The radical right-wing Republicans are back to their old racist tactics, the same kind of tactics that Nixon, Reagan, and southern white evangelicals and others have used over the years to rally their base. They used these tactics successfully to turn the South from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
Paul Ryan is now blaming poverty and the horrendous income and wealth inequality on the culture of the “inner city.” If you listen real close you can hear the same old racist dog whistle. Does anyone doubt that Paul Ryan was referring to African-Americans in the “inner city?” He said poverty in the inner city is the result of a culture that keeps generations of men from working.
Where have we heard this before?
This is a horrendous racist charge that goes back to JUSTIFY SLAVERY.
As the debate about slavery in the United States heated up from about 1835 through the Civil War and until today, the racist lie that African-Americans are lazy has been used to justify slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow and segregation, white on Black rape, beatings, voter suppression, and all manner of cruelty to Black Americans.
It is too HYPOCRITICAL to ignore two obvious points:
1) That the same old tired right-wing racist Republicans making the charge never did a day of real work in their entire lives. How familiar do you think Paul Ryan is with real work–or his boy, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus?
2) The radical right-wing Republicans constantly stand in the way of raising the minimum wage or allowing workers to organize unions and bargain collectively. They also stop us from creating important work to fix our infrastructure and our economy, and lift people out of poverty.
Strategically, I don’t understand it. Are the Paul Ryans so afraid of the Tea Party bullshit that they feel like they must move beyond the radical right to racist hatred? Or are they afraid their base needs their familiar fuel of hatred and anger to turn out?
Photo source: DonkeyHotey on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)