Someday soon, I’m going to get back to blogging about issues other than race. But for now, allow me this one last flabbergasted facepalm in response to Rush Limbaugh:
I think frankly, a lot of people are asking this question about Obama on everything. Is this worth it? Is the historical relevance of his presidency, the first black president, worth all this?
It’s obvious that, for some, like the birthers, opposition to Obama is not about policy, it’s about an inability to accept a black man as president of the United States. Limbaugh can’t change what’s already happened. But he’s going to try and make sure that white people regret voting for Obama because it isn’t “worth all this”–“this” being a relatively modest center-left agenda, which in the fevered imaginations of Limbaugh and his dittoheads has become an upheaval of the appropriate social order, a place where “the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.” He couldn’t be more clear.
When Americans elected Barack Obama last November, they toppled the peak of an eroding racial caste system that has caused immeasurable harm to Americans of all races–even though that wasn’t the reason they did so. Limbaugh is saying, “you’ll be sorry.”
It’s just too bad that neither Limbaugh, nor anyone else suffering from an inability to accept that there is a black man in the White House has the ability to change the past. They’ll just have to keep living in anguish.
— A. Serwer
