You all have heard about the strange RNC attack ad leveled against Nancy Pelosi as part of their misogynistic GOP/Media pile-on meant to distract from Bush/Cheney crimes.
As a smear, the ad fails. If the RNC wants to strike fear in the genitals of white male blue-collar voters, they can’t do so by comparing Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore. Ms. Galore is a sexy, smart, sympathetic character who Bond winds up redeeming. If they want to hit the misogyny and homophobia buttons in their targets, Rosa Klebb is a better choice.
That aside, the ad seems to be part of a new iteration of the long-standing habit of obliqueness from the Republicans — similar to what the late Lee Atwater referred to in 1981 as "getting abstract":
"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
"And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger."’
Ever wonder why Republicans pushed the Obama’s-A-Muslim and Obama’s-A-Foreigner storylines? It’s because, as Lee Atwater said back in 1981, you can’t say ‘n*gg*r’. Just as "cutting taxes" became oblique, abstracted Republican code for oppressing black people, Republicans use Muslims and foreigners as stand-ins for black and brown people in America.
And Al Giordano notes yet another facet of the GOP’s abstraction diamond, in that the hysteria whipped up over housing Guantanamo detainees in US prisons is made to subtly piggyback onto not just general fears of The Other, but onto the fears previously whipped up against undocumented workers from Latin America.
This is why pushing the fears of Gitmo detainees, as ridiculous as it seems to us, is Priority One among Republicans right now -- because for one thing, they know that Democrats in states where immigration is a hot-button issue are likely to cave rather than do the right thing.
(A version of this diary appears at Mercury Rising.)