YET ANOTHER WINGNUT JOINS THE RACE-BAITING FLASH MOB

I saw this story at Newsmax today, and also (naturally) at Fox Nation:

Fmr. HUD Secretary: Obama Still a Community Organizer

The key to understanding Barack Obama is that he was a community organizer, Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bush, tells Newsmax....

"When you are a community organizer, what you get most of the time is people telling you what their problems are and why they don't succeed."

In many cases, they are blacks who blame their lack of achievement on whites.

"When I was running public housing in Dallas, blacks would come in and tell me, 'You know, we can't do this because the white man keeps us from doing this,' and I would always say, 'Well I did, and I came up in a segregated environment,'" Jackson says. "I said, 'You can do it, if you choose to do it.'" ...

"I'm not sure that Obama understands the fiscal and jobs issues that we are facing today," Jackson says. "His perspective is that the government can do everything." ...

Jackson has been completely out of the public eye since he left his Cabinet position -- what the hell inspired him to say this now? What the hell did Obama do to inspire this?

It's a silly question, I know. Obviously, since Jackson is African-American, he's out there giving cover to others, some black but mostly white, who are stepping up the racial attacks on President Obama, especially this week, as -- by astonishing coincidence -- a good-ol'-boy Texan becomes the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, and the GOP plans yet another push to persuade Americans that we really don't want benefits that are due to us. (Hey, maybe we whites really won't want them if we associate them with Negroes!)

Surely I don't have to tell you that the right cranked up the race-baiting this week. Rush Limbaugh described a new Oreo cookie as "biracial" and the "Or-Bam-Eo." Allen West, also providing African-American cover for the rest of his party, referred to the Democratic Party as a "plantation" for blacks. (I think some people believe West came up with this line all by himself, but this is an old chestnut on the right -- in fact, a reference to the "Democrat Party plantation" even appeared in the 1992 Republican platform.) And, of course, Tom Coburn -- saying more or less what Alphonso Jackson said -- attacked Obama as someone who seeks to "create dependency" because "As an African American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs. So he believes in them." (I'm told that the complete transcript of Coburn's remarks is supposed to clear him of racism charges, but it doesn't -- it just makes it obvious that he believes only black people avail themselves of social programs, and that all black people use them to excess.)

How does it happen that there's a sudden uptick in this sort of crap? Am I paranoid if I believe that there really is a decision made at some Wingnut High Command? (I don't know -- maybe at Grover Norquist's Wednesday meeting?) Whatever happens, these sudden bursts of high-profile racism don't seem spontaneous. I wonder how long this one will last -- another 15 months?

*****

I meant to add this when I wrote this post last night: Please note, once again, that while Democrats struggle to do effective messaging, even in response to events, Republicans are always messaging, even in response to nothing in particular. They relentlessly sell their messages to their base. Thus, they're always on offense, and the rest of us are always on defense.