I explained yesterday that part of the entirely unconvincing defense of Rush Limbaugh's "Barack The Magic Negro" as satire is that no one defending it gets the joke or can explain it. Republican flack Kate Obenshain was on MSNBC yesterday, where anchor Tamron Hall took her to the woodshed over her defense of the song. This is Obenshain's defense from the transcript provided by Thinkprogress:
I will point out though that the magic negro first appeared in the “Los Angeles Times” as an editorial, and it is a parody. It is, I mean, the appropriateness of Rush Limbaugh running this show — this song is — it is a perfectly appropriate thing to point out absurdity through use of the absurd. He’s basically criticizing Al Sharpton and this columnist for saying Barack Obama wasn’t black enough. Now, was it appropriate for Chip Saltsman to send it out? No, it was foolish. We need for our conservative leaders to be clearly articulating those principles that bring a broad spectrum of individuals to the republican party, something our candidate for president wasn’t able to do.
Okay, what I have to explain is that this is verbatim the defense of the song that Rush Limbaugh provides his ditto-bots with: "Illustrating absurdity by being absurd." "It's not an attack on Obama, it's an attack on Sharpton." "David Eherenstein said it first." Limbaugh made these meager excuses from the safety of his studio, and his followers actually believe they can go out and repeat the things he says and the "brilliance" of them will be recognized. A "brilliance" their addled little heads can't even articulate, but merely pay tribute to through childlike repetition, not realizing that the originator gets paid millions of dollars to offend people and draw ratings. The joke, is of course, at least partially on them, as anyone not emotionally dependent on Rush Limbaugh can tell after listening to the show for five minutes.
Of course, the reason Hall was angry, and the reason the parody sparked a backlash almost two years ago that no one in the Republican Party thought mattered is that to the extent the song attacks Obama, it attacks him for being black. Which is to say, it attacks black people. "Magic Negro" has no use as a term of cinematic or philosophical analysis in Limbaugh's song, the point of its use is to belittle Obama with an archaic racial language. But two years ago that didn't matter to the Republican Party, because Obama was going to lose to Hillary Clinton and the Republican Party didn't mind being a white party. But since many people in the Republican Party don't actually care what Shelby Steele thinks as long as he stands around and makes the party look less white, and party pollsters recognize that Obama's victory has more to do with a diversifying country than a land of guilty whites begging for absolution, they know that they have to stop being a party that appears hostile to minorities. They've just been working so hard to excuse that hostility for so long they have no idea how to do that.
Given the fact that the party officials seems to be rallying around Chip Saltsman for being brave enough to do something that makes liberals mad, it doesn't seem like many Republicans actually want to appeal to nonwhites, because if they weren't so lazy and stupid they'd be Republicans. The GOP are the Real Americans after all, and who would want to change that by diluting the party with people who have "had the government take care of them their whole lives"?
-- A. Serwer
