Their official roles are to push the political-correctness of the 1990’s back into the closet, except, this time, for good. And how they go about doing that is, well, simply put, by being rude. We call it “rude,” but they call it “as a matter of fact.” And when they recently spoke of African-Americans in this country, the poor ones, the ones that, as Bill O’Reilly stated recently, who wouldn’t “go out and educate themselves” so that they wouldn’t live in the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans, well, they don’t give much positive criticism at all.

Instead, their voices bellow, their eyes pop out, their anger flares and they describe this nation’s minorities in just about every way except the one way they want to describe them as.

You see, all Rovian Republicanism has done has pushed this country to about THIS close to making it okay to call African-Americans “niggers” once again. And if you watch and listen to these guys on television and on the radio, you can hear it in their voices. You can see it in their eyes. They are just on the verge of saying it. It started with Bill O’Reilly’s “shut up” and has progressed to the sort of statements that Mr. Bennett made. And instead of just apologizing, these “jerks”, cuz that’s what they are when you come down to it, defend what they said, and blame the Liberal Media and just about anyone else that criticized them. Except the White House, of course.

It just goes to show you how out of control this has all gotten. I don’t even think Bush intended it to get this crazy for he probably had no clue as to where this was all going to lead in the first place. Ultimately, I think that even the Genius Boy Karl Rove has lost control of this ship for it appears that there is just no way that these hornets’ nests are going to calm down anytime soon. All of these angry, white Americans who ARE calling African-Americans “niggers” again are pushing thru concealed-weapon laws to protect themselves from the rioting hoards that they fear are just on the verge of exploding out of the decaying urban metropolis’ and into their gated, bubbles of homogeneity. We’ve only seen the beginning of all of this insanity- this loss of reason. And they are not going to stop. At least not right now. Or in the near future. These people are on the warpath after feeling like we have assaulted them for the past decade or more. And now it’s their turn to fight back.

Or is it ours?

PS- I got one question for all of the LGBT PoliQueer groups in DC: the gay marriage issue is sorta like our community’s Iraq; not all of us wanted to be here, but now that we are, we have to deal with it. So, now that all of us are running around making marriage our fight issue, our #1 issue to push- what happens if our next Democratic presidential candidate won’t endorse gay marriage but only civil unions? Are we going to still endorse this person? Because, if after all of this work getting behind this marriage issue over the next three years, if the LGBT PoliQueer groups DO endorse a non-gay marriage candidate, I’m going to be really, really pissed off.

And I probably won’t be the only one.

I quote Matt Bai’s piece on Senator Clinton in Sunday’s NYTimes: “Clinton is very much a Southern Democrat like her husband (or, for that matter, an Eisenhower Republican like her father) and less of a social liberal than she is often portrayed. When she talks about her opposition to gay marriage, her preference for abstinence or her disapproval of violent movies, she means it.”

Food for thought, food for thought.

Mike Shea
Cleveland Stonewall Democrats