Chip Saltsman is a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, who's been involved in some controversy over his Christmas gift to committee members: a "comedy" CD including the song 'Barack the Magic Negro', which had debuted on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the CD has only increased his profile and given fire to his once dark-horse bid to become the leader of the national Republican Party. His chief rival, incumbent Duncan Hunter, is naturally appalled. Obama himself laughs off the matter.
I'm sure that some have taken genuine offense to the song. I’m not even remotely offended by the song. I also don’t think it’s funny, in the least, really (get it? He’s black! That’s the joke!), but it’s an acceptable bit of "political satire", again, as long as you think “He’s black!” is a suitably witty punchline. The issue is that we’re talking about the chairman of the party. The leader of one of two political parties in the United States should probably have better sense and better taste than to send around negro jokes for Christmas.
To send out dozens of copies of a song that makes fun of the President-elect of the United States of America for being black isn’t (necessarily) racist, and it’s absolutely within the bounds of free expression. It’s also tasteless and just disrespectful when coming from the aspiring leader of one of our two political parties. Seriously? He’s black? That’s the best you can do? I have one piece of advice for Republicans, and I’m dead serious about this: Get. Your. Shit. Together. The Democrats took eight years to do it, but we are running out of time. The west’s economic dominoes have only just begun to fall. We’re in the middle of two wars; nuclear powers India and Pakistan are moving ever-closer to the brink, while Israel and the Palestinian territories are engaged in a full-scale armed conflict. Nuclear Russia has recommitted to authoritarianism and antagonism. Dictators and religious zealots in North Korea and Iran probably don’t have nuclear weapons, yet. Disease and malnutrition are wiping out the generation of Africans that may have had a real shot at An environment hospitable to human life is no longer a given in the near term. This all may or may not be end-of-the-world-type shit, but it’s certainly moving uncomfortably in that direction. There's also the less immediate, similarly frightening stuff: the breakdown of habeus corpus, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretaps on your home phone, along with the fact that I don't share the same constitutional rights as you because I rather enjoy kissing other boys. We cannot have half of our electorate led by people who think black people are funny by virtue of their negro-ness and continue to feel that a person who cannot name a newspaper is a proper subject of sexual and political adulation. The democrats with their reflexive capitulation and pandering are bad enough--at least they seem to be placing some premium on competence. Still, I'm talking to all politicians when I say this: this is some serious shit. The craziest of my lifetime, easily, my parents lifetimes, certainly. It's almost a new year, so please, please, ditch the nigger jokes and all the other stupid-shit-that-we-do-not-have-time-for. Republicans can do better, Democrats can do better. We all have to do better. Or we'll all fucked.
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