Ragnar
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Mark Steyn: Racist dog whistles and the men who hear them | racist, white, dog - Opinion - The Orange County Register
Steyn's weekly home run ends with this little tidbit... "Democrat strategy 1992: It's the economy, stupid. Democrat strategy 2012: It's the stupidity, economists." Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand. Or so a wise man once said.
On the matter of those racist dog whistles all these middle-age white liberals keep hearing, the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto put it very well: "The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it's intended for somebody else," he wrote. "The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you're the dog." And a very rare breed at that. What frequency does a Mitch McConnell speech have to be ringing inside your head for even the most racially obsessed Caucasian NBC anchorman to hear the words "PGA tour" as "deep-rooted white insecurities about black male sexuality"? That's way beyond dog-whistling, and somewhere between barking mad and frothing rabid.
Still, now that "golf" and "Chicago" along with "Clint," "Medicare," "debt," "jobs," "foreign policy" and "quantitative easing" are all racist code words, are there any words left that aren't racist? Yes, here's one:
"Negrohood."
Not familiar with it? New York Assembly candidate Ben Akselrod used it the other day in a campaign mailer to Brooklyn electors, arguing that his opponent "has allowed crime to go up over 50 percent in our negrohood so far this year."
Like Messrs Dunn, Matthews and O'Donnell, Ben Akselrod is frighteningly pasty white, and a Democrat, and so presumably has highly refined racial antennae. Had a campaign staffer suggested that Mr. Akselrod's opponent was wont to wear "plus-fours" and had a "niblick," obviously such naked racism would have been deleted in the first draft. But the more subtly allusive "negrohood" apparently just slipped through.
Mr. Akselrod now says it was a "typo." Could happen to anyone. You're typing "neighborhood," and you leave out the "i," and the "h" and "b," and the "o" and "r" get mysteriously inverted. Either that, or your desktop came with Al Sharpton's spellcheck. And then nobody at the campaign office reading through the mailer spotted it. Odd.
Steyn's weekly home run ends with this little tidbit... "Democrat strategy 1992: It's the economy, stupid. Democrat strategy 2012: It's the stupidity, economists." Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand. Or so a wise man once said.