Mitochondrial DNA Indeed
Just when society was becoming more accepting of cross-dressing adulterous scions of Mafia hit-men who marry their cousins and hire perjurers as police commissioners, Giuliani has to spoil it all. Somebody must have slipped sodium pentothal in his glass of merlot at the 21 Club, because since his Churchillian speech there, he just can’t shut up about how un-American President Obama’s blackness is.
The conservative noise machine has praised him with faint damnation, expressing chagrin that they themselves lacked Giuliani’s moxie in pointing out the unpatriotic nature of being black. It’s a twofer from a tea party perspective. How could they have missed it? Mafia hit-men who marry their cousins and hire perjurers as police commissioners, Rudy
Nothing new here; scientists have known for well over a year that the GOP consists of troubled white people. What's notable about Giuliani’s paroxysm was its culmination: a jaunty defense of presidential race-baiting that cheered the heart of GOP propagandist and chubby-boy-getting-revenge-for-high-school, Frank Luntz. With the subtlety of Duns Scotus Giuliana responded to his critics that he can’t possibly be a racist, because (and here’s the innovation) Obama has a white mother. In this version of Mendelian politics, Giuliani insisted his personal attacks were aimed at Obama’s obvious socialist and anti-colonial upbringing, which Giuliani urges is a white thing, a trait on his mother's side, and not something blacks need to fret about. It’s the mitochondrial DNA defense to racism.
As a matter of habit Republican politicians crudely dog whistle their sympathy for racist obsessions all the time: Reagan’s welfare queens in Cadillacs, Bush I’s Willie Horton ad, Ryan’s lazy inner city men. Even the least of the tea party swains can't miss the hopeful conservative message: it’s all black people’s fault.
But Giuliani has gone meta. He uses one of these fixations (miscegenation and all the imagery it conjures up for conservatives clinging to guns and online porn) as an argument that scapegoating minorities isn’t racist at all because of liberals and their biracial tendencies. At worst, he seems to assure us, the GOP message can only be characterized as bi-racist.
At this point, Giuliani’s stirring rehash of Reverend Wright and the apparent looming Afro-Islamic-takeover is unlikely to cost Obama the 2008 election. But the meme that only “pure” blacks can suffer racism has a sort of retro Alfred Rosenberg logic that tea partiers will surely burnish in the upcoming psycho-drama that will be the GOP's 2016 presidential campaign.