Race To The Finish #1

Unless you've been asleep for the past year or have spent that time drinking the FOX "News" Kool-Aid, you know by now that the GOP has gone all-in on a race-baiting strategy to unseat President Obama.

The strategy is as simple as it is insidious. To hell with women, youth, minorities, gays and lesbians or any voting block save one. If R-MONEY can get a big enough majority of angry, White males to vote for him, he can win.

After the second debate I suggested that President Obama was able "to transcend and eliminate the 'Angry Black Man Factor'." However, polls showing R-MONEY gaining in swing states, have led me to question that assessment.

I'm beginning to think that those gains are precisely because the GOP standard bearer was so badly beaten in the debate.

In the eyes if those who see only the color of Mr. Obama's skin, R-MONEY came off as a White man who was publicly disrespected by a Black man. And not just any Black man, but one who doesn't buy the White man's dismissal of 47% of Americans of whom he said, "I'll never convince them that they should take personalresponsibility and care for their lives."

In my blog introduction I state that "To Kill A Mockingbird" is my favorite novel. So it is fitting that I offer a passage from that book to remind my readers of the true nature of the mindset which underlies racial bigotry.

It is part of Atticus Finch's final summation to the jury at the end of the trial of Tom Robinson, and it ends with an indictment which I believe applies to those who have devised the strategy the GOP has chosen to pursue.

“And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to ‘feel sorry’ for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people’s. I need not remind you of their appearance and conduct on the stand—you saw them for yourselves. The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption—the evil assumption—that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber.