Playing The Race Card... Go Fish!

C***servative tip: Hats with horns command respect and guarantee you will be taken seriously. In the 10th century.

Man, those 'Racers' love to have it both ways. Somehow it's OK to portray Obama as an African witch doctor, to picture the White House lawn converted to a watermelon field, to call the President of the United States a "half-breed Muslim"... but none of that's racist according to them.

Isn't this one of the oldest tricks in a very well thumbed playbook? Let's break it down:

1: Say something overtly and intentionally racist
2: Wait for an adverse reaction
3: Counter-accuse your accusers of 'playing the race card.'
4: Sit back and look like a smug pr**k

Once step three is complete, some mysterious process of cognitive dissonance takes place where the racist takes on the role of the victim and the real victim is made to look like the aggressor. It's a neat trick and has a very low failure rate. Remember how it worked in 4th grade? A big kid would slyly slap a smaller kid, then the smaller kid would be labeled a cry baby when he objected while the big kid stood back shrugging his shoulders in a "what'd I do?" kind of way. Like all the best c***servative tactics, the classic race bait-and-switch has its roots in elementary school but works just as well in the less intellectually rigorous world of American political discourse.

Can a tactic this obvious still work? Oh hell yes. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

Or Michelle Malkin.

Malkin is one of the most prominent wingnut race bait-and-switchers. She's made a career of it and is currently scoring a lot of teabagger gigs with people who like their racist propaganda overt but deniable. Malkin is the sleazebag who wrote a book defending the WWII policy of interning Japanese Americans (the only thing FDR ever did she'd agree with?) and advocating the policy be reinstated for Arab Americans in the aftermath of 9-11. But, of course, she's not a racist... just ask her.

Many teabaggers (publicly) swallow the big, fat lie that Malkin isn't a racist. But surely even a Glenn Beck oompah loompah would pause over her connections with the quasi white power site VDARE.com where her words of wisdom regularly appear and which The Southern Policy Law Center has defined as a hate-group? No..? Do the perfectly reasonable, non-racist average Americans who book Malkin for their hate-ins teaparties find nothing objectionable about their speaker 'palling around' with a group that subscribes to the 'scientific' theory that "blacks have smaller brains" because "they have larger penises"? I guess not. And, I guess too, I'd just be 'playing the race card' to point that out.