but in my experience, especially in the blue-collar areas of Cambridge MA (It isn't all Harvard and MIT...far from it, with huge Irish Catholic, Italian, and Portuguese elements --- Tip O'Neill's district was North Cambridge) those most like to say "nigger" were blacks, usually to tell a joke denigrating (no pun, no etymology!) stupid bigoted whites, or to diss a fellow black, as in "jive-ass nigger" for a certain type of con artist who made a living as a parasite on women.

People who are not racists but live in areas with a bad history also might use the word in self-deprecation, saying in effect "Yeah I sound like a peckerwood but I have a working brain anyway". I have some deep-South relatives and it sure jangled my stereotype system to hear them use Yiddish expressions with a magnolia-and-honeysuckle accent.

All in all, though, I should feel good today. But I followed the Boston Red Sox for 35 years and know what it feels like to watch the ground ball skip through the fielder's legs, when a minute ago we were one strike away from winning it all...

BTW...a feel-good story: A couple of years ago, the fans at Fenway welcomed back Bill Buckner, who committed that (in)famous error, with cheers. The poor guy was getting so much flack that he had to move away from the Boston area. People are not always mean.

Elephantboy

Isn't it just a small, a remote, an itsy-bitsy, a tiny possibility that Colin Powell recognized a better brain, a better heart, a better speaking gift, and a better temperament in the man who just happened to have darker skin? And that as a competent general accustomed to thinking in contingencies he calculated that a one in ten chance that McCain should die or be incapacitated (actually it's a better, or worse, chance than that) had too much of a downside, i. e. Sarah Palin with the nuclear codes, and the risk was just too great? (Here's a place where Cheney's 1% Doctrine probably makes sense.) And also, as an old Pentagon hand, that he preferred a steady thinking-it-through type to an impulsive, if brave, flyboy? And a good poker player to a plunging crap-shooter? Do you think "We are all Georgians now?" might have been a red flag (no pun intended!) to a former Secretary of State? Race was miniscule in comparison to qualification. (And can't we get off the experience wagon?... There is no experience that can prepare a person to be POTUS. Check out Lincoln's pre-election resume somethime.)

As they say, think about it and get back to me.

@ilanbarak: You said it, rather more emphatically than I would have.

But it's not so much a geographical location as a cast of mind.

Just as you don't have to be Jewish or a mother to be a Jewish Mother, you don't have to be Southern or a peckerwood to be a Southern Peckerwood. It happens that there is a geographical concentration (call their country Nixonland) of such narrow-minded, suspicious, hateful, and potentially violent types in that area (and watch out for the extreme ones, the McVeighs and the Rudolphs...they will be more dangerous to us than Al Qaeda). I for one am sick to death of these prating idiots, with their lapel pins (made in China), their Xtianist piosity, their pride in their ignorance, whose icon is John Wayne and whose prophet is Rush Limbaugh. I want my country to be better than that, and maybe, just maybe, I'll see it go in that direction...I've been waiting almost 70 years for this.

And I've been around too long to expect miracles and won't be disappointed if we fall short...the human race ALWAYS falls short. We are, after all, human.

Be of good cheer, keep the aspidastra flying, and don't let the bastards grind you down.

As usual, they have it backwards. Instead of dealing with a reality that they have largely created, they persist in trying to force it conformity with their ideological preconceptions, which has ever been a recipe for disaster. And they must disguise their intentions, for whenever they say clearly what they mean, the voters reject them (e. g. privatizing Social Security, oops, I mean "creating an "ownership society".) Here's a clue, kids: your problem is not your marketing but your the product. Evntually the customers figure out that in spite of all the fancy talk, the vacuum cleaners don't work.

The so-called Republican-conservative philosophy was little more than a rationalization of power hunger and simple greed. The latest incarnation in the Bush version added blatant corruption and monumental incompetence --- although there was a certain wacky logic to it, attempting to prove that government can't work by deliberately mismanaging it. Pounding on the resentments of a considerable portion of the populace and exploiting --- even exalting a la Palin --- the ignorance of same, they have crafted a Rube Goldberg political monstrosity, a coalition of ludicrously mismatched components that under the pressure of serious economic stress is now coming apart. It is time for them to go the way of the Whigs.

What a new re-alignment might look like is impossible to say...but there will be one, and hopefully the Dominionists and the racists and the flat-Earthers can huddle in the corners waiting for the Rapture while the rest of us try to repair the damage to the economy, the environment, the climate, to the very idea of America that their bullheaded ignorance has wrought. The Republican Party of GWB, Rush, DElay, and Gingrich is for the ash-heap of history. And no one is better suited to lead it there than Sarah Palin. Bon voyage, and good riddance.

I liked them. A lot. I've never felt that way about a first couple.