May 5, 2007 
They can’t help themselves. It’s a syndrome. For that matter, what is it with righties and reality?
On a lighter note — the Saturday Cartoons.
Update: Here’s a little more on righties and hate — Dave Neiwert has been writing about the “new racism,” which is pretty much the “old racism” dressed up to look like social commentary. Yesterday he noted that CBS News has been forced to turn off comments on Barack Obama stories on its web site because the stories were attracting too many racist comments. Dave comments:
This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing “political correctness,” or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call “race realism.”
But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.
And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner … well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse.
Awhile back some guy at BBC radio asked me if America was ready to elect a black president. I said I didn’t know. I’d like to think we are, but I could be mistaken. On the other hand, I suspect the majority of die-hard white supremacists vote Republican, anyway, meaning that if Senator Obama is the nominee his race wouldn’t cost him many votes.
And Dave is probably right about the zombies. If Senator Obama is the nominee, I expect to see a return of the overt, full-frontal racism that was mostly banished from mass media in the 1960s. Not that racist hate speech ever went away, of course. But the prime-time bigots figured out how to cloak racist hate speech as “humor” or as “unbiased commentary,” often accompanied by much winking and nudging. If in the fall of 2008 presidential nominee Obama is cruising to an apparent victory, I ‘spect a whole lot o’ desperate bigots will drop the pretense and say, plainly, what they really mean. It could get ugly.
Update 2: On righties and Darwin:
… it’s always heartening to hear conservatives returning with childlike wonder to the great intellectual debates of the 1880s. …
… As for Darwin’s later work on vegetable molds and climbing plants, though, I think there are many relevant lessons there for anyone seeking to understand the rise of the New Right.
Too droll.
3 Comments 
