Does Barack Obama look like a “skinny ghetto crackhead” to you? Did
Whitney Houston’s death inspire the thought that Representative Maxine
Waters needs to “step away from the crack pipe?” If so, then Fox is the
cable network for you. (The quotes belong to Media Research Center
president Brent Bozell and Fox News host Eric Bolling, respectively.)
But if you prefer your news by radio, then perhaps you’d best stick with
Rush Limbaugh, who explains that President Obama “talks honky” around
white folk, while his wife feels entitled to abuse public funds as
payback for centuries of white oppression of black people. And finally,
if you like your racism live and in person, then no doubt you would have
been right at home at the recent CPAC convention, where Ann Coulter
told the assembled crowd, “Voters with forty years of politically
correct education are ecstatic to have the first black president. They
just love the idea of it, even if we did get Flavor Flav instead of
Thomas Sowell.”
Comparing the president of the United States and the most senior
female black member of the House of Representatives to rap
artists/reality-TV clowns and drug addicts is apparently unremarkable
for conservative media personalities, but presidential candidates need
to be more subtle. When Newt Gingrich, for instance, calls President
Obama America’s “food stamp president” and promises to “talk about why
the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be
satisfied with food stamps,” he is engaging in similar signaling, though
one with built-in deniability. For Gingrich this has the added benefit
that when he pretends this is not the case in the face of media
questioning, he gets to attack yet another enemy of the Tea Party types
whose confused causes he professes to represent.
