From http://www.laprogressive.com

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.

Then, almost with a sigh, she added, “But that’s just Alaska.”

Racial and ethnic slurs may be “just Alaska” and, clearly, they are common, everyday chatter for Palin.

Besides insulting Obama with a Step-N’-Fetch-It, “darkie musical” swipe, people who know her say she refers regularly to Alaska’s Aboriginal people as “Arctic Arabs” – how efficient, lumping two apparently undesirable groups into one ugly description – as well as the more colourful “mukluks” along with the totally unimaginative “f**king Eskimo’s,” according to a number of Alaskans and Wasillians interviewed for this article.

But being openly racist is only the tip of the Palin iceberg. According to Alaskans interviewed for this article, she is also vindictive and mean. We’re talking Rove mean and Nixon vindictive.

No wonder the vast sea of white, cheering faces at the Republican Convention went wild for Sarah: They adore the type, it’s in their genetic code. So much for McCain’s pledge of a “high road” campaign; Palin is incapable of being part of one.

Read the rest of the article here.

There’s a web forum used by people in the town where I live to discuss various topics of local interest. I enjoy posting on it from time to time, mainly to bedevil the right wing dumbasses who lurk there. I post under the name ‘mysterio’.

It isn’t easy being a red state liberal. I feel like I’m surrounded by morons. It’s frustrating because said morons are so high on “family values” and their triumphalist vision of America that they can’t see the forest for the trees. They preach personal responsibility, but when the excrement hits the air conditioning they reflexively blame the media, government, Democrats, liberals, minorities – anyone other than themselves. Occasionally this unenlightened state causes the wing-nuts to inadvertently expose the latent racism that still infects some quarters of the right.

Albatross composing his latest diatribe

Recently one of my nemeses on the forum, Albatross, composed a rant making the ludicrous claim that minorities are the cause of the mortgage crisis. I’ve never met Albatross, but he strikes me as a bitter old coot uncomfortable with the world changing around him. Normally I take this into consideration and only skewer him gently, but this time he crossed a line.

Alba’s tendency to credulously regurgitate right-wing oversimplifications of complicated issues got the better of him. I can let him slide when he blames the problem on reckless borrowers – “idiots” to use one of his favorite terms. There is after all an undeniable personal responsibility dimension to the sub-prime mess.

The thrust of Alba’s “argument” however, was that the government forced mortgage lenders to end discriminatory lending practices by “dumbing down” their standards so that more minorities could obtain loans. The orgy of irresponsible borrowing brought on by this loosening of standards led to the current crisis. The lenders themselves are only culpable to the extent that they “cowered under pressure and threats” from the government. To connect the problem in any way to the remediation of discriminatory lending practices is utterly ridiculous. I began my reply with a sardonic caricature of the racist undertones in his comment.

The mortgage crisis could have been avoided if only the gummint hadn’t bullied lenders into lavishing money on irresponsible minorities who need to have standards “dumbed down” for them. Some of them are probably even Cadillac driving welfare queens.

Brilliant, eh? I went on to highlight the origins of Alba’s dubious “idea” and to point out that it is ultimately an attempt to lay blame for the sub-prime crisis at the feet of the Democrats. I thought about continuing with a disquisition about the real causes of the problem, but quickly decided that it was unnecessary. Not only is the information readily available to anyone who can use the Google, but the webmaster of this particlar forum dislikes lengthy posts. Besides, Alba’s allies would would start to chime in and my point would be lost entirely in the dog pile. I’ve learned that the best way to deal with these ignorant nutjobs is to be brief, witty and keep them on the defensive.