Bunning: a bit player in GOP assault on Obama

NOW THAT MANY of us (except Fox News) have had a little fun over Jim Bunning's meltdown that jammed up the government for a day or so, the more likely version of this mad tale is that he was not really acting alone. Instead, he was merely an unsightly spurt from the boil that forms the seething Republican enclave on Capitol Hill. In the nanosecond after Bunning's first claim to the national media-driven spotlight, it is fair to conclude that some of his partisan colleagues were satisfied that his Caligulan rant had served their cause well in further debasing the Obama Administration. Some even muttered as much. But when the returns came in that the Kentucky senator may have gone too far in holding up his entire party to further ridicule, the game was up. Given Bunning's loony track record on The Hill, no Republican could happily adopt him as the GOP's poster boy - even if they agreed that he got it right.

We are long past the stage of constructive dialogue in Congress, which seriously puts a halt to social progress in a system that most of us with even minimal historical awareness call a democracy and the other side sneers is socialism. The sickness runs incurably deep. Since the day that Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office - Barack Hussein Obama! - the Old South began its dramatic return to the podium with the vibrant assistance of the GOP's high priest, Rush Limbaugh, unapologetically aided and abetted by a television network whose deception begins with the kooky assurance that it is fair and balanced.

Why has the unanimous assault from the political right been so much more bitterly sustained beyond ordinary ideological disagreement? . The most entrenched element, less and less muted as time goes on, is racism. Losing to a Democrat, as has happened from time to time in presidential politics, is one thing. Losing to an African-American Democrat is unacceptably something else. Particularly for the political party that is not represented by a single black in Congress.

As Columnist Bob Cesca writes in the Huffington Post:

"...when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there's no comparative group on the left that's similarly motivated by bigotry and racial hatred."

So-called mainstream Republicans have stood before angry crowds and stared diectly into the ugly racist placards with indifference. At the same time, Cesca notes that Limbaugh "can stoke racial animosity on his show by suggesting health-care reform is a civil rights bill - reparation - and no one seems to mind. The Tea Party is an extension of talk radio...of the Fox News Channel. It's an extension of the southern faction of the Republican Party - the faction that gave us the Southern Strategy, the Willie Horton ad, the White Hands ad , the racially divisive politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It's an extension of the race-baiting and, often, of the outright racism evident in all of those conservative spheres."

In the grand scheme of things, Jim Bunning was no more than a bit player who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame for the team. Unfortunately, there will be others.

With Joe, the race card is cashworthy

AT THE END of pianist Philip Thomson's stormy performance of the first movement of the Grieg piano concerto with the Akron Symphony Orchestra Sunday night, a woman seated somewhere behind me effused, "He got a helluva lot of music out of that piano!" That appears to be also true of Joe Wilson's slam at President Obama as a liar. The South Carolina Republican congressman reportedly is getting a helluva lot of cash register music out of his contributors following his historic misconduct during the president's health-care reform speech.

As awful as it might seem, Wilson may have set a precedent for other congressional Obama haters. The next logical step would be for one of the southern Claghorns to interrupt a State of the Union speech to challenge Obama to a dual. Politics doesn't limit its questionable excesses when it comes to raising money.

The Republican Party has never been the same since it was hijacked by noisy groups of religious fanatics, racists and cable lunatics. The election of Barack Obama only increased their fervor to do and say outrageous things. And after decades of racial progress, a party without a single African American in Congress is now hosting a retreat to political precincts where racism is a guarantee to a long happy life on Capitol Hill.

The haters are embittered that their war-hero candidate and pink-cheeked hockey mom were soundly defeated by a Democrat with dark skin. This was not supposed to happen, not in an America where The Others were supposed to know their place. After all, wasn't it Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss who cautioned Obama to be "humble" in his speech to the congress? In Louisiana, which is two-thirds white, Republican Sen David Vitter is basing his rise-from-the-ashes campaign by reminding everyone that he has no use for Obama. Even some ministers down there, well aware that Vitter is an out-of-pocket adulterer, figure he can be excused because of his antipathy toward the President.

