Speaking in code

Conservative blowhard Alan Keyes said the other day that President Obama's policies could destroy the USA and that he must be stopped at all costs. Now all of us liberals and progressives know that what Keyes is doing is what scared conservatives do best, he's trying to make the rest of us as scared as he is. He's frightened that he'll lose his place of privilege and that his tax dollars might get used to help out a sick baby or to build a school that poor people might use and we know he'd rather his tax dollars go to the Pentagon or to Haliburton or to the chicken hawk soldiers of Amway/Blackwater. And goodness knows the man who kicked his own daughter out of his house and cut her off from his life because she committed the crime of loving a person of her own sex can't abide a government that is socially conscious and that helps people outside of defense related corporations.

What makes what Keyes said reprehensible is that he is calling for the assassination of our President. Sure he doesn't say so in those exact words but what he is doing is he's speaking in conservative code and he's saying that it's okay to take out the President before he screws up the economic system for all the conservatives like him.

Let's look at the facts, shall we? The shootings in the Unitarian church in Knoxville were done by a man driven mad by his hatred of liberals and gays. He was driven to that place of madness by the rantings and ravings of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mann Coulter, Mike Malkin, and Rush "The fat draft dodging drug addict" Limbo. His would be suicide note said he wanted to kill as many liberals as he could and he hoped that his actions in that church that day would inspire many others to do the same.

In this atmosphere Alan Keyes says that President Obama must be stopped at all costs. Now if a white conservative pundit had said that we'd dismiss it as casual racism and we'd hoot and holler him down for saying it. But when a black man like Alan Keyes says it he's saying to the soft white underbelly crowd of the conservative movement that it's okay to gun down the President because if you do so then you'll be saving the America you love so much. You know their America, it's the one filled with hatred for black and Latino people (except for the Uncle Tom's like Alan Keyes, Ward Connerly, and Clarence Thomas), hatred for taxes (because they might be used to help 'others'), hatred for women and children, and hatred for gays and lesbians. Their America is lilly white and stuck in the good old days of the 1950's when blacks, spics, chicks, and guys who suck dicks knew that their place was beneath that of those who were white, Christian, and members in good standing of the John Birch Society.

The shootings in the Unitarian church in Knoxville were the logical outcome of years of hate filled talk radio. The years of blaming the blacks, the Mexicans, the gays, the liberals came to fruition that day when that chicken shit guy opened fire. And with people like Alan Keyes stoking the flames of political and racial prejudice, it's going to happen again. Conservatives are after all the people who love their guns and who stockpile them, liberals are not armed to the teeth and they don't commit the majority of gun crimes in this country. Keyes is speaking in code and he's telling a would be conservative shooter that it's okay to shoot the President because a black dude said it was.

Keyes is speaking in code to his conservative base just as surely as that other hatemonger, James Dobson, did last summer during the campaign when he said that the best reason to vote against Obama was because Obama was going to appoint judges who supported his 'fruit cake' interpretation of the Constitution. Sure that statement seems innocuous but to a whole generation of people steeped in the brand of hate filled religion that is practiced by people like Dobson, the late Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, when they hear the word 'fruit cake' they take it to mean homosexual, as in gay, as in the biggest bug-a-boo of the modern religious right. It used to be they saved their hatred for blacks and for Communists but when the civil rights movement finally won most of their battles and the Soviet Union fell they had to find a new group to hate on and they settled on gays.

The last group to speak this much in code were the Hutus in Rwanda. They took to the airwaves and demanded that their fellow Hutus exterminate the cockroaches, which was code for the Tutsi population and for moderate Hutus. By the time they got done speaking code nearly a million people (aka cockroaches) were murdered. I hope against hope that that sort of thing doesn't happen here.