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IN RESPONSE TO PREVIOUS POST ON DR. RAND PAUL

Writes reader Matador:

This is one of your best. Too bad it can not be published.

Every day we continue to see proof that having a half African in the white house does not mean a damn thing to American society.

My reply:

Thanks.

Rand Paul is so new that I did not catch in time a few more of his Libertarian bugaboos.

·       Wwants to overturn the Fair Housing Act.

·       Is in complete sympathy with BP, feeling it is being harshly accused and unfairly treated.

·       Wants to end farm subsidies.

·       Wants to close Gitmo.

Rand Paul cancelled a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press. Seeing that he will be Kentucky’s  Republican candidate in the fall, his handlers, obviously, are having conniptions. They most likely had to lock him in a room over the weekend and read him the Riot Act. It is amazing that, especially being from a political family, he has entered the world of Real Politic so unprepared. Of course, he’s probably trying to out-do “Dad;” but, even “Dad” had the moxie to curb his out-of-the-mainstream ideological musings sufficiently to get elected.

Getting back to the gist of the previous posting, we who have lived most of the last century are witnesses to the plethora of contortions of language that have been used by hardcore and apologist racists in order to achieve the ends of their hateful philosophy.

At this very moment, extreme right-wingers in Texas – along with other blasphemies on the record – are writing out slavery from the history books. They are reducing that horrendous blight on humanity to an unidentified, innocuous element of an international trade triangle.

In the 1930s, when those current-day Republicans were running the Democratic Party, the lynching of African Americans in the South went on unimpeded. Incredibly, Congress never was able to eke out an anti-lynching law! At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan, adorned in all of its lily-white finery, gleefully marched en masse down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital. During that period, African Americans were gently referred to in Congress as, “Nigras.”

Incidentally, during that same era, the Nazis also were on the march – in freakin’ Madison Square Garden, of all places! Anti-Semitism, also, was rife in this monument to equality and justice.

Together with politically alert schoolmates, I was outside the Convention Hall in Philadelphia, in the summer of 1948, when Harry S. Truman was nominated. It was his attempt to keep the office to which he was appointed upon the death of FDR. That convention marked the dissolution, on the national stage, of the White and Negro Democrats in the South. That same year, Truman ordered the racial integration of the armed forces.

After the landmark Supreme Court decisions of the 1950s, there followed turbulent 1960’s Viet Nam War protests and racist push-back in the South. Nixon saw his chance to capitalize on White resentment, and took it. That began the series of “Southern Strategies,” which, carried on by Reagan, ultimately drew resentful Whites from the South and made them a permanent part of the current Republican Party.

Having evolved to the point of eschewing direct racial confrontation, ethnic references to African Americans now were couched in terms such as, “Crime, Welfare, Inner-city, Poverty,” etc. When you heard of a, “Welfare Queen” or saw a criminal in a revolving door, you knew to whom they were referring. Similarly included were, “Innerr-city Crime” and“Poverty Pockets.”

Of course, a goodly part of the continued crucifixions of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are punishments for their audacity in daring to treat Black folk as legitimate citizens of the United States. No specific references need be made; the very essence of their being says it all. When these two sons of the South named the Tea Party and its antics of last summer for what it was, they earned eternal placement in the pantheon of, “Nigger Lovers.”

When the endless loop of Reverend Wright’s and Father Pfleger’s cris de Coeur failed to deter the rolling Obama juggernaut, Rush made his pronouncement and the Tea Party dutifully formed ranks. By then, it was as though Black folk did not exist. All of the vituperation was heaped upon the interloper in the White House. If the charges of, “Socialist, Communist, Nazi, Traitor” were not enough, then, the flagrant brandishing of firearms at Barack’s speaking venues provided the emphatic punctuation.

With all Blacks now neatly embodied in the permanent Obama lynch mode, the nation’s deep-seated racial animus (politically foolishly) is being directed toward Hispanics. In two successive legal volleys against racial minorities, Arizona has struck the standard that certain other states have vowed to follow. Of course, it is all properly packaged so as to conceal the true intent of those who feel their majority status to be quickly and threateningly diminished.

Now, comes Dr. Rand Paul, newly minted as a star of the Tea Party revolution. But, oops! – He and they, in their unorganized zeal and direct umbilical to the Republican Party – have not yet learned the language of concealment. Ergo, this weekend’s session in the wood shed.