What is it about Louisiana? Vitter succeeded Rep. Bob Livingston in the House, who in turn was to succeed Newt Gingrich, a Georgian, as the House speaker, after Newt was caught up in his own scandal. And why did Livingston need a successor? Well, he resigned from Congress because of public notice of his own extramarital affair and is living happily ever after as a...yep, lobbyist. I've only gone back on the devious line of succession to Gingrich. For all that I know, it might have begun with the Marquis de Sade.

OK, I might as well haul in California GOP Assemblyman Mike Duvall, who just resigned after unwittingly boasting on a live mike to a friend of his sexual escapades with a much younger female energy company lobbyist. This was the same pol who once received an ehtics award from Chapman University in Orange, Ca., for his deep commitment to meritorious behavior as a family and community man.

Remember: This is the party that boasts of its moral clarity and family values only to have some of its leading lights - Sen. John Ensign, Gov. Mark Sanford and Vitter - seeking sex right off the assembly line.

And this is the party that is adrift in a world where racism and hyprocrisy could become a plank in th next party convention platform.

In his introduction to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Columbia University Prof. Bruce Robbins observes that the book's protagonist merely reflected his times. Of Julien Sorel he writes:

"If he wants to improve his lowly condition, hist0ry decrees he must be a hypcocrite. In love, as in religion and politics, he must ignore the empty banalities he is fed and take a hungrily scientific interest in how the gears and levers of social power really work."

Since it is also a no-no with the Joe Wilsons et al, science may not enter their premeditated conduct. But the rest of Robbins' words seems about right.

It depends on whose race is being gored

THERE WAS A story and photo in Sunday's paper that reported the arrest of a 20-year-old woman who was charged with a bank robbery attempt in Cuyahoga Falls. Aside from the oddity of a young woman being the suspect, I also noted another element in the case: she was white.

We are at a time when racial innuendo and worse appear to be on the rise with a segment of the public particularly abusive about Barack Obama's arrival at the White House. That was demonstrated once again by the North Canton police dispatcher who e-mailed a photo-shopped Air Force One with the N-word on the tail. She couldn't stop laughing, she said. Oh?

So I had to wonder how many of the white readers reacted when the picture of a young white woman accompanied the robbery story. Were they as indifferent to the woman's skin color as they might have been if she had been an African American, Asian or Latino or anybody else not in the the reader's comfort zone? . How many would have felt at least a tinge of bias because a crime suspect wasn't white? You know, those people are always causing trouble. On the other hand, how many, by knee-jerk definition, would have looked at the young woman's picture and concluded that all white people are criminals? Just asking.

I can't attempt to answer these questions, other than to sense that some whites won't share the guilt for another white who has gone astray but do not hesitate to condemn an entire race for stereotypical criminality. In this instance, the young woman was white. I doubt that her skin color bothered anyone. On the other hand., if she had been.....well, that's how ingrained racism works. Right?

She said it wasn't so

FOOTNOTE TO the sad story of a confused young McCain worker who fabricated a report of being assaulted by a tall black man in Pittsburgh: Ashley Todd needs professional help rather than condemnation. But that's not the end of the story.  The condemnation should be directed at Matt Drudge, a modern carnival barker who gave the phony story national visibility, and McCain's communication director in Pennsylvania who reportedly called TV stations instantly to report a brutal attack on Todd.  How quickly the word spread to McCain,  Palin and Obama, too, all of whom are said to have called her with their concern before her tale collapsed.    It would be hard not to see a Willie Horton type racial subplot by the McCain people in a crucial battleground state in the closing days of the campaign.  They may or may not have orchestrated the hoax.  But they didn't hesitate to dive in to exploit the earliest narrative  before she confessed to police.   It's hard for me to believe otherwise.