Saturday, July 17, 2004

Doo dah, doo dah....

Watch for Bush to make a big 'inclusivity' push for the next few days, hauling Paige, Powell and Rice before the cameras and hugging every kid of color he can find in a prelude to his scheduled appearance before the Urban League, as Mr. 'Uniter, not a divider' pits one civil rights group against another.

While Bush sets the stage, though, Bob Herbert paints a realistic backdrop in the New York Times, pointing out just what kind of show the R's are putting on in the barn out back...
Four years ago, on the first night of the Republican convention, a parade of blacks was hauled before the television cameras (and the nearly all-white audience in the convention hall) to sing, to dance, to preach and to praise a party that has been relentlessly hostile to the interests of blacks for half a century.

I wrote at the time that "you couldn't tell whether you were at the Republican National Convention or the Motown Review."

That exercise in modern-day minstrelsy was supposed to show that Mr. Bush was a new kind of Republican, a big-tent guy who would welcome a more diverse crowd into the G.O.P. That was fiction. It wasn't long before black voters would find themselves mugged in Florida, and soon after that Mr. Bush was steering the presidency into a hard-right turn.
It's still fiction, of course.

Black, brown, white working class, out of work, sick, tired, old...it seems like no matter what societal subdivision you find yourself in, there's one abiding truth.

George Bush doesn't care about you.

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