I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do you your adopting Mr. Atwater’s Southern Strategy chapter and verse. Or didn’t you read the quote above? It’s the same quote that’s tattooed on the back of your hand.

(Though I wouldn’t be surprised if you say that since I’m more ideologically aligned with Republicans, Lee Atwater is thus my ideological father. Or something.)

Keep on keepin on!

Kling makes a distinction. Instafuckwit does not.

>then I say F*** You and have a nice day. The word “reparations” is a racist dogwhistle.

And I say that the sooner race baiters like yourself and Oliver are off to a well deserved obscurity, the better. Your attempt to make certain words be racial only in order to make hay out of it is pathetic, though not unexpected. It’s apparently “how the liberal mind works.”

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Not a whole lot more to it.

Exactly. The party of the Southern Strategy does not get the benefit of the doubt.

The “reparations” debate was a nice, wedge non-issue that the GOP got the yokels all whipped up into a froth about – I still, to this day, see bumper stickers that decry the phantom “reparations” issue here in Texas. If your argument is that we should give the GOP the benefit of the doubt and that the mention of “reparations” was an innocent nod to some other arcane historical reference of “reparations” then I say F*** You and have a nice day. The word “reparations” is a racist dogwhistle.

Movie theatre/ Annapolis, MD

Customer: “You only have two showings of American Carol! That’s just plain un-American! You’re all d**ned communists.”

Me: “I’m sorry sir, but it wasn’t selling well so we had to split it with another movie.”

Customer: “No – it’s because you’re g**d**n commies.”

Me: “No, sir, that’s actually capitalism. We move the movies that don’t sell well to less show times so as to maximize profits.

Customer: “No, capitalism is American and no real American would move a movie down just because it wasn’t making money!”

I did not know that. WTF have I been doing all this time?
It’s pretty clear to me that whatever follows after that sentence is utter bullshit.

But, no, we all should concede that he isn’t talking about racial reparations. He isn’t really talking about anything sensable.

Good to see that Oliver is still a race baiter though, if it’s “how the liberal mind works” when Obama is criticized, this should be a fun 4 years. (Or 8, to anticipate the inevitable rejoinder.) The lame thing is you didn’t even need to play the race card – Kling’s premise isn’t very convincing. Here let me help you:

“People who pay income taxes tend to vote Republican. People who live off taxes tend to vote Democratic.”

This seems dubious, or at least would require a tortured definition to work. Needs some sort of backing statistic.

“To the Democrats, the Bush tax cuts were a heinous evil, comparable to Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality in World War I. Now, they are demanding reparations, with hundreds of billions of dollars to be paid into teachers unions and other members of the coalition that won the election.”

So the Democrats hated the Bush tax cuts so much that they are trying to payback various Democratic constituencies to make them feel better about the horrible injustice of said tax cuts. Democrats disliked the tax cuts, sure, but theres a lot more work to do to make the case that there is a meaningful line between hatred of the tax cuts and the contents of the stimulus bill. Kling doesn’t bother to try to back up that argument.

See? Kling’s claim is unconvincing, and I didn’t need ignore historical references and be intellectually lazy by saying, “OMG he said ‘reparations’! Booga booga!” to make that case. Amazing!

Stones? Are you serious? The guy was on his deathbed trying to burnish his image? Not exactly a profile in courage. Too little, too late don’t feed the bulldog, dig?