason to encourage this. But not for Rush. He'd never lower himself to treat niggers as humans. He may play nice, but he destests black people.

This is not the first time Gilliard has found occasion to harsh on the "national treasure" dopehead.  Back in 2003, when Rush got in a little trouble with the law for his "national treasure" drug addiction, Steve quoted a few of Limbaugh's Free Republic admirers and wrote (The denial is strong in this one 10/03/03):

What world do these people live in? Freeper world, where Hillary lurks behind every corner and Rush couldn't be a racist pig dope fiend.

And in Sympathy for the Devil (10/02/03), he wrote:

Some foolish people may have some sympathy for the racist pig drug fiend Limbaugh, and I can understand that emotion. We all want to be decent, human beings, and not stick a shiv in the formerly bloated hillbilly heroin junkie, but that sympathy is misplaced. He doesn't deserve an ounce of it because he never had any for anyone else. If, oh, David Brooks, developed a smack habit, I would hope he'd go into recovery and I wouldn't find much humor in that human weakness. It's one thing to despise a man's politics, another to despise his person. ...

But with the racist pig drug fiend Limbaugh, the rules are very different. This is a man who specialized in kicking people when they were down. He suggested Hillary Clinton was a murderer and Bill Clinton a rapist. And unlike Coulter and the rest of the blonde bimbocracy, he's taken seriously by people in power. People listen to Coulter in direct proportion to their desire to see her naked. People believe the racist pig drug fiend Limbaugh and his distortions of the truth.

I notice in that post, from almost two years ago, Gilliard was talking about Karl Rove and the Valerie Plame outing.  This has been going on for a while.

But possibly his most inspired post on Rush was Limbaugh: pill-poppin' freak 10/02/03:

It must suck to be addicted to OxyContin. I feel so bad for him.......

NOT. [Cheney] his fat, drug addicted, racist ass. Freaking hypocrite junkie, sucking down Hillbilly Heroin like it was candy. It's one thing to respect someone's private sexual life, or to sympathize with someone's home being flooded with obscene phone calls. But when they rail against people, lack any form of human compassion, denigrate people based on race, insult others without regard for fact or logic, and do so with glee, well they get what their dope using ass deserves.

Referring to one of Rush's more controvesial moments, the one where he told a black caller to get the bone out of his nose, Steve wrote:

I find it amusing that he was popping pills like Fasto Goering, pretending to be some kind of moral guide for millions of Americans.

The whole business of prescription pill addiction is a sordid one, as Elvis found out. But instead of a Dr. Nick, the racist pig Limbaugh used his housekeeper. Grubby deals in Denny's parking lots, collecting thousands of pills. Drug addiction is always an ugly business, done in darkness and desperation. It pleases me to find Rush Limbaugh loitering there. Why shouldn't he spend his leisure time where he spends his workday. No force has been more destructive to honest debate than Limbaugh and his imitators. No person more deserves to be exposed as a dope-using fraud. Take the bone out of my nose? Hey Rush, take those pills out of your hand, you pill-popping dope fiend racist.

That post includes also some details about Rush's medications of choice.

The moral of this story:  stay away from OxyContin, kids.  Why do you think they call it "dope"?