Bill Ockham might point out that plain-old politics could pretty easily include racism: it did before, it does now. Watch the video, it's pretty obvious what's going on with the colour tones. The item's entitled "Also Racist Now: Pronouns" so I worry that there's blood all over Foster's desk from razor-mishandling.David Sirota at Salon thinks this Crossroads GPS ad is racist:
Specifically, Sirota thinks Karl Rove is, with a genius as evil as it is subtle, “present[ing] the image of an African-American man as an evildoer, referring to him as the tax-raising “he,” and pitting him against the “we” in classic demagogic “us versus them” terms.”
Once you’re done laughing, you’ll probably feel a little guilty, clear your throat, and in your least-condescending-sounding voice tell Sirota that maybe it’s a bit hasty to read racial code into a set of signifiers when Bill Ockham would say plain-old politics explains them just fine.
Jay Nordlinger follows up, somehow managing to type whole paragraphs without fainting:
I was just thinking: I’ve had many years to get used to the Left, but, still, I found it hard to read Dan Foster’s post. I guess I’m still not used to them.Who's Joseph Welch? Oh, him, the guy who humiliated the Republican blowhard. In this case the analogy is absolutely perfect because Obama was attempting to destroy Mitt Romney's career as a serial loser of elections and similarly David Sirota's outsized influence as a writer for Salon puts a worried and sweating Rove in the same position as Fred Fisher. How dare anyone cast aspersions on the noble race of Republicans.
As Dan informed us, we have a Salonista railing against Republicans for expressing an “us versus them” mentality. We’re racists, we’re evil, we’re KKK, blah, blah, blah. In the recent campaign — it ended only a few weeks ago — Barack Obama ran an ad saying, “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.”
That was not the implication. That was not what Obama was hinting at. That’s exactly, explicitly what he said in his ad.
I can only ask the Joseph Welch question — the answer to which, I’m afraid, is no.
