The Karl [Rove] Klux Klan

Attention Republican Party, aren’t you ashamed yet? Is it still possible for you to feel shame? Particularly over a little issue like, say, race-baiting?

Right-wing operative and pundit Karl Rove just said on Fox news that Barack Obama, one of the most cultivated men to be in the Oval Office for decades, committed a “political drive-by shooting” when he critiqued Trump.

Oh, for God’s sake.

Of course you don’t have to be an expert semiotician to figure out the subtext. Obama = Black. Black = Ghetto. Ghetto = Violence and Drugs. Therefore, Obama = N-word, and voting for Democrats = voting for N-words, drugs, and violence.

This, mind you, comes after Mitch McConnell said that Obama was “classless.” And, face it, that’s saying exactly the same thing.

So, Republican Party...

Have you really come to this? Have you really sunk so low? Have you really become the modern analog of the Ku Klux Klan? Have you really no other wiser, more important issues on which to run? Nothing more important to say?

If so, then you should be ashamed...both for your appeal to the most debased emotions possible...and, also, for your total intellectual bankruptcy.

You have nothing to offer. Other than the hate of the vulgar many for the virtuous few.

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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

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