Uncle Fred's frightful ghost tales

WHEN I WAS A BOY, my inventive Uncle Fred would join my cousin Georgie and me at Grandma's kitchen  table to tell us scary stories.  In the midst of his tale he would tell us to shut our eyes and count to 10. When we opened our eyes we could see the string from the overhead  light wildly moving back and forth.  That would always announce the arrival of Lou and Fu, Fred's eerie ghosts who were always on standby when he wanted to scare the hell out of us.  (How were we to know that in our moments of darkness he had reached up and batted the string?)

Uncle Fred died years ago without ever revealing his secret plot device, which we eventually figured it out.  But many frantic ghost stories linger today and the field is getting awfully crowded with Lou's and Fu's who keep revealing themselves as fright-mongering real people in the Obama era.   As the anticipated right-wing fury over Sonia Sotomayor erupts 24/7,  the perps keep revealing themselves as so many nesting dolls.  There is always one more until you turn off the tube and go to bed.

  The latest Lou (or Fu) is Tom Tancredo, a political stagehand,  who actually wants to worry us with his fiction that Sotomayor is a Ku Klux Klansman (In fact, she is being pictured on a racist blog as wearing a pointed Klansman's hat.)   

A couple of sizes larger is Newt Gingrich, a revived apparition of his own glories past, who also finds Sotomayor to be a racist dangerously associated with a civil-rights organization.  (Do you think that part of President Obama's provocative finesse of the white male ghosts on the right is to give him a some breathing time from the nasty names that are routinely whipped at him by the flapping wingnuts?)

Then there is Rushbo, the former failed sports commentator,  who is addicted to this own idiocy, likening Sotomayor to David Duke.  One must wonder when he will call for the super-scientific  test of pounding Sotomayor's face with neurons to verify the color  of her pigments.  And so goes the ghastly hazing of the president's Supreme Court nominee by some creatures who have never shown that much concern  about racism in the past.

Now that Obama has wiggled the light string, the room is suddenly filled with a lot of spooky Lou's and Fu's.  Of course, they're  dealing with us  grown-ups now.