The Black Republican

Apparently, Jane Hamsher and the pseudonymous "DarkBlack" think that the way to fight race-bating is with stereotypical racial imagery. Tom Maguire quotes DarkBlack's defense of his "art".

Lieberman has attempted to activate a voting demographic that his strategists believe will aid him in his quest.

To this end, he has imported a figure, Bill Clinton, who has standing with the American black community, and has repeatedly asserted his personal credentials as one who has worked on behalf of that community.

Yet Lieberman has engaged in race baiting (with the Lamont flyer) as a cynical attempt to game this demographic, and he has engaged in other activities which cast doubtful shadows upon this allegiance.

Thus, in my opinion, Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain, exactly like the vile caucasian minstrel show performers of Vaudeville.

And so my artist's impression stands.

This back-and-forth between two members of the Pander Party is what you get when you insist that people identify with a candidate through group identity rather than policy positions.

LGF

UPDATE: One of the commenters at the ConnecticutBLOG article links to this:

The act of accusing others, particularly white Americans, of racist behavior typically does not entail racially divisive language, unless it features talk about honkies and crackers and white-hooded Klansmen. It doesn't disparage white people generally, but, if it is disparaging, it tends to be disparaging of behavior that is racist.

This is only "race baiting" if you believe that exposing bigotry by whites somehow inflicts harm upon them; if you believe that whites are themselves the victims of systematic, oppressive, and widespread "reverse racism" in America -- a notion that enjoys considerable support among the angry white men of the right, but for which the evidence is scant indeed; and that suggesting at times that their behavior might be motivated by racism is itself a degrading racial stereotype.

This may be true in a handful of instances, but more often the charge is raised in instances where there is no derisive language, only serious questions. Indeed, compared to the real history of oppression and racism in this country, both in the past and present, such claims appear, more than anything, to be little more than the bathetic [sic] whining of the privileged.

Reformulating "race baiting" to include raising concerns about racism is a form of Newspeak: it inverts the actual meaning of the phrase to suggest its nearly polar opposite, thereby rendering it meaningless.

So, clearly, no Democrats are being harmed here, because neither of these white guys is trying to scare up white votes by saying nasty things about blacks. Saying nasty things about "privileged" white guys (true or not), and depicting them via negative racial stereotypes isn't wrong because that's scaring up black votes, so it's not really race-baiting because blacks can't be racist.

It seems even more appropriate now than ever who we named The Black Republican of the Year.

UPDATE II: A "compassionate progressive" at Ned Lamont's campaign blog delivers this hilarious whopper:

This is obviously a fake. Progressives are the pinnacle of tolerance. Why would one of us do something like this?

You might want to ask somebody to explain it to you, CP. I know just the person for the job.