Sometimes I update my Facebook profile picture with ones I’ve manipulated at Photofunia.com. Like this:
People enjoy these photos and often comment on them. This one, which I put up on Tuesday, the first day of the Republican convention in Tampa, drew several remarks, including one from a black friend who said: “Is Obama friends with Grizzly Adams?” Now I’m as careful as the next bleeding heart Subaru-driving PC liberal when it comes to racial comments, but I couldn’t resist calling him on that crack: “Geez, ________, that was just plain racist! 
” I was playing on the “All ________ people look the same to me” meme. Putting words into my friend’s mouth, I could just hear him saying something like “All white people look like Mr. Whipple to me … unless they have beards, and then they look like Grizzly Adams.”
But yeah, these days I tread especially lightly when it comes to race, because the Republicans are trying to release the kraken and no one knows what the consequences are going to be. They’ve been looking for something, anything, to hang on President Obama, and since they can’t really say he’s been a bad president in any significant way, they’re attacking him on racial grounds. He’s not really one of us. He wants to take our money and give it to blah people. A certain percentage of American voters are infantile about race. Calling out Obama on racial grounds won’t make any difference to them … they hated Obama anyway and were always going to vote against him. Like the young man who posted this, a member of my Limbaugh-lovin’ Cape Girardeau clan:
Will these “scary black man wants to take your money and give it to welfare queens and strapping young bucks who don’t want to work” lies work on undecided voters? I don’t know. Obviously Republicans are betting they will.
But there’s another pot of people being brought to a boil by all this: the bubbas, the mouth-breathers, the committed racists. Like this guy:
Ah, yes, the “negrohood.” These are the bottom-feeders the Republicans are stirring up with their racial attacks on Obama. How close are we to the day Rush Limbaugh says “nigger” on the radio and officially frees the kraken? Closer than ever. And no one is doing anything to de-escalate the hate. Normally I’d say we just have to get out the sensible vote and win the battle on election day, but the battle may be upon us well before then.
© 2012, Paul Woodford. All rights reserved.
