Wow! That South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary battle was the most bracing bit of race baiting, dog-whistle political campaigning I've seen since Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around Michael Dukakis's neck in 1988. Rick Santorum declared that he did not want to make "blah people's" lives better by giving them "other people's money" even as he traveled the state fueled by other people's money. Ron Paul is unable to escape the stench of those "How To Off A Black Carjacker And Get Away With It" newsletters of the early Nineties. And Mitt Romney is an avuncular, über-rich fathead confused by any black person who isn't carrying a microphone, sports gear, or a serving tray. But for the winner--in actual votes, and for sheer bigoted pungency--we have Newton Leroy McPherson Gingrich.
Ol' Newt started with the suggestion that school districts across the nation could save money and improve the character and station of the black race by firing union-affiliated school janitors and replacing them with underaged African-American kids. He gave a spirited defense of this version of The White Man's Burden in a debate on CNN a week ago Monday, followed that up by flatly stating that Fox News contributor Juan Williams wouldn't know honest work if it bit him on the ass, and then Newt surged to victory on Saturday with an unmistakeable appeal to white South Carolinians to help him turn back the rising tide of pimps, drug dealers, welfare queens, and their shiftless, work-impaired pickaninnies by deposing their King: Barack Hussein Obama, The Food Stamp President.
Yes, Newt Gingrich, the people of South Carolina, Newt's fellow candidates and the Republican Party have served notice: They're fed up with Niggers, from the Big One in the White House down to that very last little fifth-grader without a mop. Vote Republican and the Great Reckoning will come. The country will recover the proceeds from all those bogus mortgage loans lavished on the rabble by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac thanks to Bill Clinton, they'll ignite the all-consuming blaze of the Christian work ethic in the heretofore benighted, and apply the brakes to the deficit-fueling gravy train that is the Food Stamp Program.
In other words: Heaven-on-earth.
One little problem…
Imagine a Southern supermarket checkout line with one of Newt's faithful holding forth to the cashier about how nice this country's going to be once Newt gets rid of all these "food stamp niggers." Now, imagine that you're a white waitress with five hungry kids and you're standing right behind him, your hand clutching that book of food stamps in your purse…
One sacrifices accuracy for coverage in painting with a broad brush [USA Today]; the artist formerly known as Leroy McPherson makes Jackson Pollack look like Mondrian with this masterpiece. Thanks to Newt and the Republicans of South Carolina, if you're on food stamps under the regime of The Food Stamp President, you're part of the problem no matter what color you are. That food stamp book is your "Scarlet A"… your passbook… your "skin"…
Modern dictionary definitions of the word "nigger" divorce it from race. It denotes a victim of prejudice similar to that suffered by blacks; a person who is economically, politically, or socially disenfranchised [Reference.com]. The American Middle Class is disappearing faster than a drifting Artic floe under a polar bear. How we deal with income inequity is the crucial issue of our time and rhetoric like Newt's sharpens rather than diminishes the conflict between the One Percent and everyone else because he has miscalculated so horribly in trying to drive this wedge. Speaker Gingrich's South Carolina campaign has raised consciousness about the Occupy Movement in some of the very people he intended to inflame against President Obama and the Democrats.
Newt is no stranger to unintended consequences. His career since becoming Speaker of the House of Representatives is a monument to the concept. The only question remaining is how White America will answer this latest attempt to profit from the historical divisions created by the One Percent to control the other Ninety-Nine.